[comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d] looking for PS replacement for GRAPHICS.COM

north@manta.NOSC.MIL (Mark H. North) (02/22/91)

Now that all my printers are postscript only I find I can't do screen
dumps anymore with PrtSc. Is there a reasonably sized graphics.com
type tsr to do this?

Mark

roelofs@nas.nasa.gov (Cave Newt) (02/22/91)

In article <1786@manta.NOSC.MIL> north@manta.NOSC.MIL (Mark H. North) writes:

>Now that all my printers are postscript only I find I can't do screen
>dumps anymore with PrtSc. Is there a reasonably sized graphics.com
>type tsr to do this?

I'm not a True PostScript Hacker Stud, but my guess would be "no."  Unless
there's a special bitmap command, the only way I know how to do this is by
filling square regions; you would need "moveto," "lineto," "setrgbcolor,"
"eofill," "showpage," and a number of other (text) commands saved within
your TSR, and that stuff adds up.  The header and footer ("prolog" and "con-
log"?? :-) text is even longer, although a lot of that may be unnecessary.
But I could easily imagine just the command strings taking up to a kilobyte 
of space.

And then there's still the question of speed; downloading all those wordy
commands (and the multi-digit coords that go with them) will take a LOT of
time, assuming you draw each of the 300000 boxes that would correspond to
a typical VGA screen.  Defining a dictionary of short macros (e.g., "m" =
"moveto") would help some, but then you need to save that much more text
in your TSR.

If there's some sort of bitmap command, of course, things would be much
nicer.  I think you'd probably still have to put at least some of the 
prolog stuff in your TSR, though.

I do seem to recall a utility, either posted here or uploaded to Simtel,
that converted an EGA screen to PostScript.  If that was a TSR, ignore 
everything I just said. :-)  If not, perhaps you can make it into one.
I think the name was "EGAPS.ZIP" (or .ARC or .ZOO); poke around Simtel's
MSDOS.SCREEN and/or MSDOS.EGA directories (or maybe MSDOS.PRINTER?  Beats
me) and see what you find.

Greg