richard@gryphon.CTS.COM (Richard Sexton) (03/15/88)
X-posted to .tech It may not be "real", but it is real here, and about 15 articles a day come through. And guess what ? No *shit*. In article <2752@csli.STANFORD.EDU> kasper@csli.UUCP (Kasper Osterbye) writes: >Are there anyone out there in net-land that have a program that >will print IFF files as they are? That is - no perspective. I have >often wanted to draw some illustrations, mainly consisting of boxes >arcs and circles (Petri-nets) and some text. They look just great >in DPAINT II. > >B U T then. > >When I print the picture, the pixels come out in different sizes!! > Aha. Let me make a couple of tacit assumptions here. 1) you are using 640x400 in dpaint and 2) you have an epson printer. Now, whats happening here is that you have painted a picture on a 72 dpi (dots per inch) device - the CRT. You go to print it and it looks like shark cheese. This is because of _Pixel replication_. If dpaint made one pixel on the screen correspond *exactly* to one dot on your printer (assuming 240 dpi mode) you would have a large postage stamp that bared some resemblance to your original picture. So, every time is grabs a pixel from dpaint, it actually spits several pixels at the printer. Now, if the printer was an integral multiple of 72 dpi, you'd get a better looking picture. Ie, every pixel on your dpaint screen would be rendered as a square of 2, 3 or 4 pixels, depending on your printer resolution. Ok, thats why it looks like shit, how do you fix it ? Well, what you do is this: Go into Dpaint, and select a page size that "looks" more or less like a piece of paper in size. SOmething around 640 x 800 or so. Now draw diagonal lines from the top left to the bottom right and the top right to the bottom left. Print it, using left margin 1, right margin 89, height 100%, width 100%. It'll look like this: * * * * * * * * * or it'll look like this: * * * * * * * * * either way, that means the page height is not quite right yet. Change it. Print it again. Did it get better ? Good, keep changeing it. Did it get worse ? Change it the other way (ie, if you made the page taller, make it shorter). Repeat until you get a clean diagonal line. Now, I've never done this on an Epson, so I'm assumimng some reasonable replication factor exists. I have a canon which is, guess what 72 dpi, same as the screen. Dpaint needs a 640 x 825 screen, lm 1, rm 89, width 100% height 100% to get a 1:1 repilacation factor. There is some program you can get from CATS or somebody that lets you fiddle with the replication factor. That'll be $5 please. -- "...(alright Nils, alright)..." richard@gryphon.CTS.COM {ihnp4!scgvaxd!cadovax, rutgers!marque, codas!ddsw1} gryphon!richard