[comp.text.tex] \special{em:graph xxx} in emTeX

garym@cognos.uucp@uunet.uu.net (Gary Murphy) (05/10/91)

I found this most inviting little command tucked in at the bottom
of the DVIDRV doc files and thought all my troubles were solved!
I quickly grabbed a .PCX from my old Paintbrush v.1.0 and whipped
up a quick test program (I actually took the LaTeX sample and
just blindly added the \special just before the titlepage command),
but the DVISCR refused to find the file.  Thinking back to how the
_WINDOWS_ version of PCX (version 2.0) could not read the files
from my straight DOS version, I dug out another utility to convert
.GIF's to windows-paintbrush-compatible .PCX files.  These new .PCX
files were found by DVISCR, but the display came out as a pure black
rectangle.

In the documentation, it states that all non-black pixels will be
printed.  The image I was testing was a gray-scale, so I fired up
the PicLab, applied heavy contrast and mapped the image down to
2 colours --- it looked ok in the viewer, but again DVISCR only shows
black.

Is this due to DVISCR mapping multiple pixels onto the same screen
location (I would expect at least a little noise!) or does it not
support images (it _is_ already in a graphics mode) or am I missing
something absolutely essential?  How does one prepare an image for
emTeX?  The documents recommend .MSP files instead, but I can't think
of where I have seen a .GIF->.MSP converter which does not require
windows to run (why would it need this obsolete format?)

If anyone has any advice on printing bitmap images through the DVIxxx
utilities, some assistance here would be greatly appreciated!

p.s. what happened to the emTeX mailing list?  I've lost their address
and never received any messages after the first week!

--
o| Gary Murphy                                                            |o
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