ephraim@think.COM (ephraim vishniac) (12/28/87)
Both Grayview (version 1.97) and Giffer (version 0.96) offer to convert Thunderscan (version 4.0) documents into gray-scale pictures. Both do fine when the original scan was done at 100% (i.e., 1:1 reproduction ratio), but both have a problem when the scan was at some other ratio. For example, I scanned a small photo at 300% to obtain a roughly half-megabyte scan file. The image is correctly proportioned when I view it with the ThunderScan software. (I taped the photo to a piece of graph paper, so it's easy to see jitter and distortion.) When I convert it with GrayView or Giffer, the image is compressed vertically and has several diminutive, but correctly proportioned, extra images along the bottom edge. There must be a popular misunderstanding of the TScan file format, since the two conversion programs have exactly the same problem. (Either that, or one of them created the bug and gave it to the other -- one author lives in Cambridge and the other in Lexington.) I've written to David Fry about this; is the author of "Giffer" on the net? Anybody else hit this bug? Ephraim Vishniac ephraim@think.com Thinking Machines Corporation / 245 First Street / Cambridge, MA 02142-1214