frank@odetics.com (Frank Merrow) (09/29/90)
Hi, We have an existing system with a bunch of Versatec ACRIS scanners and plotters on it. We now want to add a little functionality on the side door using a IBM PC/AT. The scanners talk something called "Greensheet" which is (as I understand it) a hardware parallel protocol. We want to capture the Bit Map data using some kind of a Greensheet board in a PC. Does anyone know of such a board and who makes it? The Versatec folks make a board, but it will only sends TO a device (their plotter) and we need a bi-direction connection for our purposes. A Versatec saleperson told us that he though "Vidar" might have what we wanted, but he could not tell us what part of the country they are in, much less give us an address or phone number. Additionally, once we have the image scanned and captured in the PC, our customer wants us to compress the image using "CCITT Group 4". I have seen chips that perform this compression, but in our case we would like to do it in software in the IBM PC (actually we will probably need a 386 if the compression alogorith is as bad as I suspect). In any case if anyone knows of a software package that does CCITT Group 4 (public domain or purchased), I would also appreciate a line on that as well. frank@odetics P.S. I occurred to me that there MIGHT even be a "Greensheet" board that had CCITT Group 4 built in. That of course would be "the ultimate". P.P.S. The IBM PC plateform seems the most logical to us at this time, but we are also open to solving the problem using another computer. We have Sun and DG experience in house.