Welcome to Graphic Workshop Professional’s Help. The information in the help selection is a subset of what’s available in the Manual installed with your software. If you don’t find what you need here, or if you require additional clarification, please consult the Manual and its dependent documents.

Help with Graphic File Formats

Help with Configuring Graphic Workshop Professional

Help with Using Graphic Workshop Professional

Help with Registering Graphic Workshop Professional

Help with Contacting Alchemy Mindworks


FORMATS

Help with Graphic File Formats

ART Johnson-Grace / AOL

AVI Video for Windows movies

BGA OS/2 graphic arrays

BMP Windows and OS/2 bitmaps

CAM Casio digital camera images

CDR Corel Draw bitmaps and previews

DCX FAX documents

EXE self-displaying pictures

FIF Fractal-compressed images

FITS Astronomical images

FLI/FLC Autodesk animations

FPX FlashPix

GIF Graphics and animations

IMG GEM/Ventura images

CUT Halo images

HRZ slow-scan television

ICO Windows icons

IFF/LBM Amiga images

JPEG Photorealistic images

KDC Kodak digital camera images

KQP Konica Quality Photos

MAC MacPaint files

MIDI Sequenced music

MOV Apple QuickTime movies

MPEG MPEG movies

MSP Windows 2.0 Microsoft Paint images

PCD Kodak Photo-CD images

PCX PC Paintbrush images

PIC GLPaint images

PNG Portable Network Graphics

PSD Photoshop images

RLE Windows compressed bitmaps

SCR Windows screen savers

SFW Seattle Film Works images

SGI Silicon Graphics images

RAS Sun raster image

TGA Targa images

TIFF Tagged Image File Format images

TTF TrueType fonts

TXT Text files

UUE UUencoded graphics

WAV Windows sampled sound files

Wallpaper Windows wallpaper

WMF Windows metafiles

WPG WordPerfect Graphics

XBM XWindows bitmaps


ART

ART – Maximum bits: 24

The ART format uses a proprietary compression structure created by Johnson-Grace. As of this writing, ART technology is owned by America On Line. Many files downloaded from AOL are stored in the ART format. As an aside, a not-insubstantial number of files having the extension JPG are really ART files inside. If you have trouble reading a downloaded JPEG file, try renaming it with the extension ART.

The ART format uses lossy compression to create smaller files – there's a more detailed discussion of lossy compression elsewhere in this document as it pertains to JPEG files. The JPEG/ART Quality item it Setup will define the degree of compression of ART files written by Graphic Workshop.

There's a second extant format which uses the extension ART – it was used to create graphics for the PFS:First Publisher application some years back. It only supports monochrome images. Graphic Workshop will read uncompressed PFS:First Publisher ART files if it encounters them – it always writes Johnson-Grace ART files.


AVI

AVI files – Maximum bits: 24

AVI files contain Video for Windows animation. The can have any dimensions, although they tend to be fairly small. Graphic Workshop will allow you to read individual frames from an AVI file, display the whole file as an animation sequence and convert other selected animated formats to AVI.

Note that Graphic Workshop will not convert between animated GIF files and AVI files. See our GIF Construction Set software at http://www.mindworkshop.com for this functionality.

You must have the Video for Windows drivers installed for the AVI functions to work properly. These are typically installed as part of Windows 95, 98 and NT 4.0. If the AVI functions don't work, you have driver problems.


BGA

BGA Files – Maximum bits: 24

The BGA format is used by some OS/2 Warp applications. It can contain multiple images and is actually a variation on the OS/2 BMP format. If you attempt to read a BGA file which contains multiple images, a dialog will appear to allow you to select the image you're interested in.

Converting an image to the BGA format will result in a single-image BGA file.


BMP

BMP/DIB files – Maximum bits: 24

BMP files are used as wallpaper under Windows. They can be created using the Paintbrush application supplied with Windows, among other things. The BMP and DIB formats are identical – DIB files are used in some programming and multimedia applications.

Note that the OS/2 also supports graphic files with the extension BMP. These are distinct from Windows BMP files. Graphic Workshop will read both types. You can configure it to write either type by setting the Write OS/2 Bitmaps switch in Setup


CAM

CAM files (Casio Digital Camera) – Maximum bits: 24

These files are created by Casio's digital cameras. Graphic Workshop will read them and convert them to other formats, but it will not write to the CAM format.


CDR

CDR files – Maximum bits: 24

Graphic Workshop's use of CDR files is a bit peculiar. You'll save yourself a degree of frustration if you read this section before working with CDR files. Note that there are two distinct modes under which Graphic Workshop can read CDR files.

Corel Draw's CDR files are vector graphics, but they contain small preview or thumbnail images which appear in the Corel Draw File Open dialog and in the Mosaic browser application. Graphic Workshop will read these preview images – it will not read the actual line art graphics in CDR files. The preview images are very coarse, but they're useful for quickly ascertaining what's in a CDR file.

Alternately, Graphic Workshop can be instructed to search CDR files created with Corel Draw 4 and 5 for bitmap objects. If one or more bitmaps are found, Graphic Workshop will read these as if they were conventional bitmap images. This is handy, for example, should you wish to extract a bitmap from a CDR file with no loss of resolution. If no bitmaps are present, Graphic Workshop will show you the CDR thumbnail preview for the file. If more than one bitmap is present, a dialog will appear to prompt you to choose one of the available images

Enable the Read CDR Bitmaps switch in Setup to have Graphic Workshop troll CDR files for bitmaps, or disable it to have it display thumbnails for all CDR files.

If Graphic Workshop only reads a thumbnail image from your CDR files, it will allow you to convert from CDR, but you'll be converting the preview images. This will not be attractive. Should you contact us and ask us why converting from CDR thumbnail images results in a small, coarse graphic that's nowhere near as good as it looks in Corel Draw, our leather winged demon of the night will make a special trip over to visit you and rip out your lungs.


DCX

DCX files – Maximum bits: 1

The DCX format is used to store FAX documents. DCX files can include multiple pages. If you attempt to view or process a multiple-page DCX file, a dialog will appear to prompt you for the page to read. Graphics converted to DCX will be written to single-page files. Note that only monochrome graphics can be converted to the DCX format.


EXE

EXE files (self-displaying pictures) – Maximum bits: 8

You can convert images having between two and 256 colours to files with the extension EXE. Such files are self displaying pictures. For example, if you have a file called PICTURE.GIF and you use Graphic Workshop to translate it to PICTURE.EXE, typing PICTURE from the command line will cause the picture to display on your screen.

Note that Graphic Workshop installs with the EXE format initially disabled. You must enable it in the Formats dialog from the File menu before Graphic Workshop will read or create EXE pictures.

The EXE pictures created by Graphic Workshop for Windows can be either DOS or Windows applications. You can define which type of picture to create with the Windows EXE Pictures switch in Setup.

Pictures written into the EXE format can subsequently be read back into any other format. However, note that Graphic Workshop can only read EXE files which it has created. Use the Get Info function to check out EXE files if you aren't sure whether they're pictures or programs.

Graphic Workshop will not read self displaying pictures written by other applications.

There's a lot more about EXE pictures in the Manual document.


FIF

FIF files – Maximum bits: 24

FIF files are created by software from Iterated Systems' fractal compression technology. They can be thought of as being similar in nature to JPEG files, in that fractal compression deletes some of the detail from a compressed image in order to achieve better compression. The visible nature of the image degradation of FIF files will vary somewhat from that of JPEG files.

Graphic Workshop is only able to read FIF files – due to licensing restrictions by Iterated Systems, it will not convert files from other formats to FIF.

As with JPEG files, you can tell Graphic Workshop to treat FIF files as being either eight- or 24-bit entities. The Read JPEG/FIF as RGB switch in Setup defines this – turn it on for 24-bit reading. Reading a FIF file with this switch off will cause it to be dithered to 256 colours.


FITS

FITS files – Maximum bits: 24

The FITS format is used to store images from telescopes and other astronomical sources. Graphic Workshop supports a subset of FITS. Specifically, it will only handle images with two axis correctly. FITS files can contain more than eight bits of grey scale information, but as no PC display hardware exists that can display it, images with higher resolution will be reduced to eight bits of grey for display and conversion.

It won't take you much work to find FITS files that Graphic Workshop will not display. FITS files are often used to contain images which aren't simple two-dimensional flat graphics.

If you write an image to a FITS file, it will be stored as an eight-bit grey scale picture.


FLI

FLI and FLC files – Maximum bits: 8

The FLI and FLC formats are a DOS-based animation protocol developed by AutoDesk. All FLI files are constrained to have the dimensions 320 by 200 with eight bits of colour, and most FLC files do as well. At present the FLI and FLC formats do not support sound.

The FLI and FLC formats use simple run length compression. Note that complex frames which don't compress well can result in really huge FLI or FLC files. The raw data for a 100-frame FLI file would require over six megabytes of storage.


FPX

FPX files (FlashPix) – Maximum bits: 24

The ultimate in flexible image file formats or the graphic standard from hell – we favour the latter – FlashPix is designed for photorealistic imaging and specifically for the manipulation of pictures from digital cameras. Graphic Workshop will view FlashPix images and convert them to other formats. It will not convert images to the FlashPix format as of this writing, pending the resolution of some problems with the FlashPix libraries.


GIF

GIF files – Maximum bits: 8

These can range from monochrome to 256-colour images in any size you can find them. Graphic Workshop supports both the 87a and 89a versions of the GIF standard

In order to view GIF files having more than one image, or to view animated GIF files in real time, the Multiple Image GIF Files item in Setup must be enabled. Note that this may significantly increase the access time for some GIF files.

GIF files can be created using either interlaced or non-interlaced storage. An interlaced GIF file has its lines stored in a non-linear order. This will in no way affect how your GIF files will look in Graphic Workshop – they'll appear in interlaced order if they're displayed in a web browser. To have Graphic Workshop write interlaced GIF files, select the Write GIF Interlaced option in Setup.

By default, if you attempt to view an animated GIF file, Graphic Workshop will display it as such. It can alternately be configured to prompt you to select which of its discrete images you'd like to look at. If you don't want to have it automatically view animated GIF files, turn on Prompt to View Animation in Setup.


IMG

GEM/IMG files – Maximum bits: 24

GEM/IMG is a fairly ancient format, and you probably won't want to bother with it unless you like old versions of Ventura Publisher. There are actually quite a few variations on IMG files... they handle monochrome and grey level images. Graphic Workshop supports files with up to 256 levels of grey and 24-bit IMG files with up to sixteen-million colours. Note that 24-bit IMG files are only supported by Ventura 4.0 and better.


CUT

CUT files (Halo) – Maximum bits: 8

The CUT format is exceedingly awkward, and Graphic Workshop makes a few assumptions about how CUT files will be used in order to make it workable. To begin with, CUT files don't know how many colours they have in them. They rely on a second file, called a PAL file, to define their colours.

Graphic Workshop looks for a PAL file to decide whether a CUT file has two bits or eight bits of colour. If it doesn't find a PAL file with the same name as your CUT file, it will assume that the CUT file in question only has two bits of colour. Otherwise, it will assume that there are 256 colours in the file.

Files written to the CUT format from Graphic Workshop will appear as two-colour files if they started out that way or as 256-colour files if they had more than two colours initially.


HRZ

HRZ files (Slow Scan Television) – Maximum bits: 24

Images in the HRZ format always have 24 bits of colour and the fixed dimensions 256 by 240 pixels. Images with differing dimensions will be padded or cropped to fit in this space when they're translated to HRZ. Images with fewer colours will be promoted to 24 bits. This is a fairly specialized format – if you aren't using slow scan television, you probably don't need it. You might well ask what slow scan television is – damned if we know. Conventional television seems slow enough.


ICO

ICO files (Windows icons) – Maximum bits: 4

ICO files are used to contain Windows icons. They're very small bitmaps. If you convert a larger bitmap to ICO, only the upper left corner of the source image will appear in your icon. Investigate the Graphic Workshop Scale and Crop modes if you're creating icons. You might also have recourse to the Effects Colour Reduction function if your source images have more than sixteen colours.

Graphic Workshop will read icons of any size and colour depth recognized by Microsoft Windows. It will only write 32 by 32 pixel, sixteen- or 256-colour icons.


IFF

IFF/LBM files – Maximum bits: 24

IFF files originated with the Amiga. The IFF file standard is extremely flexible and it supports all sorts of things besides storing images. IFF files are found in PC environments PC having been ported from Amiga systems. They are also created on the PC by several applications such as Electronic Arts' Deluxe Paint – in this case they may have the extension LBM.

Note that Graphic Workshop only reads "pure" IFF files, and will not handle the countless variations on the format which have appeared on Amigas. Specifically, it does not read hold and modify, or HAM, files.


JPEG

JPG files (Joint Picture Experts Group) – Maximum bits: 24

The JPEG format is actually a combination of several elements, and it's important that you understand what it does before you use it. The JPEG algorithm reduces the amount of space a compressed image will occupy on disk by selectively removing details from the image. Pictures with fewer details compress more effectively. The amount of detail removal is defined by the JPEG/ART Quality item in Setup.

At the default value of 75, relatively little picture degradation will take place but a significant amount of compression will be obtained. At lower values you'll experience still better compression, but with a marked loss of image quality.

Once an image has been converted to JPEG, its lost details are lost for good. Note also that repeatedly reading and writing the same image in the JPG format will successively degrade it – it's a very bad idea to convert from JPG to JPG, as your pictures will get a bit uglier each time you do so.

Note: All colour JPEG files are 24-bit images, having sixteen-million colours. Because some systems can only display 256 colours directly, JPEG files can be read as 256-colour images. This actually means that they'll be dithered when they're read. To have your JPEG files read as 24-bit images, enable the Read JPEG as RGB item in Setup. Disable this item to have them read as 256-colour images. The number of colours displayed in the Get Info box will reflect the setting of this switch.

The best way to convert from JPEG to a 256-colour format, such as GIF, is to enable the Read JPEG as RGB switch and then use the Colour Reduction option of Effects.

Graphic Workshop includes support for progressive JPEG. A progressive JPEG file will initially appear blurred if it's part of a web page or other on-line service, and will resolve as more of the file is transmitted. Graphic Workshop will read and write progressive JPEG file but it will not display them progressively – that is, if you view progressive JPEG file, it will appear as a single sharp image. You can determine whether Graphic Workshop writes conventional or progressive JPEG files through the Write Progressive JPEG switch in Setup. Note that most applications with JPEG support will not read progressive JPEG files.


KDC

KDC files (Kodak Digital Science) – Maximum bits: 24

KDC files are created by Kodak's digital cameras. Graphic Workshop will read them files and convert them to other formats, but it will not write to the KDC format.

Graphic Workshop will read KDC files created by Kodak DC30, DC40, DC50 and DC120 cameras, but not DC20 cameras. If you need to read DC20 KDC files, see the sixteen-bit version of Graphic Workshop classic. More recent Kodak digital cameras save their images in the FlashPix format, discussed elsewhere in this document.


MAC

MAC files (MacPaint) – Maximum bits: 1

MacPaint files come in two flavours. The most common one is straight ported MacPaint files, that is, files having a "MacBinary" header. The other is "headerless" files, having no MacBinary header. Graphic Workshop reads both types, but if you convert a file from a different format to MacPaint format the file will be written in accordance with the setting of the MacBinary Header item in Setup.

Files converted to the MacPaint format from other formats will be cropped or padded out as necessary to fit in the MacPaint format's 576 by 720 format. Only monochrome files can be converted to MacPaint, as MacPaint in a monochrome-only format.


MIDI

MID files (MIDI Music)

MIDI files aren't graphics – they're sequenced music. None the less, you can browse them with Graphic Workshop. If you "view" one, a small bitmap will appear and the music in the file will play. Note that the Play item in the Picture menu of View mode can be used to repeat a MIDI file once it finishes. If you attempt to convert a MIDI file to a graphic format, the resulting graphic file will contain a copy of the MIDI bitmap that appears in View mode.

MIDI files display in Graphic Workshop's browser windows with a canned thumbnail.

You must have the MCI sequenced music drivers installed for the MIDI functions to work properly. These are typically installed as part of Windows 95, 98 and NT 4.0. If the MIDI functions don't work, you have driver problems.


MOV

MOV files (Apple QuickTime) – Maximum bits: 24

QuickTime movies are a tragic tale, and Graphic Workshop's involvement with them will prove very cursory. It will play MOV files but it will not convert to or from MOV, a situation that's not likely to change in the foreseeable future.

Without getting into all the hoary details of our brief flirtation with Apple, adding complete QuickTime support proved to be prohibitively expensive. As we weren't prepared to raise the price of Graphic Workshop to deal with what is in reality a pretty obscure animation format, we decided to forgo this feature.

We have included hooks in Graphic Workshop which will allow it to play QuickTime movies if you have the QuickTime MCI drivers installed in your system. If you do not have these drivers installed, attempting to play a QuickTime movie will generate an error message.

We regret the inconvenience this situation may cause users of Graphic Workshop – the whole ordeal has left us pretty confused. We felt that some QuickTime support would be better than none at all, especially for Graphic Workshop users who require the software primarily for viewing files.

You must have the QuickTime MCI drivers installed for the MOV functions to work properly. These are typically installed as part of Windows 95, 98 and NT 4.0. If the MOV functions don't work, you have driver problems.


MPEG

MPG files – Maximum bits: 24

Graphic Workshop will display the video of MPEG animations. It will not convert MPEG to other formats, or other formats to MPEG.

MPEG files display in Graphic Workshop's browser windows with a canned thumbnail.


MSP

MSP files – Maximum bits: 1

These are the image files used by the paint application which came with Microsoft Windows version 2. MSP files only support monochrome images.


PCD

PCD (Kodak Photo-CD) files – Maximum bits: 24

Kodak Photo-CDs allow you to have conventional photographs converted to Kodak's proprietary CD-ROM format. The resulting files can be viewed, converted and treated like other PC file formats. Having your photographs made into Photo-CDs will avail you of very high grade scanning even if you don't own a scanner.

Photo-CD image files usually reside in a directory named \PHOTO_CD\IMAGES on a Photo-CD. They're named by the following convention:

IMGxxxx.PCD

where xxxx is a four digit number, beginning with one for the first image.

Each PCD file contains a number of scans of the same image at different resolutions. The very low resolution images are used for thumbnail previews. Medium-level images are useful to view and work with Photo-CD scans in a PC environment.

You can tell Graphic Workshop to read Photo-CD images at a specific resolution through the Photo-CD Read Options item in Setup. If you choose one of the 256-colour options you'll see dithered images – these are useful if display card only supports 256 colours. If you choose one of the RGB options you may see coarse dithered images when you view a Photo-CD image, but you'll be able to convert PCD files to high quality true colour images for use with colour separation and desktop publishing software, photographic retouching packages, such as Photoshop. Choose one of the grey scale options if you will be outputting your Photo-CD images to a monochrome device, such as a laser printer. Note that if you choose a resolution which is not available on your Photo-CD, the next available resolution will be substituted.

If you use Graphic Workshop to convert from PCD files to another format, you must enable the Prompt for Destination option in Setup. If you don't do this, Graphic Workshop will attempt to write its converted files to your CD-ROM drive, which would be a bit tricky, CD-ROMs being read-only.

The thumbnails for PCD files are not handled like thumbnails for other file formats. Specifically, there are no THN files used – the images are actually the lowest-resolution scans in the PCD files in question. This means that you cannot use the Details and Search functions with PCD thumbnails.


PCX

PCX files – Maximum bits: 24

PCX is a very old image file standard – it originated with Z-Soft's PC Paintbrush software back in the late Jurassic period. It's widely supported as a graphic file format. PCX files can range from monochrome to 24-bit images. All the various formats are supported by Graphic Workshop.


PIC

PIC files – Maximum bits: 24

These should not be confused with Lotus 1-2-3 PIC drawing files. PIC files are created by GLPaint/GLPro and are used by Grasp, among other things.

At present, Graphic Workshop writes 24-bit images to the PIC format as type one high colour files, that is, with fifteen bits of colour information.

In addition to reading PIC files from the GL Paint package, Graphic Workshop will also read PIC files generated by Pegasus software. The Pegasus PIC format is used by several commercial photofinishers who provide photographs on floppy disks.

The KQP files used by Konica's digitial photofinishing services are also Pegasus PIC files, and will be read by Graphic Workshop.


PNG

PNG files – Maximum bits: 24

The PNG, or "Portable Network Graphics," format was created as a successor to GIF. It features lossless compression for images with up to 24 bits of colour and most of the other features of GIF. In most cases it will provide at least slightly letter compression than GIF.

PNG files can be interlaced or non-interlaced. This won't affect how PNG images look in Graphic Workshop, but interlaced PNG files will cause Graphic Workshop to pause momentarily before its status bar begins to indicate that something's happening.

The PNG Compression control in Setup defines how hard Graphic Workshop will try to compress PNG files. It can range between one and nine. If it's set to one, PNG files written with Graphic Workshop will not be all that well compressed, but they'll write quickly. If it's set to nine, Graphic Workshop will usually manage to create smaller PNG files, but it will take a lot longer to do so. Intermediate settings will represent a tradeoff between these two extremes. Note that this setting will not affect the quality of an image stored in a PNG file – it only deals with the compression effectiveness and the time it takes to write a PNG file.


PSD

PSD files (Adobe Photoshop) – Maximum bits: 24

The PSD format is native to Adobe Photoshop. It can store images having up to 24 bits of colour – it also allows for transparency and several other options which are not supported by Graphic Workshop. PSD files can be stored either uncompressed or compressed using run-length compression. The latter is typically not very effective on photorealistic subjects. Enable Compress IFF/LBM/PSD Files in Setup to have Graphic Workshop write compressed PSD files.


RLE

RLE files – Maximum bits: 8

The RLE format is actually a variation on the BMP format discussed previously. It uses rudimentary image compression.

Graphic Workshop for Windows will read most RLE files from other sources. One known exception is the VGALOGO.RLE file provided with Windows 3.1.


SCR
Screen Savers

Windows screen savers are actually specialized applications which are run automatically by Windows when your system has been idle for a predetermined time. Screen savers have the file extension SCR.

Graphic Workshop will convert graphics in other formats to screen savers. In fact, when you perform this conversion, Graphic Workshop creates an application to display your pictures as screen savers and embeds your graphic in the application. Graphic Workshop's screen savers can be run on systems which do not have Graphic Workshop installed on them – they are self-contained screen savers.

Graphic Workshop screen savers can be configured to display your graphics with a number of animated transitions. Users of these screen savers can define which transitions they'd like to see.

Having converted a graphic to the SCR format with Graphic Workshop, you must copy the SCR file you have created to your \WINDOWS directory. Alternately, simply have Graphic Workshop write it directly to \WINDOWS. Open the Windows Control Panel and select Display. Click on the Screen Saver tab and select GWSPRO Screen Saver as your default screen saver. Click on the screen saver Setup button to access the screen saver configuration dialog.

Graphic Workshop's screen savers can display graphics with your choice of one or more of the following animated transitions. If you disable all these options, your graphics will appear and disappear with no animation.

Chaos and Order: Your graphics will appear as a sequence of random tiles which are gradually sorted into their correct order.

Horizontal Split: Your graphics will appear to split horizontally and move together.

Plummet: Your graphics will appear as vertical bands which descend into your screen area.

Quadrants: Your graphics will appear in four sections which resolve into a complete image.

Sandstorm: Your graphics will appear one pixel at a time, in random order.

Tile: Your graphics will appear one tile at a time, in random order.

Vertical Split: Your graphics will appear to split vertically and move together.

Wipe in from Left: Your graphics will wipe in from the left.

Wipe in from Right: Your graphics will wipe in from the right.

The Setup dialog will also allow you to set the image duration – the time your graphics will be displayed between animated transitions – and the Random Placement switch. The latter option can be enabled to cause your graphics to appear at a different location every time they're displayed, or disabled to centre them.

The Test button in the Setup dialog will display your screen saver as it will appear when your screen is actually blank. Click anywhere in the screen to end the test. This feature is duplicated by the Preview button in the Windows Display under Windows 95, 98 and NT applet – it's included here for users of Windows 3.1.

Screen savers created with an unregistered copy of Graphic Workshop Professional will say so when they're activated. This message will not appear in screen savers created with a registered copy. This message cannot be removed once a screen saver has been created – you must re-convert your graphic to SCR with a registered copy of Graphic Workshop Professional to banish it.

Note that in addition to converting graphics to the SCR format, Graphic Workshop will convert images from its own SCR format back to other, more conventional graphic formats. To this end, it can display SCR files in its browser windows. Graphic Workshop will only read and convert from SCR files it has created – if you attempt to have it read an SCR file from another source, it will most likely display an error message. Be warned – if you inquire about why Graphic Workshop displays error messages when it's asked to read SCR files it's never heard of, we will, however reluctantly, be forced to send a leather-winged demon of the night to search the very threads of time for the beating of your heart and breath all over you until your hair falls out.

The screen savers created by Graphic Workshop are sixteen-bit Windows applications, which means that they can be used under Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows NT. This also means that you will not see an animated preview in the Display applet of the Windows Control Panel when you select one, and the Password button will be disabled. Password Protection is available for Graphic Workshop's screen savers, but it's handled through the Setup dialog.

Graphic Workshop screen savers store their defaults in a file called GWSPSAVE.INI in your \WINDOWS directory.

Distribution of screen savers created by Graphic Workshop: If you have registered Graphic Workshop Professional, you are welcome to create and distribute all the screen savers you like except in a commercial context wherein you are actually selling the service of creating screen savers. This assumes that you own the copyright to the images they contain, of course. Screen savers created by an unregistered evaluation copy of Graphic Workshop may not be distributed.


SFW

SFW files – Maximum bits: 24

The SFW format is used for disk-based photographs processed by Seattle Film Works. Graphic Workshop will read SFW files and convert them to other formats, but it will not convert images to SFW files.


SGI

SGI files (Silicon Graphics) – Maximum bits: 24

The SGI format is use by Silicon Graphics workstations. Graphic Workshop supports most of the format. Specifically, it does not recognize SGI files with obsolete line formats. All graphics written to the SGI format will be stored as uncompressed 24-bit files, no matter what their source colour depth was. Graphic Workshop also recognizes files with the extension RGB as being SGI files.


RAS

RAS files (Sun raster) – Maximum bits: 24

Sun raster files are native to the Sun unix environment. They can be uncompressed or run-length compressed. There are also a number of obscure compression standards which Graphic Workshop does not support at present. These rarely turn up – the Get Info function will tell you if you've encountered one.

Sun raster files appear with a variety of file extensions. Graphic Workshop uses the extension RAS. You might have to rename your files to use this extension if they're named something else. Extensions for Sun raster files on a unix system can include .ras, .rast, .im1, .im8, .im24 and .im32.


TGA

TGA files – Maximum bits: 24

The Truevision Targa format is used by several high-end paint programs and things like ray-tracing packages. Targa files can also store true colour images with sixteen bits of colour, rather than 24, to save space. Enable the Create 16-bit Targa switch in Setup to have it do this.


TIFF

TIFF files – Maximum bits: 24

The TIFF facilities of Graphic Workshop can get a bit involved. The TIFF format offers lots of options to make it applicable to a wide variety of applications – which entails a certain amount of confusion, as well.

Note that due to the wide variations among the programs which produce TIFF files, Graphic Workshop would be lying rather badly if it claimed to be able to read all TIFF files.

Setup includes a field for TIFF Write Options, which allows you to define the type of compression to be used in creating TIFF files. Each line in this field has three items, specifying the compression type for monochrome files, palette colour files with up to eight bits of colour and true colour 24-bit files respectively. The options are:

None	No compression

PBits	Simple PackBits compression

LZW	LZW compression

Group 3	Group 3 FAX compression

Group 4	Group 4 FAX compression

JPEG	Lossy JPEG compression

PNG	Lossless PNG deflate compression

TIFF files with no compression are fast to read and write, and are all but certain to be accepted by any application that reads TIFF files. However, they can result in huge disk files. TIFF files with LZW compression take somewhat longer to read and write, but they usually result in smaller files. There are many applications which read TIFF files but which do not support LZW compression. PackBits compression is somewhere in the middle. Group 4 FAX compression can deal with some line drawings more effectively than LZW compression can, but it creates files that almost no TIFF readers will handle. Don't use Group 4 unless you're certain your target application will read them.

JPEG compression is identical to the compression used by the JPG file format – it discards a specified amount of image detail to achieve more effective compression. The amount of detail to be discarded can be set using the JPEG/FIF/ART Quality control in Setup.

PNG compression uses the same compression as is found in the PNG format, the PKZIP Deflate compression. Note that while they are legal TIFF compression types, JPEG- and PNG-compressed TIFF files are supported by very few other applications as of this writing.


TTF

TTF files (TrueType fonts) – Maximum bits: 1

TTF files are TrueType fonts. Graphic Workshop will display these as font samples. If you convert from TTF to another format, you'll have a bitmapped image with a sample of the font. The size of the bitmaps, the example text and other features of the font samples can be configured – see the Configuration document. Graphic Workshop will not create TTF files.

For a comprehensive TrueType font management package, check out Font Wrangler, available at the Alchemy Mindworks web page http://www.mindworkshop.com .


TXT

TXT files (text files) - Maximum bits: 24

Graphic Workshop will create a two-colour image from any ASCII text file. It can contain both alphabetic characters and high order IBM block graphic characters. Tabs are expanded and all other control characters except for carriage returns are ignored. Source text files for this function can have up to 2048 lines of text. A line can be up to 4096 characters wide. If you use files which are longer than this, the extra text will be ignored. Note that a text file of these dimensions will create a 130-megabyte bitmap.

Suitable text files must be in pure ASCII, not proprietary word processor documents. They must have the extension TXT.


UUE

UUE files (uuencoded Internet graphics)

The UUE format isn't a graphic file format at all. Rather, it's a way of graphics and other binary objects so they can be sent over text-only electronic mail systems, such as Internet e-mail and Usenet newsgroups. The process of uuencoding a graphic turns it into text – albeit fairly mysterious-looking text – which can be mailed. The received uuencoded file must be uudecoded to return it to its former state.

If this means almost nothing to you, you're probably not involved with this aspect of the Internet and you can safely ignore this section.

Graphic Workshop will read the images from uuencoded text. The file extension for your uuencoded text must be UUE. The text itself can contain multiple sections if you like – Graphic Workshop will attempt to figure out where the breaks are and assemble the original graphic into a correct file.

Graphic Workshop's UUE decoder can work in strict or relaxed mode, as defined by the Relaxed UUE option in Setup. This has to do with how it deals with UUE files having multiple sections.

In strict mode, the standard begin <mode> <filename>  fields must precede the first uuencoded block in your source text file. Each subsequent section for multiple section uuencoded files must start with a BEGIN line of some sort and end with an END line. A uuencoded graphic that appears as multiple sections must have all the sections concatenated into a single UUE file. Note that Graphic Workshop does very little validity checking for uuencoded data – damaged source data, sections out of sequence or incorrectly formed uuencoded headers or trailers may cause Graphic Workshop's uudecoder to create an incorrect final binary file and hence a mangled or unreadable graphic.

In relaxed mode, Graphic Workshop will decode any line which checks out as valid uuencoded data, ignoring all the BEGIN and END markers save for the first one. If it doesn't find the END marker of the current file being decoded, it will prompt you for the next file in the current sequence.

The strict mode guarentees you a correct decode if your UUE files have the correct section markers, but not all uuencoded data has these. The relaxed mode can usually handle files without headers properly, but some pathological cases will crop up in which spurious data is decoded. The strict mode does not prompt for multiple sections of a UUE file.


WAV

WAV files (Sampled Sound)

WAV files aren't graphics – they're short sound bites. None the less, you can browse them with Graphic Workshop. If you "view" one, a small bitmap will appear and the sound in the file will play. Note that the Play item in the Picture menu of View mode can be used to repeat a WAV file once it finishes. If you attempt to convert a WAV file to a graphic format, the resulting graphic file will contain a copy of the WAV bitmap that appears in View mode.

WAV files display in Graphic Workshop's browser windows with a canned thumbnail.

You must have the MCI sound drivers installed for the WAV functions to work properly. These are typically installed as part of Windows 95, 98 and NT 4.0. If the WAV functions don't work, you have driver problems.


WALLPAPER

Windows Wallpaper – Maximum bits: 24

If you select the Wlppr item from the Destination dialog, your selected file will be converted to the BMP format and written to your \WINDOWS directory. It will appear on your desktop as wallpaper. Converting multiple files to Wlppr will cause all the files to be written to your \WINDOWS directory, but only the last one will become your current wallpaper image. You can change the wallpaper image for your desktop through the Windows Control Panel.

Note that 24-bit wallpaper ties up a lot of memory and it won't look very good on systems with 16- or 256-colour screen drivers. Consider reducing 24-bit images to 256 colours with the Effects function before you use them as wallpaper.

When you convert an image to wallpaper, you will be prompted to display it centered or tiled.


WMF

WMF files – Maximum bits: 8

The WMF format contains vector graphics. Graphic Workshop will rasterize WMF files into bitmaps. You can set the colour depth and approximate image dimensions of the rasterized bitmaps this feature will create using the Vector Read Options control in Setup. Set the Configuration document for more about this.

Graphic Workshop will not write to the WMF format.

When you read a WMF file with Graphic Workshop, the result will be a bitmap. Graphic Workshop will read both conventional and placeable metafiles. If you're curious, you can tell which is which through the Get Info function. The Comments field will define the number of objects in the file for a conventional metafile and will say "Placeable metafile" otherwise.

Note that because the aspect ratio of conventional and placeable metafiles are calculated differently, the same drawing stored in both forms will have slightly differing dimensions.


WPG

WPG files – Maximum bits: 8

These are the native import graphic files for WordPerfect. These files can contain both bitmaps and line art, or vector graphics. Graphic Workshop can only deal with the bitmapped parts of them. If you view, print or convert a WPG file containing both bitmapped and vector elements, the vector elements will be discarded.

WPG files which refuse to read with Graphic Workshop are usually those which contain only vector elements and no bitmaps. If you use the Get Info function on a WPG file which does not read, the comments field of the file information box will say "Vector file" if this is the case or you will see a message that says "No Bitmap."

Graphic Workshop will deal with WPG files having one, four or eight bits of colour information, that is, monochrome files, sixteen-colour files and 256-colour files.


XBM

XBM files – Maximum bits: 1

The XBM format is used to store small bitmaps – it's actually a C-language definition of a bitmap. XBM files are associated with UNIX systems, wherein they often store icons.


SETUP

Configuration and Setup

The Graphic Workshop Setup dialog can be accessed by clicking on the Setup button in the tool bar or by selecting Setup from the File menu. Because there are a lot of format variations and other things you're likely to want to change periodically, you should become familiar with Setup.

Setup is organized into a number of panels to make it easier to locate the Setup item you need to change.

See the Manual document for information about editing the GWSPRO.INI file.

The Browser Panel

The Display Panel

The Files Panel

The Formats Panel

The Register Panel


SETUP.BROWSER

The Browser Panel

Centre Thumbnails: Disable this item to have thumbnail images appear in the upper left corner of each thumbnail, or enable it to have them appear in the center of each thumbnail.

Close Progress When Complete: Disable this item to always leave the progress window open when a batch of files have been processed, or enable it to close the progress window unless there have been errors.

Create Thumbnail Options: This is the dithering mode for thumbnails. Remap will create contrasty, undithered thumbnails, Bayer will create fairly chunky dithered thumbnails and Error-Diffused will create attractive dithered thumbnails. Unless you have a compelling reason to do otherwise, use the latter option.

Default Directory Window Size: This is the default width in pixels of the directory tree when Graphic Workshop creates a new browser window.

Default New Browser Mode: This is the view mode that Graphic Workshop will apply to the new browser windows it creates.

Drop Options: This is what Graphic Workshop will do by default when you drop files into one of its browser windows. See the Reference document for information about overriding the default Drop Options setting.

Include Remote Drives in Browser: Enable this item to include remote network drives in the directory tree displays of new browser windows, or disable it to suppress them. Note that changes to this item will only apply to windows created or refreshed after it's changed. Because it takes significantly longer for Graphic Workshop to survey network drives than local drives when it creates a browser window, you might want to disable this option and use the Folder button to access network drives when you need them.

Maximize New Browsers: Enable this item to have Graphic Workshop create new browser windows maximized, or disable it to have Graphic Workshop create new browser windows at normal size.

Remember Open Windows: Enable this item to have Graphic Workshop remember all its open browser windows between sessions.

Untag After Processing: Enable this item to unselect files after processing.

Untag After Viewing: Enable this item to unselect files after viewing.


SETUP.DISPLAY

The Display Panel

Centre Viewed Images: Disable this item to have viewed images appear in the upper left corner of View windows, or enable it to have them appear in the center of View windows.

Directory Tree Dialogs: Enable this item to have the Change Directory and Move and Copy dialogs use Windows tree controls, similar to the ones which appear in Graphic Workshop's browser windows. Disable this item to use list box controls to select directories.

Default View Zoom: This is the default zoom mode for View windows. If it's set to 100 percent, you graphics will be displayed normally. If it's set to Zoom to Fit, a zoom mode will be chosen to best fill the View window.

File Menu List Size: This is the maximum number of items that will appear in the recently visited directory list in the Graphic Workshop File menu. Set it to zero to suppress the list entirely.

Maximize View Windows: Enable this item to have Graphic Workshop create View windows maximized, or disable it to have it set them to the dimensions of the graphics to be displayed.

Prompt before Viewing Animation: Disable this item to show animations without displaying the Select Image dialog, or enable it to display the dialog.

Show Right Click Menu in View: Enable this item to have Graphic Workshop display a menu when you right-click in View or Crop mode, or disable it to have it exit View and Crop mode when you right-click.

Show Startup Window: Enable this item tohave the startup logo window displayed when Graphic Workshop boots up.

Show View Title Path: Enable this item to include the complete paths of the file names displays in the caption bars for View and Crop mode, or disable it to just show the file names.

View Mode Background: This is the background colour for View mode. Click on this colour button to change it.


SETUP.FILES

The Files Panel

Auto Create Thumbnails: Disable this item to suppress the automatic creation of thumbnails for new files, or  enable it to create thumbnails whenever new files are written by Graphic Workshop.

Default File Extension: This is the default file extension.

File Name Underbars: Enable this item to prepend processed file names with underbars, or disable it to use the source name when creating a new name for a processed file. This does not apply to files created by the Convert function, which always uses source file names. See the Reference document for a discussion of file naming for processed files.

Prompt before Moving Files: Enable this item to be prompted before Graphic Workshop moves files, or disable it to move files without prompting.

Prompt before Overwriting Files: Enable this item to be prompted before Graphic Workshop overwrites files, or disable it overwrite files without prompting.

Prompt for Destination Path: Enable this item to be prompted for a new destination directory whenever Graphic Workshop is about to create one or more files, or disable it to have Graphic Workshop write new files to the source directory.

Prompt for Destination Names: Enable this item to be prompted for a new file name whenever Graphic Workshop is about to create a file.

Prompt for File Comments: Enable this item to be prompted for file comments whenever Graphic Workshop is about to create a file. The Write File Comments item must also be enabled for this item to be recognized.

Use Text File Comments: Enable this item to use text comment files. The Write File Comments option must be enabled for this item to be recognized. When Graphic Workshop writes file comments and this item is enabled, it will look for a file with the same name as the file being written and the file extension specified in the TextCommentExtension field in GWSPRO.INI. If a file by this name is found, it will use its contents for the file comments about to be written. Text comment files must be pure ASCII, not formatted word processor documents.

View Corrupted Files: Enable this item to be prompted to view partial images if a corrupt file is read by the View function.

View File Comments: Enable this item to have Graphic Workshop display file comments after you exit View mode if any are present.

Write File Comments: Enable this item to have Graphic Workshop write file comments to those formats which support them.


SETUP.FORMATS

The Formats Panel

AVI Quality Factor: The quality factor for writing AVI files should range from 100 for unspeakably ugly to 10000 for almost perfect reproduction.

Compress IFF/LBM/PSD Files: Enable this item to compress IFF, LBM and PSD files, or disable it to create them uncompressed.

Create 16-bit Targa: Enable this item to create sixteen-bit Targa files when writing true-colour images to the TGA format, or disable it to create 24-bit Targa files.

Create Compressed EXE Pictures: Disable this item to create uncompressed DOS EXE pictures, or Enable it to create compressed DOS EXE pictures.

Create Windows EXE Pictures: Enable this item to create Windows EXE pictures, or disable it to create DOS EXE pictures.

Fast FIF Read: Enable this item to buffer FIF files in memory, or disable it to read them a block at a time from disk.

JPEG/ART Quality Factor: This control determines the amount of image degradation for images written to JPEG and ART files. It should range from 10 for unspeakably ugly to 100 for almost perfect reproduction.

Password Protect PNG Files: Enable this item to create password-protected PNG files, or disable it to create normal PNG files.

Persistent Passwords: Enable this item to preserve your PNG password for the duration of your current Graphic Workshop session, or disable it to be prompted for your password each time it's required.

Photo-CD Options: This combo box defines which resolution will be requested when Graphic Workshop reads a Photo-CD image. The RGB items will cause Graphic Workshop to fetch a 24-bit true-colour graphic. The 256-colour items will cause Graphic Workshop to fetch an eight-bit dithered graphic. The 256 greys items will cause Graphic Workshop to fetch an eight-bit grey-scale graphic. Note that not all Photo-CD images have complete resolution sets – if you specify a resolution option which is unavailable in the Photo-CD image you ask Graphic Workshop to read, it will fetch the closest resolution that does exist.

PNG Compression: The PNG compression factor should range from one for fast writes and poor compression to nine for slow writes and more aggressive compression.

Rasterize Metafiles to Clipboard: Enable this item to rasterize metafiles to bitmaps before they're pasted to the clipboard, or disable it paste them as metafiles.

Read CDR Bitmaps: Enable this item to have Graphic Workshop search CDR files for bitmaps, or disable it to always display CDR thumbnails.

Read JPEG/FIF as RGB: Enable this item to have JPEG and FIF files read as 24-bit objects, or disable it to have them read as eight-bit objects.

Relaxed UUE: Enable this item for relaxed multiple-block UUE decoding, or disable it for strict single-block UUE decoding.

TIFF Write Options: This combo box defines how TIFF files should be written. Each item has three sections – one for monochrome images, one for images having between four and 256 colours and one for true-colour images. As such, setting it to Grp3 – LZW –LZW will cause monochrome images written to TIFF to be stored using Group 3 compression and all other files to be stored using LZW compression. See the Formats document for a complete discussion of the available TIFF compression types. Note that JPEG and PNG compression are legal TIFF options, but few applications which read TIFF know how to interpret them.

Vector Options: This combo box defines the size and colour depth of the bitmap used to rasterize vector files – specifically WMF files.

Write GIF Interlaced: Enable this item to have Graphic Workshop write interlaced GIF files.

Write MacPaint with headers: Enable this item to add Macbinary headers to MacPaint files being create by Graphic Workshop, or disable it to suppress the creation of headers.

Write OS/2 Bitmaps: Enable this item to write OS/2 BMP files, or disable it to write Windows BMP files.

Write PBM Headers to IFF/LBM Files: Enable this item to write 256-colour LBM files with PBM line structures, or disable it to create them with ILBM line structures.

Write Progressive JPEG: Enable this item to have Graphic Workshop write progressive JPEG files, or disable it to have it write conventional JPEG files. Be warned – most applications which read JPEG files don't read progressive ones.


CentreThumbnails

Centre Thumbnails: Disable this item to have thumbnail images appear in the upper left corner of each thumbnail, or enable it to have them appear in the center of each thumbnail.


CloseProgressWhenDone

Close Progress When Complete: Disable this item to always leave the progress window open when a batch of files have been processed, or enable it to close the progress window unless there have been errors.


DitherThumbnails

Create Thumbnail Options: This is the dithering mode for thumbnails. Remap will create contrasty, undithered thumbnails, Bayer will create fairly chunky dithered thumbnails and Error-Diffused will create attractive dithered thumbnails. Unless you have a compelling reason to do otherwise, use the latter option.


DefaultDirWide

Default Directory Window Size: This is the default width in pixels of the directory tree when Graphic Workshop creates a new browser window.


DefaultViewMode

Default New Browser Mode: This is the view mode that Graphic Workshop will apply to the new browser windows it creates.


DropOptions

Drop Options: This is what Graphic Workshop will do by default when you drop files into one of its browser windows. See the Reference document for information about overriding the default Drop Options setting.


IncludeRemoteDrives

Include Remote Drives in Browser: Enable this item to include remote network drives in the directory tree displays of new browser windows, or disable it to suppress them. Note that changes to this item will only apply to windows created or refreshed after it's changed. Because it takes significantly longer for Graphic Workshop to survey network drives than local drives when it creates a browser window, you might want to disable this option and use the Folder button to access network drives when you need them.


MaximizeNewBrowsers

Maximize New Browsers: Enable this item to have Graphic Workshop create new browser windows maximized, or disable it to have Graphic Workshop create new browser windows at normal size.


RememberOpenWindows

Remember Open Windows: Enable this item to have Graphic Workshop remember all its open browser windows between sessions.


UntagAfterProcess

Untag After Processing: Enable this item to unselect files after processing.


UntagAfterView

Untag After Viewing: Enable this item to unselect files after viewing.


CentreViewImages

Centre Viewed Images: Disable this item to have viewed images appear in the upper left corner of View windows, or enable it to have them appear in the center of View windows.


DirectoryTreeDialogs

Directory Tree Dialogs: Enable this item to have the Change Directory and Move and Copy dialogs use Windows tree controls, similar to the ones which appear in Graphic Workshop's browser windows. Disable this item to use list box controls to select directories.


DefaultViewZoom

Default View Zoom: This is the default zoom mode for View windows. If it's set to 100 percent, you graphics will be displayed normally. If it's set to Zoom to Fit, a zoom mode will be chosen to best fill the View window.


FileMenuRange

File Menu List Size: This is the maximum number of items that will appear in the recently visited directory list in the Graphic Workshop File menu. Set it to zero to suppress the list entirely.


MaximizeViewWindow

Maximize View Windows: Enable this item to have Graphic Workshop create View windows maximized, or disable it to have it set them to the dimensions of the graphics to be displayed.


AnimationViewPrompt

Prompt before Viewing Animation: Disable this item to show animations without displaying the Select Image dialog, or enable it to display the dialog.


RightClickMenuInView

Show Right Click Menu in View: Enable this item to have Graphic Workshop display a menu when you right-click in View or Crop mode, or disable it to have it exit View and Crop mode when you right-click.


ShowStartupWindow

Show Startup Window: Enable this item tohave the startup logo window displayed when Graphic Workshop boots up.


ShowViewTitlePath

Show View Title Path: Enable this item to include the complete paths of the file names displays in the caption bars for View and Crop mode, or disable it to just show the file names.


ViewModeBackground

View Mode Background: This is the background colour for View mode. Click on this colour button to change it.


AutoCreateThumbnail

Auto Create Thumbnails: Disable this item to suppress the automatic creation of thumbnails for new files, or  enable it to create thumbnails whenever new files are written by Graphic Workshop.


DefaultFileExtension

Default File Extension: This is the default file extension.


FilenameUnderbars

File Name Underbars: Enable this item to prepend processed file names with underbars, or disable it to use the source name when creating a new name for a processed file. This does not apply to files created by the Convert function, which always uses source file names. See the Reference document for a discussion of file naming for processed files.


PromptBeforeMoving

Prompt before Moving Files: Enable this item to be prompted before Graphic Workshop moves files, or disable it to move files without prompting.


PromptBeforeOverwrite

Prompt before Overwriting Files: Enable this item to be prompted before Graphic Workshop overwrites files, or disable it overwrite files without prompting.


PromptForDestination

Prompt for Destination Path: Enable this item to be prompted for a new destination directory whenever Graphic Workshop is about to create one or more files, or disable it to have Graphic Workshop write new files to the source directory.


PromptforDestName

Prompt for Destination Names: Enable this item to be prompted for a new file name whenever Graphic Workshop is about to create a file.


PromptForFileComments

Prompt for File Comments: Enable this item to be prompted for file comments whenever Graphic Workshop is about to create a file. The Write File Comments item must also be enabled for this item to be recognized.


UseTextCommentFiles

Use Text File Comments: Enable this item to use text comment files. The Write File Comments option must be enabled for this item to be recognized. When Graphic Workshop writes file comments and this item is enabled, it will look for a file with the same name as the file being written and the file extension specified in the TextCommentExtension field in GWSPRO.INI. If a file by this name is found, it will use its contents for the file comments about to be written. Text comment files must be pure ASCII, not formatted word processor documents.


ViewCorruptedFiles

View Corrupted Files: Enable this item to be prompted to view partial images if a corrupt file is read by the View function.


ViewFileComments

View File Comments: Enable this item to have Graphic Workshop display file comments after you exit View mode if any are present.


WriteFileComments

Write File Comments: Enable this item to have Graphic Workshop write file comments to those formats which support them.


MovieQualityFactor

AVI Quality Factor: The quality factor for writing AVI files should range from 100 for unspeakably ugly to 10000 for almost perfect reproduction.


CreateIffCompressed

Compress IFF/LBM/PSD Files: Enable this item to compress IFF, LBM and PSD files, or disable it to create them uncompressed.


CreateTarga16

Create 16-bit Targa: Enable this item to create sixteen-bit Targa files when writing true-colour images to the TGA format, or disable it to create 24-bit Targa files.


CreateExeCompressed

Create Compressed EXE Pictures: Disable this item to create uncompressed DOS EXE pictures, or Enable it to create compressed DOS EXE pictures.


CreateWindowsExe

Create Windows EXE Pictures: Enable this item to create Windows EXE pictures, or disable it to create DOS EXE pictures.


FastFifRead

Fast FIF Read: Enable this item to buffer FIF files in memory, or disable it to read them a block at a time from disk.


JpegCompression

JPEG/ART Quality Factor: This control determines the amount of image degradation for images written to JPEG and ART files. It should range from 10 for unspeakably ugly to 100 for almost perfect reproduction.


PasswordProtect

Password Protect PNG Files: Enable this item to create password-protected PNG files, or disable it to create normal PNG files.


PersistentPasswords

Persistent Passwords: Enable this item to preserve your PNG password for the duration of your current Graphic Workshop session, or disable it to be prompted for your password each time it's required.


PhotoCDResolution

Photo-CD Options: This combo box defines which resolution will be requested when Graphic Workshop reads a Photo-CD image. The RGB items will cause Graphic Workshop to fetch a 24-bit true-colour graphic. The 256-colour items will cause Graphic Workshop to fetch an eight-bit dithered graphic. The 256 greys items will cause Graphic Workshop to fetch an eight-bit grey-scale graphic. Note that not all Photo-CD images have complete resolution sets – if you specify a resolution option which is unavailable in the Photo-CD image you ask Graphic Workshop to read, it will fetch the closest resolution that does exist.


PngCompression

PNG Compression: The PNG compression factor should range from one for fast writes and poor compression to nine for slow writes and more aggressive compression.


RasterizeMetafilesToClip

Rasterize Metafiles to Clipboard: Enable this item to rasterize metafiles to bitmaps before they're pasted to the clipboard, or disable it paste them as metafiles.


ReadCDRBitmaps

Read CDR Bitmaps: Enable this item to have Graphic Workshop search CDR files for bitmaps, or disable it to always display CDR thumbnails.


ReadJpegRgb

Read JPEG/FIF as RGB: Enable this item to have JPEG and FIF files read as 24-bit objects, or disable it to have them read as eight-bit objects.


RelaxedUUE

Relaxed UUE: Enable this item for relaxed multiple-block UUE decoding, or disable it for strict single-block UUE decoding.


TiffOptions

TIFF Write Options: This combo box defines how TIFF files should be written. Each item has three sections – one for monochrome images, one for images having between four and 256 colours and one for true-colour images. As such, setting it to Grp3 – LZW –LZW will cause monochrome images written to TIFF to be stored using Group 3 compression and all other files to be stored using LZW compression. See the Formats document for a complete discussion of the available TIFF compression types. Note that JPEG and PNG compression are legal TIFF options, but few applications which read TIFF know how to interpret them.


VectorOptions

Vector Options: This combo box defines the size and colour depth of the bitmap used to rasterize vector files – specifically WMF files.


WriteGIFInterlaced

Write GIF Interlaced: Enable this item to have Graphic Workshop write interlaced GIF files.


CreateMacbinaryHeader

Write MacPaint with headers: Enable this item to add Macbinary headers to MacPaint files being create by Graphic Workshop, or disable it to suppress the creation of headers.


WriteOS2Bitmaps

Write OS/2 Bitmaps: Enable this item to write OS/2 BMP files, or disable it to write Windows BMP files.


CreateIffPBM

Write PBM Headers to IFF/LBM Files: Enable this item to write 256-colour LBM files with PBM line structures, or disable it to create them with ILBM line structures.


WriteJpegProgressive

Write Progressive JPEG: Enable this item to have Graphic Workshop write progressive JPEG files, or disable it to have it write conventional JPEG files. Be warned – most applications which read JPEG files don't read progressive ones.


RegistrationName

Registration Code: Your registration code is provided when you register Graphic Workshop. If you received Graphic Workshop on an Alchemy Mindworks CD-ROM, it's on your invoice in the line item for Graphic Workshop Professional. It will look like this:

Graphic Workshop Pro	REG # 12345-12-67890-88	$40.00

If you have received a confirmation e-mail message after registering Graphic Workshop, it will appear in this message, like this:

1 Graphic Workshop Pro 	REG CODE 12345-12-67890-88

Graphic Workshop Professional registration codes are all 17 characters long, in the form of one five-digit group of numbers, a dash, one two-digit group of numbers, a dash, a second five-digit group on numbers, a dash and a final two-digit group of numbers. You must enter your code exactly in the Registration Code field to successfully register Graphic Workshop. The dashes separating the digit groups are not entered.

Note: Once it has been entered, your registration code will not be displayed by Graphic Workshop. If you have cause to re-install Graphic Workshop in the future, you will require your registration name and code. Write them down now and store them in a safe place.

Registration Name: Your registration code is a complex checksum based on the characters of your name. If your name is not entered correctly in the Registration Name field, your registration code will not be accepted. Your registration name is printed on your invoice and is included in the confirmation e-mail message you received when you registered Graphic Workshop. It must be entered exactly – all the characters, spaces and punctuation in your registration name as it is provided to you must match what you enter in the Registration Name field.


NOHELP

No help is available for this item.


SETUP.REGISTER

The Register Panel

Registration Code: Your registration code is provided when you register Graphic Workshop. If you received Graphic Workshop on an Alchemy Mindworks CD-ROM, it's on your invoice in the line item for Graphic Workshop Professional. It will look like this:

Graphic Workshop Pro	REG # 12345-12-67890-88	$40.00

If you have received a confirmation e-mail message after registering Graphic Workshop, it will appear in this message, like this:

1 Graphic Workshop Pro 	REG CODE 12345-12-67890-88

Graphic Workshop Professional registration codes are all 17 characters long, in the form of one five-digit group of numbers, a dash, one two-digit group of numbers, a dash, a second five-digit group on numbers, a dash and a final two-digit group of numbers. You must enter your code exactly in the Registration Code field to successfully register Graphic Workshop. The dashes separating the digit groups are not entered.

Note: Once it has been entered, your registration code will not be displayed by Graphic Workshop. If you have cause to re-install Graphic Workshop in the future, you will require your registration name and code. Write them down now and store them in a safe place.

Registration Name: Your registration code is a complex checksum based on the characters of your name. If your name is not entered correctly in the Registration Name field, your registration code will not be accepted. Your registration name is printed on your invoice and is included in the confirmation e-mail message you received when you registered Graphic Workshop. It must be entered exactly – all the characters, spaces and punctuation in your registration name as it is provided to you must match what you enter in the Registration Name field.


Reference

Graphic Workshop Professional embodies a great deal of functionality for managing and manipulating graphic images. It's unlikely that you'll find uses for absolutely everything Graphic Workshop knows how to do. It's more unlikely still that you'll want to try to learn everything there is to know about Graphic Workshop in a single session.

If you have not already done so, please read the Introduction and Tutorial document installed with Graphic Workshop. It will walk you through the basic operation of the software and provide you with step by step procedures for performing the most common tasks that Graphic Workshop is called upon to do.

Caption

Catalog

Clipboard

Convert

Crop

Delete

Dither

Drag and Drop

Effects

EXE Picture

Formats

Get Information

Graphic Catalog

Identify Mystery Files

Moving and Copying Files

Printing

Rename

Reverse

Scale

Scan

Screen Capture

Selecting Files

Slide Show

System Information

Thumbnails

Thumbnail Database

Transform

View


Caption

The Graphic Workshop Caption function will allow you to add text to existing graphic files. Caption text always appears below the graphics it's added to, as it would in newspaper captions. The vertical dimension of a captioned graphic will be expanded sufficiently to allow for its caption text.

By default, if you have Graphic Workshop caption a file it will create a new file for you of the type you select and with "C_" prepended to its name. Thus PICTURE.GIF could be written to C_PICTURE.GIF, for example. This option can be disabled in Setup.

To add captions, select one or more files and select Caption from the Image menu. The Caption dialog will appear. The following items will affect what your captions look like:

Single Line: Enable this option to allow a single line caption – your caption text will be truncated when it fills the first line or at the first carraige return. Disable this option to allow multiple-line captions – your captions will include as many lines as they require to display all the caption text.

Background: Click on this colour button to select the colour your caption background will be set in. See the discussion of colour in captions, below.

Foreground: Click on this colour button to select the colour your caption text will be set in. See the discussion of colour in captions, below.

Frame: Click on this colour button to select the colour your caption frame will be set in. See the discussion of colour in captions, below. The frame will only be displayed if the Frame Size item is set to a value greater than zero.

Title Font: You can select any alphabetic single-byte TrueType font installed in your system as the caption text font.

Title Font Size: This is the point size of the caption text. Bigger point sizes will create bigger captions – if you enable the Single Line option, bigger point sizes will also allow fewer words in your caption.

Frame Size: Graphic Workshop's Caption function can display a coloured frame around your captions. The frame colour is set by the Frame colour button. Set this value to zero to disable the creation of a frame.

Justification: Select left, centre or right justifcation for your caption text.

Caption Text: The caption text field will allow you to enter up to 260 characters of caption text. You can use carriage returns to format your text if you wish. You can also instruct the Caption function to fetch text from a text file. To do this, enter an @ character followed by the path to your text file in the Caption Text field. This text file must be pure ASCII – not a formatted word processor document file. It can be of any length, but keep in mind that really huge files can create really huge graphics.

Once a caption has been applied to a graphic, the text in the caption is just pixels – it can't be subsequently edited with the Caption function. If you're careful, however, you can run the same graphic through Caption multiple times to add multiple captions in different colours or different fonts if you like.

Note that the Caption function draws its colours from a standard 256-colour palette. If you caption a 24-bit true-colour image, the colours you select will be displayed exactly as they appeared in the Caption dialog colour buttons. If you caption a graphic with 256 or fewer colours, the Foreground, Background and Frame colours you select will be matched to the nearest available colours in your graphic. This can result in visible colour shifts. If you caption two-colour graphics, make sure you choose colours which will remap to black and white correctly.

The Caption function will allow you to add visible captions to your images without mangling the pictures in question. Keep in mind that anyone determined to do so can subsequently remove them – the Graphic Workshop Crop function, for example, will excise captions. There is no practical way to embed text – such as a copyright notice – in your graphics in a form which guarantees that someone will not subsequently delete it.

The Caption button will not be visible if your system is configured with a 640 by 480-pixel screen driver. You can still access the Caption function through the Image menu.


Catalog

The Graphic Workshop Catalog function will create pictures of your pictures. Tag a number of images and select the Cataloging function. One or more files will be generated containing thumbnails of your selected images. These can be helpful in keeping track of a large collection of picture files.

Files created by the catalog function will be named Catalog00001, Catalog00002, Catalog00003 and so on. The catalog function will not overwrite existing files – if the file Catalog00001 exists, for example, it will begin with Catalog00002.

When you create a catalog you can select one of a number of sizes for the final catalog files, in eight or twenty-four bit colour, with the individual thumbnails set in either portrait or landscape frames. Choosing twenty-four bit colour will create more attractive catalog images.

If you create eight-bit catalogs you can choose to either remap or dither the thumbnail images. As a rule, remapped images won't represent the colours of your source graphics all that well and dithered images will lose a bit of resolution. Bayer dithering is faster than Floyd-Steinberg dithering, but the latter looks better.

Catalog files can be created with a three-dimensional appearance or with a flat white or black background. You can select the font to be used for file names – as this text is pretty small, it's unwise to use a particularly ornate font.

If you catalog animation files, such as AVI or FLI/FLC, the image cataloged will be the first frame in the file.


Clipboard

Graphic Workshop supports the Windows clipboard. Specifically, you can use it to copy images to the clipboard so other Windows applications can paste them into their documents. You can paste images currently on the clipboard into any image file format which Graphic Workshop supports.

There are two ways to get things onto the clipboard from within Graphic Workshop. To get an image from a file to the clipboard:

1. Select the file in question in a browser window.

2. Select Copy from the Edit menu.

The file will be read and its image copied to the clipboard.

Alternately, you can choose the clipboard, rather than a specific file format,  as the destination for any Graphic Workshop function by clicking on the Clpbrd button in the Destination dialog. Thus, for example, you could "convert" a GIF files to the clipboard, or scale a JPEG file and have the scaled image copied to the clipboard. This would cause Graphic Workshop to read the file and write its contents to the clipboard, rather than to another disk file.

Note that if you use this function on a vector graphic, the object pasted to the clipboard will be a metafile, not a bitmap.

To fetch a bitmap from the clipboard and have it written to a file, select Paste from the edit menu. You will be prompted for a destination file. You can only Paste with Graphic Workshop if the object on the clipboard at the moment is actually a bitmap.


EXEPicture

Configure EXE Pictures

Graphic Workshop for Windows can convert images in other graphic file formats, such as PCX and GIF, into executable pictures. When you run the executable files so created as applications, they'll display the your original images. Graphic Workshop can create both DOS or Windows applications, as defined by the Windows EXE Pictures switch in Setup. If you want to create EXE pictures which can be configured, as discussed in this section, the Windows EXE Pictures option must be enabled.

See the EXE section in the Formats document for more about Graphic Workshop's DOS-mode EXE pictures.

The Configure EXE Pictures item of the File menu will allow you to configure Windows EXE pictures created by Graphic Workshop.

Self-displaying pictures are limited to 256 or fewer colours. If you want to convert an image from a true-colour file to an EXE picture – such as a JPEG graphic – you must use the Colour Reduction option of the Effects dialog to reduce it to a 256-colour graphic, and select EXE as the destination format. Windows EXE pictures created by Graphic Workshop are useable as soon as they have been created. They default to fairly simple display parameters – you can modify these through the Configure EXE Pictures function.

Note: The Configure EXE Pictures function will not open anything other than a Windows EXE picture create by Graphic Workshop. If you attempt to open another sort of EXE file, such as an application, it will complain.

When an EXE picture has been opened in Configure EXE Pictures, its name will appear in the title bar of the Picture Configuration dialog and its dimensions, colour depth and the version of Graphic Workshop for Windows that created it will appear in the upper left corner of the Picture Configuration application window.

Keep in mind that configuring a Windows EXE picture will change the contents of the EXE file for the picture. If you have a virus detector that looks for modified EXE files, this will set it off. Doing so is harmless – no viruses have been introduced into your pictures.

Here's what the configuration options in Picture Configuration do:

Next Picture

Windows EXE pictures can chain to subsequent  pictures – or, in fact to any other application's EXE file – when they terminate. You can use this feature to create a Windows slide show. Click on Browse to select the picture to chain to. Delete the contents of this field to prevent a picture from chaining.

Note: If you want to abort a sequence of chained Windows EXE pictures when they're running, click and hold in the current picture with your right mouse button and click on the left button. A dialog will appear to ask if you want to abort the sequence.

Effect

Windows EXE pictures have built in multimedia facilities. A Windows EXE picture can play wave files, MIDI music files and Video for Windows AVI files. These have the file extensions WAV, MID and AVI respectively. You can configure a Windows EXE picture to play a multimedia file when it first starts up, or from a menu selection or a button in its About box.

Note that colour AVI files will seize the system palette for as long as they play on display devices having 256 or fewer colours. This may distort the colours of your Windows EXE picture until the movie stops.

You can select an effect file by clicking on Browse. Once an effect has been selected, click on Test to see what it sounds or looks like. While an effect is playing as a result of clicking on Test, the Test button will become a Stop button. Clicking on it will terminate the effect.

When a Windows EXE picture loads, it also looks to its command line for the path to a wave, MIDI or AVI file. If it finds one, it will use this as an effect if the Effect field has been left blank.

Title

This field allows you to define the text for the title bar of a Windows EXE picture. If you leave this field blank, the title will be "Picture."

Message

This field allows you to define the text for the About box of a Windows EXE picture. It can contain up to 300 characters.

Background and Set Background

If Set Background is enabled, the background of your picture will be the colour selected in the matrix of background colour tiles. If it's not enabled, the background will be the default background colour for the system that runs your EXE pictures. The background colour affects the matt around a picture when you maximize it. Click in a coloured tile to choose a new background colour. The current colour is indicated by a tile with a square within it.

Time Delay

If you enable Time Delay and enter a time delay value, your Windows EXE picture will display for a preset time and then automatically terminate or chain to another picture.

End On Mouse

If the End On Mouse option is enabled, clicking in a Windows EXE picture with your mouse will cause it to terminate or chain to another picture. This does not affect using the right mouse button to terminate a sequence of chained pictures.

Start With Effect

If the Start With Effect option is enabled, your Windows EXE picture will play an effect defined as soon as it runs if one was defined.

No Title Bar

The No Title Bar option will disable the title bar, system menu and the minimize and maximize buttons of a Windows EXE picture. It will only be enabled if End On Mouse or Time Delay are selected, such that there is some way to terminate your picture.

Centre Picture

The Centre Picture option will place your picture in the centre of its window when the window is maximized. If this option is not enabled the picture will appear in the upper left corner.

Maximize

The Maximize option will cause a Windows EXE picture to maximize automatically when it runs.

An unmaximized Windows EXE picture will generate a window just large enough to contain it. If you attempt to display a picture larger than your screen, Windows may be unable to create a window for it, and the image will not display. It's a good idea to keep the sizes of your Windows EXE pictures to modest dimensions.

EXE pictures created with an unregistered copy of Graphic Workshop Professional will say so when they're run. This message will not appear in EXE pictures created with a registered copy. This message cannot be removed once an EXE picture has been created – you must re-convert your graphic to EXE with a registered copy of Graphic Workshop Professional to banish it.

Distribution of EXE pictures created by Graphic Workshop: If you have registered Graphic Workshop Professional, you are welcome to create and distribute all the EXE pictures you like except in a commercial context wherein you are actually selling the service of creating EXE pictures. This assumes that you own the copyright to the images they contain, of course. EXE pictures created by an unregistered evaluation copy of Graphic Workshop may not be distributed.


Convert

Graphic Workshop will allow you to convert file of any format into files of any other format – with a few restrictions. The new file will have the same name as the original but a new extension. Converting PICTURE.GIF into a PCX file, for example, will create PICTURE.PCX. PICTURE.GIF will not be affected.

You can batch-convert any mixture of file types using Graphic Workshop. Any files which are inappropriate for the conversion you've requested will be ignored. The ongoing status will appear in the progress window.

You cannot convert pictures having more bits of colour than the destination format can handle. For example, you cannot convert a 24-bit JPEG file directly to an 8-bit GIF file. You should have to use the Effects colour-reduction facility to do this. Likewise, use  the Dither function to convert a colour file to a format which only accepts monochrome images.

You can convert between selected animated formats. You can also convert from an animated format to a still format – a dialog will appear allowing you to select the frame to convert. You can't convert from a still format to an animated format.

Note that Graphic Workshop will not convert between AVI and animated GIF files. See our GIF Construction Set software for this functionality. It's available at our web page, http://www.mindworkshop.com.

Not all the formats supported by Graphic Workshop are writeable. For example, you can convert from Photo-CD to JPEG, but not from JPEG to Photo-CD because Kodak wants serious bucks for its Photo-CD mastering software. Formats which cannot be written to do not appear in the Destination dialog.

If the format you want to convert a file to is disabled in the Destination dialog, one of two things has happened:

- You are attempting to save an image to a format that doesn't support enough colours to store it.

- The format in question has been switched off in the Formats dialog. Select Formats from the File menu of Graphic Workshop to re-enable it.

If you convert a file and select Clpbrd as its destination format, it will be pasted to the Windows clipboard and no actual destination file will be created. This is equivalent to selecting a file and selecting Copy from the Edit menu. If you convert a file to WllPpr, it will be converted to a BMP file, written to your \WINDOWS directory and configured as your current wallpaper image.


Crop

The crop function will allow you to select areas of an image by dragging a rectangle around the bits you like with your mouse. Select Save As from the Picture menu to save the selected fragment to a new file. The Crop window may scale the image being cropped to fit in the window – cropped fragments will be written correctly.

You can fine-tune the cropping rectangle with the arrow keys of your keyboard. Hold down the left Shift key and use the arrow keys to move the left and top sides. Hold down the right Shift key and use the arrow keys to move the right and bottom sides. Use the arrow keys by themselves to move the rectangle.

If your source image has more colours than your Windows driver can display directly, you'll see a dithered approximation of your picture in the cropping window. Any fragments cropped from it will be saved with their original colour depth, however.

The title bar of a Crop window will display the location of your mouse cursor relative to the upper left corner of the image you're cropping and the dimensions of the cropping rectangle if one is visible.


Delete

You can delete one or more files in a Graphic Workshop browser window by selecting each file to be deleted and then clicking on the Delete button, or selecting Delete from the file menu. A dialog will appear prompting you to confirm that you want to delete the selected files. Note that it will tell you how many files it proposes to delete. Make sure this number corresponds with the files you think you selected – it's not uncommon in working with large directories of files to have selected a few earlier and subsequently forgotten about them.

The Delete function can delete files in two ways:

- It can remove them from your hard drive. Files thus deleted are gone for good and they cannot be subsequently recovered.

- It can send them to the Windows recycle bin. If you send files to the recycle bin and subsequently change your mind about their general unworthiness to continue existing, you can drag them back into a directory on your hard drive. The catch in using the recycle bin is that most graphic files are uncommonly large, and it's not at all difficult to tie up a lot of hard drive space by sending them to the recycle bin if you don't keep an eye on them. If you have the Recycle Bin option in the file deletion dialog enabled, make sure you empty your recycle bin frequently.


Dither

Dithering is a sort of magical process by which colour images can be converted into pretty attractive black and white versions for reproduction on a monochrome screen or a black and white laser printer.

Note that source files for dithering must have more than two colours.

Dithering often works a lot better if you scale the original image up. Graphic Workshop lets you dither with images of anywhere from "size as" up to 500 percent expansion.

Note that the Dither function only dithers to monochrome. Colour dithering is handled by the Effects function.

By default, if you have Graphic Workshop dither a file it will create a new file for you of the type you select and with "D_" prepended to its name. Thus PICTURE.GIF could be written to D_PICTURE.GIF, for example. This option can be disabled in Setup.

The simplest and fastest form of dithering is Bayer dithering. This does not produce great results, but it's extremely quick.

The remaining three dithering algorithms use what's called "error diffusion." These produce attractive dithers, but they're quite slow if they're applied to really large graphics. The fastest and least attractive is Floyd-Steinberg. The best and by far the slowest is Stucki. The Burkes dither is somewhere in the middle.

All three of these dithers come in two flavours, unidirectional and bidirectional. These options will produce slightly different results.

You should plan to experiment with the dithering options of Graphic Workshop a bit to see what it's capable of.

In dithering an image, the original brightness levels of the source graphic will be expanded a bit to improve the quality of the dither. The amount by which the grey levels are expanded is set by the Brightness and Contrast items in the Dither Options dialog.

In addition to true dithering, the Dither function also provides for thresholding. This will reduce a colour or grey scale image to black and white by setting a white threshold. The results will usually be an exceedingly contrasty image. The higher you set the threshold value, the darker your new image will become. The threshold is point below which pixels in the source image will be considered to be black in the destination image.


DRAG

Drag and Drop

You can Drag files into any Graphic Workshop browser window from Windows Explorer and other file drag sources. You can also drag selected files from a Graphic Workshop browser window to other applications which are Drag and Drop compliant, such as WinZIP. Finally, you can drag selected files between Graphic Workshop's browser windows. Note that you cannot drag files from Graphic Workshop to some versions of Windows Explorer, for reasons which Windows Explorer declines to explain.

By default, files dropped into a Graphic Workshop browser window will be copied to the directory it's looking at. Alternately, you can configure the default drop action in Setup to be:

Copy

Move

View

Prompt for one of the above.

Note that the Move function will delete the source files being dropped into a Graphic Workshop browser window once they have been copied.

If you hold down the Shift key when you drop files into a Graphic Workshop browser window, you will be prompted for a drop function no matter how you've configured Graphic Workshop. If you hold down the Ctrl key when you drop files into a Graphic Workshop browser window, the files will be moved function no matter how you've configured Graphic Workshop.

You can configure Graphic Workshop to prompt you before overwriting files through Setup.

Note that Graphic Workshop will only allow you to drop files into its browser windows if they're of types it recognizes.


Effects

The Effects function does colour reduction, remapping, dithering, conversion to grey scale, softening, sharpening and promotion to true colour. For a more extensive library of graphic effects, see the Filters option in the Picture menu of View mode.

By default, if you have Graphic Workshop apply effects to a file it will create a new file for you of the type you select and with "X_" prepended to its name. Thus PICTURE.GIF could be written to X_PICTURE.GIF, for example. This option can be disabled in Setup.

Colour reduction

The colour reduction function will create destination files with fewer colours than the source files they're derived from. You can use this function, for example, to reduce a 256-colour file down to a 16-colour one. It's particularly useful for 24-bit true-colour files to 256-colour files.

This is the function to use if you want to convert JPEG to GIF.

Whenever you reduce the number of colours in a graphic, some image information will get lost. The simplest form of colour reduction is "remapping". This means that the destination image will have the best colour palette it can, and that all the pixels in it will be replaced with colours from that palette. The results usually aren't very attractive.

Colour dithering can produce decidedly better results. With colour dithering you can reduce 24-bit files down to eight bits with very little loss of detail or colour resolution.

Colour dithering can work to either a quantized or a fixed palette. A quantized palette is one which is selected from the image itself. A fixed palette is one which is the same for all images. Colour reduction to a quantized palette is typically a lot more attractive.

The sixteen-colour fixed Windows palette should be used to create images which are to be used in a sixteen-colour Windows environment. Note that a lot of image quality will be lost in dithering to sixteen colours. The Graphic Workshop colour dithering functions have been fine tuned to improve the image quality when dithering to the fixed Windows palette. Specifically, the Floyd-Steinberg option will result in more attractive results for images with a lot of continuous tones – pictures of people, for example – while the Burkes and Stucki options will look better for images with larger areas of solid colour.

The 240 plus 16-colour palette consists of a 240-colour quantized palette followed by the sixteen-colour Windows fixed palette. If you select this option, your image will only be dithered or remapped to the first 240 colours.

The Custom palette option will allow you to choose the palette with which colour reduction or dithering will be performed. Click on the Select button and select a graphic file which contains the palette you'd like to use as the destination palette for your dithered or remapped graphics. Note that this selected file won't be altered – it will just be read as the source of a palette. The source palette file can be in any graphic file format supported by Graphic Workshop, but it must contain between four and 256 colours. Use the Get Info function to ascertain the number of colours in a file.

Grey scale

The grey scale function will create a grey scale destination image from a colour source image.

Sharpen

The sharpen function will create a destination image with more finely resolved details than its source image.

Soften

The soften function will create a destination image with less finely resolved details than its source image.

Smudge

The smudge function will create a destination image which looks like it's being viewed through water drops.

Spatial Posterization

The spatial posterization function will create a destination image in which the image is made up of large square tiles.

Promote to 24 Bits

The promote to 24 bits function will create a 24-bit file with the same image information as a source image having fewer colours.


FORMATSDIALOG

Formats

You can disable selected file formats in Graphic Workshop. When a format is disabled, no files of that type will appear in the Graphic Workshop file selector. Disabled formats can subsequently be re-enabled whenever you like. To enable or disable formats, select the Formats item from the File menu of Graphic Workshop. Click on the formats you wish to enable or disable. Enabled formats have an X beside them.


GETINFO

Get Information

If you select a file in one of Graphic Workshop's browser windows and click on the Get Info button or select Get Info from the Image menu, a dialog will appear to tell you about the file. The important things you'll probably want to know are the pixel dimensions and the colour depth of the image in your file. This can be handy, for example, if you want to ascertain whether a particular graphic will fit on your web page without having to be scaled down.

Get Information will tell you the following things:

- The dimensions of your graphic in pixels.

- The colour depth of your graphic, that is, the maximum number of colours it can

- support. This doesn't mean that it necessarily uses them all.

- The packed size, that is, the number of bytes your graphic occupies as a disk file.

- The unpacked size, that is, the amount of memory required to open it or process it.

- The file type – which you probably already know, based on the file extension.

- The amount of compression afforded by whichever file format the file is stored in. This number is somewhat meaningless for animation files.

- Comments, which will vary between formats.

Some graphic file formats actually contain a lot more information than can be displayed in the normal File Information dialog. TIFF files, for example, can contain the name of the artist responsible for them, the type of software used to create them and so on. You can get at this optional information for formats which support it by clicking on the Details button in the File Information dialog if it's enabled

You may need some external assistance in fully interpreting the details of the more complex formats, such as TIFF.

The File Information dialog will display a palette which represents the colours in your graphic. For true colour images, this will be a rainbow of colours ranging between black and white.

If you request file information for a graphic which has a Graphic Workshop thumbnail available, the thumbnail and its key words and comments will also appear in the File Information dialog.


GrafCat

GrafCat – Printed Graphic Catalogs

The GrafCat function will print high-resolution thumbnail pages with between six and 48 pictures per page. It's analogous to creating catalog images with the Catalog function and then printing them, save that it does so more conveniently and produces vastly more attractive results. The GrafCat function of Graphic Workshop Professional features a subset of the functionality of Alchemy Mindworks' stand-alone GrafCat software.

The GrafCat Options dialog includes the following controls:

Portrait mode frames, 16 per page: Causes your pictures to be printed sixteen to a page, with each image inset in a portrait mode frame.

Landscape mode frames, 15 per page: Causes your pictures to be printed fifteen to a page, with each image inset in a landscape mode frame. This mode will leave a blank left margin, allowing your pages to be bound.

Large squares, 6 per page: Causes your pictures to be printed six to a page, with each image inset in a square frame.

Small squares, 48 per page: Causes your pictures to be printed 48 to a page, with each image inset in a square frame. This mode will get the greatest number of images on a single page.

Two-Colour Dithered: This mode will cause your graphics to be dithered to two colours prior to printing. This will result in the nicest looking printed pages if you're using a dot-matrix printer.

256-level grey scale: This mode will cause your graphics to be printed as 256-level grey scale images, to be halftoned by your Windows printer driver. This mode will look dreadful if you have a Windows printer driver that doesn't do halftoning.

24-bit true colour: This mode should be used if you will be printing to a colour output device.

PrintBrighteness and PrintContrast: Adjust these values if you're using a black and white printer and find that your output is too dark or too flat respectively. This value only affects black and white printers.

DitherBrighteness and DitherContrast: Adjust these values if you're using the dithered monochrome printing option and the brightness or contrast of your printed pictures isn't correct. This value only affects printing in the Dithered Monochrome mode.

Matt Colour: This colour button will let you set the colour of the area inside each GrafCat frame which is not occupied by the image it contains.

Title Font: This combo box will let you select the font to be used to print the file names and titles on your pages.

Page Footer: This field will allow you to customize the text for the printed footer for each page. You can enter any text you like here, as well as the following macro symbols:

%P:  	page number

%D: 	date

%T: 	time

%S: 	time and date

%N: 	registered name

%A: 	program name

%V: 	volume name

%%: 	percent sign

These symbols will be replaced by the entities they represent wherever they appear in your footer text. So, for example, if your footer text is entered like this:

Page %P printed by %A registered to %N

it would print something like this:

Page 6 printed by Graphic Workshop Professional registered to Lancelot Pigswallow

This assumes, of course, that your name is Lancelot Pigswallow -- in which case you have a lot more important things to worry about than the GrafCat footer text.

Note: When it's confronted with one of GrafCat's complex pages, Windows can generate some fairly huge temporary files. Printing to a high resolution colour printer can require upwards of ten megabytes of free disk space per page for temporary files. Printing to a PostScript laser printer can result in temporary files of excess of 25 megabytes per page. If your pages refuse to print, free up some additional hard drive space.


IDENTIFY
Identify Mystery Graphic Files

In order to deal with directories of graphic files reasonably quickly, Graphic Workshop makes the initial assumption that all the files it's asked to handle will have correct file extensions. For example, it assumes that JPEG files will have the extension JPG. A JPEG file with the extension GIF would not be readable.

In some cases – especially if you like to download graphics from the internet – you might encounter files which have obviously incorrect extensions, mysterious extensions or no extensions at all. You might also encounter files which Graphic Workshop can't read even though you're fairly sure that they're valid graphics – this is a good indication that the files in question have incorrect extensions.

Note that web browsers, such as Internet Explorer and Netscape, display the graphic files they support irregardless of their extensions. They can do this because they typically support fewer than half a dozen graphic formats. This can be a source of considerable confusion if your browser displays a file which purports to be a JPG graphic, for example, and Graphic Workshop will not. It's probably a file of another type which has been renamed with the JPG extension.

The Identify Mystery Files function in the File menu of Graphic Workshop will attempt to figure out the true nature of mysterious files. Specifically, it will compare the internal structure of a file of unknown type to the internal structures it knows how to deal with. If it finds a match, it will advise you of this and offer you the option of having the file in question renamed with its correct extension. It will thereafter be viewable by Graphic Workshop.

This process is mildly fraught with perils. It's possible to create files which will look like valid image structures, but which actually contain nothing but monkey dandruff. If you attempt to identify such a file, Graphic Workshop may erroneously tell you that it's something it isn't. Once Graphic Workshop tells you what a mystery file is, it's a very good idea to view it and make sure it's not pulling your leg.

Secondly, Graphic Workshop can only identify a subset of the file types it actually knows how to interpret. It won't do anything with mystery files in formats it doesn't recognize. It will also prove to be unable to recognize files in some of its supported formats if the formats in question don't actually have identifiable internal structures. For example, there's no reliable way to determine whether a mystery file is actually a MacPaint image because MacPaint files don't include identifiable structures. Graphic Workshop will not check mystery files to see if they're MacPaint files.

For the most part, the formats that Graphic Workshop will read but doesn't check are fairly obscure ones.


MOVECOPY

Moving and Copying Files

The Move and Copy Files function will copy files to another drive or directory, optionally deleting your source files when it's done. Specifically, Copy will copy files and leave your source files in place. Move will copy files and then delete your source files. In the latter case you'll be prompted to allow it to do so. The Move and Copy Files function includes optional verification of the copied files using a 32-bit CRC check. This reduces the likelihood of incorrectly copied files to something less than the odds of winning a state-run lottery.

Turn on the Prompt Before Overwrite option in Setup to prevent Move and Copy from overwriting existing files.

You can disable the prompt before moving files by turning off Prompt Before Moving Files in Setup.


Print

You can print one or more graphic files by selecting them in a browser window and clicking on the Print button, or by selecting Print from the Image menu.

Graphic Workshop's printing facilities will be determined by the printing capabilities of your currently selected printer and printer driver. It will print in colour, print to unusual output devices and so on if you have an appropriate driver installed in Windows.

You can select the current printer by clicking on the Setup button of the Print Options  dialog.

Printing can be handled using either Integral sizes or Scaled sizes. These work as follows:

Print at Integral Sizes: The Autosize option in the Print box will select one of the eight size options to best fill your page. Note that this will choose the best integral expansion factor – it will not scale your images arbitrarily to fill your page, as this could introduce scaling aberrations into them. The Integral Printing option will usually give you the best print quality, but not the best fit to your page.

Print with Scaling: The Scale to Fill the Page option will automatically size your printed image to fill the printable area of your page in one dimension. This will not include any printer margins. If this item is not selected, the printing size will be determined by the Scale Factor control – setting this value to 100 will print your graphic at precisely one pixel of your image to one pixel of your printer. This is usually very small. Setting it to 200 will double the size. Setting it to 50 will print at half size, a handy feature for creating your own postage stamps. The Print with Scaling option may introduce scaling aberrations into your graphics.

Note: in order to print correctly to some black and white laser printers, colour and grey scale images must be "expanded," that is, their grey scales must be adjusted to compensate for the non-linear grey scale of the output device. The amount of compensation varies among different laser printers. You can set it using the brightness and contrast controls in the Print dialog. The Expand Printed Halftones option must be enabled to do this.

The Center Printed Images item will center your pictures on the pages they're printed to.

Graphic Workshop will print in landscape or portrait mode – use the Setup button in the Print Options dialog to select the printer characteristics you require.

Graphic Workshop will optionally print a title for each file along with its image. You can specify the font you'd like it to use through the Title Font combo box in the Print Options dialog and the point size of the font to be used with the Font Size control.

The titles printed by Graphic Workshop can consist of text you supply and several macros. Enter your title text in the Title Text field. The macros expand to the name of your file, the date it was printed and so on, as follows:

%P: 	File path

%F: 	File name

%D: 	Printing date

%T: 	Printing time

%S: 	Printing time and date

%N: 	User name

%A: 	Application name

%%: 	Percent sign

You can enter up to 260 characters of text in the title field. Your final title may be longer than this due to macro expansion.

Here are some example titles and the text they will cause to be printed – these assume that you're printing EXAMPLE3.JPG and your name is Lancelot Pigswallow. Should the latter be the case, you have our sympathy.

%F	EXAMPLE3.JPG

This is %F	This is EXAMPLE3.JPG

This is %F by %N	This is EXAMPLE3.JPG by Lancelot Pigswallow

You can specify the background colour for printed graphics with the Page Colour button in the Print Options dialog. Selecting a coloured background when you're printing to a black and white printer will print with a grey level. Keep in mind that if you select a fairly dark background, your printer will get through a lot of toner or ink.

Note that Graphic Workshop stores information about your printer in a file called PDEVMODE.BIN in the Graphic Workshop parent directory. Deleting this file with Graphic Workshop not running will restore your printer defaults. You may find this is necessary if you install a new printer.


Rename

You can rename one or more files in a Graphic Workshop browser window by selecting each file to be renamed and then clicking on the Rename button, or selecting Rename from the file menu. The Rename function will prompt you for a new name for each selected file. If you attempt to enter a new name which contains characters that are not legal in file names, it will omit the errant characters.

Note that you cannot use the Rename function to change the file extension of an image file. If you were to attempt to rename EXAMPLE3.JPG to FlyingPurpleWombats.BMP, the renamed file would in fact be called FlyingPurpleWombats.JPG.

It's also worth noting that space characters are legal in Windows file names. As such, you could rename a file to Flying Purple Wombats.JPG.


Reverse

The reverse function will create a reversed version of any image file.

By default, if you have Graphic Workshop reverse a file it will create a new file for you of the type you select and with "R_" prepended to its name. Thus PICTURE.GIF could be written to R_PICTURE.GIF, for example. This option can be disabled in Setup.

If you reverse a colour image, Graphic Workshop will create a colour negative. These look weird – we haven't found a use for them as yet.


Scale

The Scale function will allow you to scale files up or down by percentage, or to specific sizes. Select By Factor to scale files by a percentage or By Size to scale pictures to the dimensions of your choice.

By default, if you have Graphic Workshop scale a file it will create a new file for you of the type you select and with "S_" prepended to its name. Thus PICTURE.GIF could be written to S_PICTURE.GIF, for example. This option can be disabled in Setup.

In pathological cases scaling a picture can produce some really ugly results, depending on what you scale. Bear in mind that scaling by integral values – down to seventy five or fifty percent, up to two hundred percent and so on – will produce less ugly results than scaling by arbitrary values.

The scaling values you enter will be rounded to the nearest lower integral value. Thus, 42.5 percent will really be 42 percent.

You should avoid scaling dithered monochrome pictures. Nothing technically bad will happen, but for reasons which will become obvious if you think about it, the results will almost always be horrible enough to mutate bacteria.

Note that the scaling percentage you enter determines the size of the destination image relative to the source image. Thus, entering 25 will produce a destination image which has dimensions one quarter – 25 percent – of the original image. Entering 200 will create a destination image twice as big – 200 percent – of the original. Entering 100 will produce a destination image identical to the source image.

By default, scaling by factors will be the same in both dimensions. If you select the Anamorphic option you'll be able to enter independent horizontal and vertical values.

You can also scale pictures to a specific size. If you select the By Size option and then enter dimensions in pixels into the Dimensions fields, Graphic Workshop will calculate the appropriate scaling factors to make you pictures come out to the size you've selected.

The fixed size buttons in the By Size group will allow you to quickly select commonly used image sizes. They set the Dimensions fields to their indicated values.

The Maintain Aspect option will allow you to scale to a fixed size image without changing the aspect ratio of your graphics. It will cause your image to be scaled such that one dimension fills the indicated frame and the other dimension is scaled by the same factor. For example, if you were to scale a 320 by 200 picture to 800 by 600 with this option enabled, the resulting image would be 800 by 500 pixels. The longest dimension, 320, would be scaled to 800 pixels. The shortest dimension, 200, would scaled by the same factor as the longest dimension.

The minimum size for scaling by size 16 pixels.

The Interpolated / Integrated Scaling option will cause Graphic Workshop to apply some image processing to scaled images if it's enabled. It only works for true-colour and grey-scale graphics – it will be ignored if you attempt to scale a monochrome or palette image.

When you scale a graphic up, its pixels are in a sense moved apart and additional pixels are generated to fill the gaps between them. This can be handled in one of two ways. The simplest one – and by far the fastest – is to duplicate the existing pixels in the source image to fill the gaps. This can result in a final graphic which looks like a Roman mosaic, with a small number of large, visible pixels.

The second approach to scaling a picture up is to generate the required new pixels as a smooth transition between the existing pixels. This is called "interpolation" or "anti-aliased scaling." The results are much more attractive, but they take longer to achieve.

Having said this, for graphics of moderate size and a fast computer, the difference in processing time will be significantly less than that required to read the foregoing paragraphs and realize that a difference exists at all.

In scaling a graphic down, some of the pixels in the source image have to be removed, and hence some of the detail will be lost. As with scaling up, this can be handled in one of two ways. Graphic Workshop can just remove the required pixels and send them into the eleventh dimension, or it can average all the pixels to be removed to generate the new pixels for the scaled-down image. The first case is faster, while the second one typically looks a lot better. Averaging the source pixels is called "integration", or, once again, "anti-aliased scaling."

Interpolated / integrated scaling is a usually two-pass process – you'll see the status bar move twice for each image being scaled. It also requires lots of memory, and unlike conventional scaling, its memory requirements increase with the final size of your scaled image. If you use interpolated / integrated scaling to scale large pictures up to make still larger pictures, Windows might have to do a lot of internal memory management. This can often take a long time and result in considerable hard disk activity. Be patient.

Note that if you promote a palette-colour image to 24 bits or convert it to a grey-scale image and then run it through interpolated / integrated scaling, some really peculiar image artifacts will probably appear in the final scaled graphic.

Should you want to create thumbnail graphics for a web page, the Graphic Workshop scaling function is the place to be. Here's how to do it:

1. Select your source images and select the Scaling function.

2. Select the By Size option in the Scaling dialog.

3. Enter rectangular dimensions for the frame in which you'd like all your thumbnails to reside. If you enter 96 by 96, for example, Graphic Workshop will create thumbnails of the same dimensions as the ones it displays in its browser windows.

4. Click on OK and select JPG as the destination format.

You might want to switch off the File Name Underbars option in Setup and write your thumbnail JPG files to a different directory to keep the names constant.


SCAN

Scanning

Graphic Workshop can acquire images through a TWAIN device. The TWAIN interface is typically used by scanners, but it's also applicable to digital cameras and other image generators with TWAIN drivers. Note that your system must have suitable TWAIN drivers installed for your scanner to use the Acquire function of Graphic Workshop – scanners which are not TWAIN-compliant are not supported by the software.

If the Acquire function in Graphic Workshop is disabled, your TWAIN driver could not be located.

Note: A few scanners have semi-compliant TWAIN interfaces which Graphic Workshop does not get along with. If you can't scan through Graphic Workshop's Acquire function, check your scanner setup. Failing this, contact your scanner manufacturer to see if there's an updated driver set available.

To scan a graphic using Graphic Workshop, click on the Acquire button or select Acquire from the Image menu. A dialog will appear to drive your scanner.

The Acquire dialog is resident in your TWAIN driver and is not part of Graphic Workshop. Its contents will vary with the capability of your scanner. Consult your scanner documentation for a discussion of its use. It will also probably look cosmetically different from the rest of Graphic Workshop.

When you have completed a scan, Graphic Workshop will prompt you for a destination format and a file name to save it to.

Graphic Workshop accepts the images your scanner created and writes them to files with no correction or modification. Some TWAIN drivers offer options that can be used to create pretty ugly images. This is especially true of what purport to be 256-colour scanning modes. If you want to scan graphics and wind up with 256-colour image files – such as to write your pictures to GIF files – you should scan into 24-bit true-colour files and then use the colour reduction features of Graphic Workshop's Effects function to reduce your source images to 256 colours.

When Graphic Workshop boots up, it looks for a TWAIN_32.DLL to load as its TWAIN driver. It must reside in \WINDOWS, in \WINDOWS\SYSTEM or in Graphic Workshop's parent directory for it to be located.

Note that many TWAIN drivers hang pretty reliably if you attempt to scan something with your scanner switched off. This will usually require that you reboot your system to re-initialize the driver.

If you have multiple TWAIN devices in your system, you can choose the one you want to scan with by selecting Select Source from the Image menu or by holding down the Shift key and clicking on the Acquire button.

Note that Graphic Workshop does not use virtual memory to scan. If you want to scan a twelve-megabyte image, your system must have at least twelve megabytes of available physical memory.


CAPTURE
Screen Capture

Graphic Workshop Professional Camera is an ancillary application to capture all or part of a Windows screen to a PCX file. You can capture the entire screen, the currently active window or just the client area thereof. The PCX files created by Camera can be converted to any other format you like using Graphic Workshop itself.

When it's running, Camera will capture screens in response to a predefined combination of keys. You can choose the activation key combination from a list of key combinations.

To get Camera ready to capture screens, run it from its desktop shortcut icon or from the listing in the Programs section of your Start menu. You can configure it by double clicking on its task bar icon.

Here's what the items in the Setup dialog do:

File Path and Base Capture File Name: These items define the directory where your screen capture files will be written, and  the file name to be used to store them. The file names will have sequence numbers appended to them. As such, if the File Path is set to C:\GraphicWorkshopProfessional and the Base Capture File Name is set to Capture, the first time you invoke Camera to capture a screen, a file called Capture00001.PCX will be created in the directory C:\GraphicWorkshopProfessional. The next time you ask Camera to capture a screen the file will be called Capture00002.PCX, and so on.

Camera checks each potential file name before it uses it. As such, it will not overwrite existing files. The file numbers can range from one through 32767 – although if the file number gets anywhere near this large, you should plan on a fairly lengthy wait between captures. You'll probably also need a few extra gigabytes of hard drive space to hold all the files.

If the Auto Create Thumbnail switch in the Graphic Workshop Professional Setup dialog is enabled, Camera will create thumbnails for the images it writes.

Alternate PCX Files: This item defines how sixteen-colour screen capture PCX files should be written. This will only matter if you're using a sixteen-colour Windows screen driver – happily there are few of these left in captivity. If you enable this item, sixteen-colour PCX files will be written in a format which is faster for some Windows applications to unpack, but which are not compatible with most DOS applications that read PCX files. If you have a Windows screen driver made after the late middle ages, you can ignore this setting.

Window to Capture: This item selects the area of your screen for Camera to capture. If you select Whole Screen, the whole screen will be captured – perhaps not surprisingly. Active Window will cause Camera to capture the topmost window on your screen. Active Client will cause Camera to capture the client area of the topmost window. Note that Camera will complain if you use one of the latter two options and the topmost window is the Windows task bar.

Activation key: This list will allow you to select the combination of keys that will cause Camera to capture a screen. Note that some applications trap some of these key combinations for their own use. If you can't capture a screen in a particular Windows application, you may have to select another key combination.

Time Delay: If this value is set to a value greater than zero, Camera will wait for the specified number of seconds before it captures your screen. It will beep once per second. This is useful for capturing menus that disappear as soon as you hit a key, or dialogs which trap all the key strokes that Camera recognizes. You can tell Camera to capture a screen and then get the menu or dialog in place before it goes off.

When you activate Camera to capture a screen, it will beep and your cursor will turn into an hourglass while the capture file is being written. When the capture is complete, the cursor will resume its previous appearance and Camera will beep again.

All the information in the Setup box will be saved when close Camera. They're stored in a file called GWSPCAM.INI in your \WINDOWS directory.

Note: Camera cannot capture a full-screen DOS session. It also cannot capture a DOS window unless you set it to capture the whole screen. This is unfortunate – it's just the way Windows works.

Important: Camera makes calls to the main executable file of Graphic Workshop Professional. It will not run if it's moved to a directory other than that of GWSPRO.EXE, or if it's distributed without the rest of Graphic Workshop. If you register Graphic Workshop Professional by entering your registration code and name in the Graphic Workshop Setup dialog, Camera will not recognize the code until you have exited Graphic Workshop once. Registered users of Graphic Workshop Professional will not see Camera's beg notice when it runs.


SELECT

Selecting Files

Graphic Workshop processes the files that are selected in the topmost browser window. It offers a number of ways to select files. It's useful to know about these – they'll save you a lot of time if you want to work with directories containing large numbers of graphics.

You can select files:

- One at a time, by clicking on their names

- In groups, by clicking on the first file in the group to be selected, holding down the Shift key and clicking on the last file in the group to be selected. All the intervening files will be selected.

- By clicking on the Tag All button in the button bar or by selecting Tag All from the File menu, which will select all the files in the current directory.

- By holding down the Shift key and clicking on the Tag All button. Graphic Workshop will prompt you to enter a wild-card specification for files to select. For example, if you enter T*.GIF, all the GIF files having names which begin with the letter T will be selected. If you enable Clear Existing Selections, any presently selected files will be unselected before your wild-card selection is processed. Note that you can call this function multiple times to tag files corresponding to different wild-card specifications.

Having selected some files, you can subsequently unselect them by:

- Clicking on the individual file names to be unselected.

- Clicking on the first file in the group to be unselected, holding down the Ctrl key and clicking on the last file in the group to be unselected. All the intervening files will be unselected.

- By clicking on the Clear button in the button bar, which will unselect all the files in the current directory.

- By holding down the Shift key and clicking on the Clear All button. Graphic Workshop will prompt you to enter a wild-card specification for files to unselect.

Note that the current number of selected files in the topmost browser window will be displayed in the Graphic Workshop status bar.


Slide Show

Graphic Workshop will display selected graphics in a continuous slide show. While hardly as sophisticated as a presentation package, the slide show function is an easy way to view a collection of images while you sit back in your chair and test the tensile strength of its springs.

To use the slide show function, select several images in a browser window and click on the View button, the one with the sunglasses. A small menu will appear. Click on the slide option. You can also select Slide Show from the Image menu. The Slide Show Options dialog will appear.

You can configure Graphic Workshop's slide show to display each image for whatever duration you like. You can configure the background colour and the font Graphic Workshop will use to display the name of each file in the slide show – assuming that you want the file names displayed at all. You can also enable the Zoom option, which will automatically scale files too large to fit on your screen down to size. Note that zooming only scales the image being displayed – it will not actually change anything in your source graphic files.

If you enable the Loop option, your slide show will run indefinitely until you interrupt it – rather like the vacation photographs from hell that still flicker and ooze from traditional slide projectors around the world. If the Loop option is not enabled, your slide show will stop when it runs out of images.

Click on OK to start the slide show.

Once a slide show has begun, you can interrupt it by hitting the Esc key or by clicking with the right button of your mouse. You can also have it proceed immediately to the next slide by hitting Enter.

The slide show function will skip animation files.


sysinfo
System Information

The System Information dialog will provide you with an overview of the configuration of your computer. This can be useful in unraveling configuration issues. It includes the following:

Screen Width and Screen Depth: These are the dimensions in pixels of your current screen display mode.

Network Present: If this field is set to Yes, Windows is of the opinion that your computer is connected to a network of some sort.

Slow Machine: This field indicates Windows' assessment of the speed of your computer.

Windows Version: This is the internal version number for your installation of Windows.

Machine Owner: This is the owner name used when you installed Windows.

Organization: This is the organization or company name used when you installed Windows.

Colour Depth: The last item in the System Information dialog indicates the number of colours which your current Windows screen driver can display without dithering. If this number is 256 or less, Graphic Workshop Professional is running a lot slower and looking a lot uglier than it needs to. See the Drivers document for help in reconfiguring your Windows screen driver.


THUMBNAIL

Thumbnails

The thumbnail mode of Graphic Workshop is an alternate way of selecting files to work with. In thumbnail mode you can see small previews of each file in your current directory, in addition to the file names. This makes it easier to see what files look like before you open them. It also means, however, that you'll be able to see fewer files at a time.

Each browser window can display the names of the files it sees in one of four modes. These modes are:

•	Small text – just the file names

•	Normal text – just the file names plus a grey document icon

•	Small thumbnails – the file names plus small thumbnail images

•	Normal thumbnails – the file names plus normal thumbnail images

By default, Graphic Workshop will open browser windows in the latter mode. You can change this once a browser window has been open, and you can configure Graphic Workshop to use a different default mode for new browser windows if you like.

You can change the browser mode of a browser window by clicking on the Thumbnail button in the Graphic Workshop tool bar. A small menu will appear with four icons – a large thumb and a small thumb for normal and small thumbnails and a large "A" and a small "A" for normal and small text. Select the mode you want your browser window to show you. You can change this mode whenever you like.

Note that you can also create multiple browser windows pointing at the same directory but in different modes and just switch between browser windows, rather than changing modes, if you like.

The current browser mode is remembered between sessions, along with the window size and position, for each open browser window.

If you point a Graphic Workshop browser window at a directory of your own graphics, you'll probably see a field of the grey thumbnail symbols. Because thumbnails take a few seconds to create and they occupy space on your hard drive, Graphic Workshop will not create them unless you tell it do so. Here's how to create a thumbnail.

1. Click once on the graphic you'd like to have a thumbnail for. This will select the file.

2. Select Add Thumbnail from the Thumbnail menu.

A thumbnail should appear for the selected graphic after a brief pause.

Adding thumbnails, like all the other image processes Graphic Workshop can do, can be done with more than one file at a time. If you select more than one file and add thumbnails as was discussed above, all the selected files will have thumbnails created for them.

Note: If you hold down the Shift key and click on the Thumb button, the Add Thumbnails function will be invoked as if you'd selected Add Thumbnails from the Thumbnail menu.

Thumbnails are stored in files on your hard drive. These files have the name of the graphic files they're associated with and the extension THN. As such, if you add a thumbnail to the file PICTURE.JPG, the thumbnail will reside in a file named PICTURE.THN. Thumbnails are always stored in the same directory as the graphic files they refer to.

Note that the thumbnail for PICTURE.PCX will also be PICTURE.THN. Files in different formats will share the same thumbnail. This helps conserve disk space, but it could cause you some confusion in using the comments and key word features of the thumbnails, as discussed elsewhere in this document. As there is little reason to keep multiple copies of the same image in the same directory, you probably needn't worry about this.

You can have Graphic Workshop automatically create new thumbnails for files it writes to disk by enabling the Autocreate Thumbnails option in Setup.

You cannot use thumbnails or the Details and Search features for Kodak Photo-CD PCD files, MPEG and MOV movies or WAV and MIDI files.

Here's what the Thumbnail menu options do:

Add Thumbnails

If you select one or more files and then select Add Thumbnails from the Thumbnail menu, thumbnail images will be created for each of the selected images. These will replace the default grey thumbnail symbol. Note that if you add thumbnails to images which currently have thumbnails, new thumbnails will be created for them and any key words and comments previously associated with the images in question will be discarded.

Add Thumbnails Where Required

This function behaves like Add Thumbnails, save that it will not create thumbnails for images which already have them.

Remove Thumbnails

The Remove Thumbnails function of the Thumbnail menu will remove the thumbnail images, comments and key words for all the selected images. The thumbnail images will be removed from all the browser windows looking at the directory in question, to be replaced by grey thumbnail images.

Keywords and Comments

The Keywords and Comments function of the Thumbnail menu will allow you to add comments and key words to selected images. This information will actually be stored in THN thumbnail files associated with the images in question.

You can store anything you like in the Comments field of the Keywords and Comments dialog. The key words should contain information to search by. For example, in adding key words to pictures of animals, you might use key words such as BIRD, AMPHIBIAN, INSECT, ELEPHANT, POLITICIAN and so on.

Search for Keywords

The Search for Keywords function of the Thumbnail menu will allow you to search through all the images with thumbnail entries in your current directory for specific  key words. Any entries which match the key words you specify will be selected. You can subsequently view, print, examine or change the details and otherwise perform the usual Graphic Workshop batch functions on them.

If you enter more than one key word into the Thumbnails Search box, you can select how the search should treat them using the And and Or options. With And selected, only those entries having all the key words you've entered will be matched. With Or selected, any entry having at least one of the key words you've entered will be matched.

If you disable the Clear Tags before Search option, any currently selected entries will be left selected by the search.

You can search for partial matches of keywords if you enable the Partial Matches option in the Search dialog. Thus, for example, you could find all the wombats by searching for WOM or BAT. This option can be used in conjunction with the And and Or functions.

View

The View submenu will allow you to select which of the four view modes discussed earlier should be used for the current browser window. It has the same function as the menu which appears when you click on the thumb button.

Thumbnail images can be dithered or not, as you prefer. See the Configuration document for more information about selecting a thumbnail dithering option. You can configure Graphic Workshop to use your choice of images for the symbol which appears when no thumbnail is present. This is also discussed in the Configuration document.


Database

Thumbnail Database

By default, Graphic Workshop stores thumbnails in files with the extension THN, as discussed in the Thumbnails section of this document. This can present Graphic Workshop with two specific problems, to wit:

It can't store thumbnails on existing CD-ROMs, and as such graphics on CD-ROMs can't be browsed with thumbnail images. As least, they can't if the thumbnails are to be handled as THN files.

Because THN files apply to all the images with the same name as the THN file in question, different graphics in the same directory having the same name but different formats will display the same thumbnail even if they in fact contain different images. This is a somewhat unlikely occurrence in the normal application of Graphic Workshop.

The thumbnail database option of Graphic Workshop addresses these issues. If you configure Graphic Workshop to store its thumbnails in the thumbnail database, rather than in individual THN files, all your thumbnails will be maintained in a file called GWSPRO.TDB in the Graphic Workshop parent directory. Each entry in the database includes a thumbnail and the path, volume name and serial number of the drive it's located on. As such, when Graphic Workshop wants to display a thumbnail, it can be instructed to look in the database, rather than looking for THN files which correspond to your pictures.

This gets around the issue of Graphic Workshop not being able to write THN files to CD-ROMs, as all its thumbnails will be written to the GWSPRO.TDB database file stored on your hard drive.

There are several considerations to keep in mind if you enable the thumbnail database.

Accessing thumbnails from the thumbnail database will get progressively slower as the database gets larger. On a fast system this probably won't become noticeable until you have several thousand of thumbnails in the database.

When Graphic Workshop updates or deletes a thumbnail from the thumbnail database, it does not actually remove it. Because manipulating the database to remove records is very time consuming, it just marks the deleted records and thereafter ignores them. To keep your thumbnail database from growing to truly enormous dimensions, it's necessary to compact it from time to time, to remove the deleted records. This will be discussed in detail in a moment. Compacting the database isn't difficult – it's just something you'll need to do from time to time if you enable the thumbnail database options.

If you delete a graphic file which is referenced by the thumbnail database through an application other than Graphic Workshop, Graphic Workshop won't know that it's been deleted and its thumbnail will remain as an orphan in the database until you compact it.

As noted earlier, the thumbnail database can display different thumbnails for images having the same file name but different extensions.

Note: Because the thumbnail database stores information about the location of each file it references, manually moving your graphics around or changing the volume name or serial number of the drives where they're stored will usually invalidate their entries in the database. If this happens, they will no longer display with thumbnails until you add new thumbnails for them.

You can configure and maintain Graphic Workshop's thumbnail database through the Thumbnail Database item of the Thumbnail menu. Here's what its options do:

Reading Thumbnails

Only Check Disk: Graphic Workshop ignores the thumbnail database when it looks for thumbnails and only retrieves them from THN files.

Check Disk, then Database: Graphic Workshop looks for thumbnails as THN files and only checks the database if it doesn't file a suitable THN file. Enable this option if you assign thumbnails to images on your CD-ROMs. Note that doing so does impose a small but measurable speed penalty on Graphic Workshop's browser windows when they're in a thumbnail mode and they encounter directories on your hard drive with images having no THN files.

Only Check Database: Graphic Workshop ignores any THN files which might be present when it wants to display thumbnails, and only looks in the thumbnail database. This option isn't recommended unless you have a very good reason to use it.

Writing Thumbnails

Write to Disk: Graphic Workshop ignores the thumbnail database when it creates thumbnails and only writes them to THN files. If it can't write a THN file, as in the case of graphics on a CD-ROM, no thumbnail is created.

Write to Database: Graphic Workshop never creates THN files, but stores all its thumbnails in the thumbnail database. This option will typically leave you with a really enormous GWSPRO.TDB file, and isn't recommended unless you have a very good reason to use it.

Write to Database if Disk Fails: Graphic Workshop attempts to create THN file when it wants to store thumbnails and only writes them to the database if it can't write a THN file. Enable this option if you wish to display thumbnails for graphics stored on CD-ROMs.

Preserve Unique File Extensions: If this option is enabled, Graphic Workshop will display unique thumbnails for each file in a directory even if files exist having the same names with different extensions.

Compact Now: Click on this button to compact the thumbnail database. Compacting the database will remove any deleted records and any records which reference files that can't be found on your system.

Include Removable Drives: If this option is enabled, the compacting process will check for the existence of graphic files referenced by the database even if they exist on CD-ROMs, floppies or network drives. If it finds that they don't exist, it will remove their entries from the database. You should disable this option to compact the database if you have added thumbnails to the database for graphics on CD-ROMs, floppies or network drives which are not on line when you click on Compact Now.

The database compacting function copies the records of your thumbnail database to a new file, ignoring those records which are to be removed. There must be enough free hard drive space on the drive where your Graphic Workshop parent directory is located to create a temporary file as large as the original GWSPRO.TDB file or the compact function will fail.

Note: If you have CD-ROMs of graphics created by Alchemy Mindworks – our graphic collections or the graphics included with the Alchemy Mindworks software installation CD-ROM – you will not need to enable the thumbnail database to see thumbnails for these images. Our CD-ROMs are created with THN files for each of the available images.


Transform

The transform function will rotate an image in ninety degree increments or mirror it horizontally or vertically. These functions work on images with any number of colours.

By default, if you have Graphic Workshop transform a file it will create a new file for you of the type you select and with "T_" prepended to its name. Thus PICTURE.GIF could be written to T_PICTURE.GIF, for example. This option can be disabled in Setup.

The 90° and 270° rotate functions cannot be used with virtual memory.

Note that the Transform function can only rotate files in 90-degree increments. If you'd like to rotate an image by a smaller amount, use the Transform function in View mode, as is discussed elsewhere in this document.


VIEW

View and Filters

If you double click on a file name or select one and then click on the View button, Graphic Workshop will open a View window and display the selected file. Select multiple files and click on the View button to show several files one after another.

Note that the View button is located in a small menu that appears when you click on View in the tool bar.

If the picture you have selected is larger than your screen, you can use the cursor movement keys and the View window scroll bars to pan around it. Hold down the Shift key when you hit a cursor key to move in larger increments.

To exit a display window, you can do any of the following:

•	Hit Enter or Esc on your keyboard. If you have selected multiple files to view at once, Enter will display the next file and Esc will abort any further files and return you to the main screen.

•	Open the Picture menu in the View window and select either Next or Cancel. If you have selected multiple files to view at once, Next will display the next file and Cancel will abort any further files and return you to the main screen.

•	Right-click with your mouse and select Next or Cancel from the menu that appears.

Graphic Workshop can be configured to close its view windows as soon as you right-click in one, and not display the right-click menu.

By default, Graphic Workshop's display windows will size themselves to fill your screen. You can configure Graphic Workshop to create display windows which are sized to the dimensions of each graphic you view if you like.

You can delete files from within View mode either by selecting Delete from the Picture menu or by hitting the Del key on your keyboard. If you hold down the Ctrl key and hit Del, you will not be prompted to confirm that you wish to delete the file in question. Once a file has been deleted, View mode will automatically terminate and display the next selected file if there is one. If you want to sort out a lot of files, select them all, click on the View button and use this feature to kill the ones you don't want to keep. Note that files deleted through View mode are handled the same way as files deleted directly from a browser window. See the section of this document which deals with deleting files for more about this.

If your graphic requires more colours than your current Windows screen driver can display, Graphic Workshop will display a dithered version of it. Graphic Workshop will use an eight-colour dither if you have a sixteen-colour display and a 256-colour dither if you have a 256-colour display. These dithers have been optimized for speed rather than for image quality, although the 256-colour dither can look pretty respectable as dithers go.

This assumes that Graphic Workshop has not become horrified by your sixteen-colour Windows screen drivers and run screaming from the room, requiring eleven to fifteen weeks of intense therapy and post-traumatic counseling, as discussed elsewhere in this document.

Many graphic files include file comments, which may tell you about more about the pictures stored in your files or explain their copyright. You can configure Graphic Workshop to display file comments through the Setup dialog.

You can perform a variety of image processes on graphics in the View mode by selecting the Filters item from the Picture menu. The Image Filter dialog will appear – select the filter type you wish to use and adjust its parameters accordingly. Click on Preview to see what the effect of your parameter selection looks like, and on OK when you're happy with the results. The scroll bars around the example image will let you see different areas of your adjusted graphic. The button to the lower right of the example image will return to the center of your graphic.

Graphic Workshop regards images to be filtered as being of four types:

•	Monochrome images, which have two colours.

•	Palette images, which have between four and 256 colours.

•	Grey scale images, which have 256 levels of grey

•	True colour images, which have sixteen-million colours.

Some filters are only available for specific image types and will not appear if you attempt to filter an image for which they are not applicable.

Note: 256-colour photorealistic images got that way by being dithered from true-colour images. If you promote them to true colour, a lot more of the filters will be available to work with them. However, doing so does not undither them and you'll probably find some pretty strange things happening when you try to filter them. Be warned. The same is true if you convert a dithered 256-colour image to grey scale.

Here are all the available filters:

Average: softens images.

Blurr: blurrs images.

Colour and Intensity: allows you to interactively adjust the colour and intensity of an image.

Contrast and Brightness: allows you to adjust the contrast and brightness of an image.

Convert to Grey: converts images to grey scale.

Convert to Mono: dithers and thresholds images to two colours.

Convert to RGB: promotes images to true colour.

Edge Trace and Fatten: traces the edges of monochrome images or fattens their details.

Emboss: creates embossing effects.

Enhance Edges: locates the edges of objects in image sand makes them more noticeable.

Equalize: interactively redistributes the shadows and highlights of images.

Obscure: makes images look like they're about to enter the witness protection program.

Reverse: makes negatives.

Scale: resizes images. See the Scale section of this document for more about scaling.

Sharpen: sharpens images.

Transform: flips and rotates images. Use the Free Rotate option to rotate an image in increments of less than 90 degrees.

Water Drops: makes image look like they're being viewed through water drops.

Waves: adds waves to images. This one can look truly weird.

The Free Rotate feature of the Transform filter allows for rotation by any angle from zero through 360 degrees in one-degree increments. It will rotate either clockwise or counter-clockwise.

Note that because free-rotating will result triangular margins around your rotated image, you can select the destination image background colour in this mode. The background colour is used to fill the margins. Click on the Background colour button to select a background colour. The available background colours are drawn from the image palette for images with 256 or fewer colours. True colour background colours can be selected from an evenly dispersed 256-colour palette.

Free rotation looks pretty reasonable when it's applied to grey scale and true colour images – applying it to dithered images can introduce some aberrations into your rotated graphic.

Free-rotating an image will usually leave it with at least slightly jagged edges.

By default, the size of a rotated image will be increased to allow the whole image to be included. The Preserve Size feature of the Free Rotation function will crop the destination image to fit within the dimensions of the source image.

Rotation always takes place around the centre of the source image, and is rotated to the centre of the destination image.

You can save a filtered picture to a new file by selecting Save As from the Picture menu.

The Filters option is not available for images which have been unpacked into virtual memory.

The Undo item in the Picture menu will be active once you have used the Filter function. It will undo the most recent filter operation.

Note that if you want to apply more than one filter to the image, you must invoke the Filter function multiple times.

Softening and then sharpening a scanned graphic with the Filter function is an effective technique for reducing scanning moirés.

You can get information about an image while you're in View mode by selecting Get Info from the Picture menu.

If you're viewing a small image, select Tile from the Picture menu to have it duplicated over the entire view window. This is handy for seeing what tiled BMP files will look like if you use them as wallpaper, and for viewing web page background textures.

The View menu in a View window will allow you to select the degree of magnification at which your image will be displayed. Zooming in on an image – increasing the magnification – will effectively increase the size of its pixels, and the displayed image will get chunkier the more you zoom in. The Zoom to Fill item in the View menu will select the appropriate magnification level to best fill your display window.

By default, Graphic Workshop opens graphics in View mode at a magification level of 100 percent. You can change this in Setup such that it defaults to any View magification level you like, or to Zoom to Fill.


AssociationWizard

Using Association Wizard

Read this section carefully before running Association Wizard. If you have Association Wizard associate file types with Graphic Workshop and you subsequently remove Graphic Workshop from your hard drive, you must re-associate the selected file types through Windows Explorer to other applications, as discussed in the Reference document for Graphic Workshop.

The Association Wizard application will allow you to quickly associate one or more image file types with Graphic Workshop Professional. Having done so, you will be able to double-click on files of the associated types in Windows Explorer and Graphic Workshop will boot up and display the files in question. Note that in this mode Graphic Workshop will not display its conventional user interface – when you exit a viewed graphic in Graphic Workshop launched from Explorer, Graphic Workshop will terminate immediately.

Associated file types are also used by many other Windows applications. The Documents item of the Start menu uses file associations to decide which application to run when you select a recently opened document.

Note: Unlike Graphic Workshop itself, Association Wizard will make permanent changes to your Windows registry – it must do so to establish associations. These changes, once made, cannot be undone automatically. Previous associations which it overwrites are not preserved. If you wish to un-associate specific file types after you have run Association Wizard, you must do so through Windows Explorer. This is discussed in detail the Graphic Workshop Reference document.

If you run Association Wizard, you will see a list of most of the file types Graphic Workshop recognizes. Some of these will have check marks to the left of them. If you click on the Associate button, the file types with check marks will be associated with Graphic Workshop Professional.

Association Wizard defaults to selecting file types it thinks should be associated with Graphic Workshop. You're free to disagree with it – you can toggle the selection of any file type by clicking on its item in the Association Wizard window. Items which do not have check marks will not be associated with Graphic Workshop.

Some forethought and care is called for in using Association Wizard. Not all the file types Graphic Workshop knows how to work with should be associated with it. For example, you would probably not want to associate BMP files with Graphic Workshop if you like to be able to double-click on them and have them open in Windows Paint.

The file types associated with Graphic Workshop do not affect the operation of Graphic Workshop itself – it will be able to view all the file types it supports through its user interface irregardless of what file types are associated with it.


Animation

Animation and Multiple-Image Formats

Some graphic file formats, such as FLI and AVI, are actually animation sequences – that is, each file contains multiple frames or images. Some conventional still graphic file formats can contain multiple images as well.

If you attempt to process a file with multiple images in it, the Select Image dialog will appear to prompt you for the image to unpack from your file. The selected image will subsequently behave as if it had come from a conventional single-image format.

The Select Image dialog will allow you to view the entire animation for those formats which contain animated sequences. Click on View to do so.

The Preview switch can be used to disable the display of example images in this dialog.


Register
Registering Graphic Workshop Professional

Graphic Workshop Professional and all its ancillary applications are shareware. We invite you to evaluate the Graphic Workshop Professional package to see if it's suitable for your needs. If you like it, please register it. If it turns out not to be what you need, or if you don't feel it's worth registering, please delete it from your hard drive and accept our thanks for trying it out. If you do productive work of any sort with this software, you are no longer evaluating it.

If you like Graphic Workshop Professional and you find it useful, you are requested to register it. The current registration fee is $40.00 – plus $5.00 shipping if you'd like the latest version sent to you on CD-ROM. This will entitle you to technical support, notification of updates, a free copy of the latest version of this software and other worthwhile things. It will also avail you of a registration number to shut off the closing beg notice. More to the point, though, it'll make you feel good. We've not infested Graphic Workshop with excessive beg notices, crippled it or had it verbally insult you after ten days. We trust you to support this software if you like it.

When you register Graphic Workshop, you will be e-mailed your registration code as soon as your order is processed. Enter your code into a downloaded copy of Graphic Workshop and it will become a registered copy, identical to what you would receive on CD-ROM. If you want to save the $5.00 shipping fee, select the NO SHIPPING option when you order. Note that absolutely nothing is shipped for NO SHIPPING orders – not even a receipt.

If you want to see additional features in Graphic Workshop, register it. If we had an Arcturian mega-dollar for everyone who has said they'd most certainly register their copy if we'd add just one more thing to it, we could buy ourselves a universe and retire.

Oh yes – should you fail to support this program and continue to use it, a leather winged demon of the night will tear itself, shrieking blood and fury, from the endless caverns of the nether world, hurl itself into the darkness with a thirst for blood on its slavering fangs and search the very threads of time for the throbbing of your heartbeat. Just thought you'd want to know that.

Order On Line

You can order on line at our web page http://www.mindworkshop.com/alchemy/alchemy.html – click on any of the blue key icons to access the secure server.

Order by Phone

Call our toll-free order desk at 1-800-263-1138 from Canada and the United States. Call 0800-89-7355 from Great Britain. Call 1-800-554-082 from Australia. Callers from other countries can reach the order desk at 1-905-936-9500. The order desk is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Please note: the order desk only takes credit card orders. They cannot provide you with order status, modify or cancel previously submitted orders, provide product information or help you out with technical support. They cannot transfer you to someone who can.

Order by FAX

You can FAX your order to 1-905-936-9502. Please use the order form included with this software.

Order by Snail-Mail

You can mail your order to:

Alchemy Mindworks Inc.

P.O. Box 500

Beeton, Ontario

L0G 1A0

CANADA

Please use the order form included with this software.

If you're paying by a cheque drawn on a bank outside North America, please be sure to make your cheque payable in US dollars. Your cheque must have the address of a North American clearing office and a bank transit number printed on it. Please do not send us Eurocheques – they cannot be cleared outside Europe.

Note that when you send us your order – and then when we send you your software – two distinct post offices get to deal with the ensuing mail. It can take a few weeks for things to get through this system – we ask that you be patient. We don't fully understand why it takes less time for a package to get to Australia than it does to send one to Cleveland. Some things are best left as mysteries.

Paying by Plastic

We can accept credit card payments by:

Registration Fee

Canadian users: The registration fee for Graphic Workshop Professional is $40.00 (CDN) plus seven percent GST, plus $5.00 shipping, or $47.80. We sincerely regret collecting this tax on behalf of several levels of government which will only squander it. If you sincerely regret having to pay it, we urge you to express your regret by voting in the next federal and provincial elections.

American users: The registration fee for Graphic Workshop Professional is $40.00 (US) plus $5.00 shipping.

Other users: The registration fee for Graphic Workshop Professional is $40.00 (US) plus $5.00 shipping.

Payment from countries outside Canada must be in US dollars. Please note that we are not able to accept purchase orders. We cannot ship software COD.

All orders are processed immediately. Please see the Terms, Conditions and Legal Dogma document included with this software for complete ordering details and all the stuff the lawyers made us say.

Update Policy

Having registered Graphic Workshop Professional, you're welcome to download the current shareware version whenever you like and install it. It will locate your existing registration code and become a registered copy. If you find new features in a downloaded copy which are genuinely useful to your application of Graphic Workshop, we'd like to ask you for $20.00. If none of the new features are specifically applicable to what you're doing, or if you just downloaded a newer version to fix bugs, please treat it as a free maintenance release.

We invite you to add your e-mail address to the e-mail update list at our web page, http://www.mindworkshop.com/alchemy/alchemy.html – you'll be notified by e-mail wherever we update Graphic Workshop.

Upgrading from Graphic Workshop Classic

If you have registered a copy of Graphic Workshop Classic – that is, Graphic Workshop for Windows 1.0, 1.1 or 1.2 – , you can update to Graphic Workshop Professional for $20.00 (US) – plus $5.00 shipping if you'd like a copy of Graphic Workshop Professional sent to you on CD-ROM. Please be sure to quote your existing registration code when you upgrade to ensure that you're charged the upgrade price, rather than the full price.

Note that Graphic Workshop Classic registration codes will not work in Graphic Workshop Professional.


Contact

Contacting Alchemy Mindworks Inc.

Graphic Workshop Professional and all its ancillary applications are shareware. We invite you to evaluate the Graphic Workshop Professional package to see if it's suitable for your needs. If you like it, please register it. If it turns out not to be what you need, or if you don't feel it's worth registering, please delete it from your hard drive and accept our thanks for trying it out. If you do productive work of any sort with this software, you are no longer evaluating it.

The best way to get in touch with us is by e-mail to alchemy@mindworkshop.com. Except in conditions of flood, famine or mental-health days, our e-mail is answered within a few hours.

Technical support and customer service are available at 1-905-936-9501, 10:00am to 5:00pm EST most business days. If you encounter our answering machine – it does happen occasionally – please try back later. One of the considerations in offering very low cost software is that we are unable to return calls for technical support.

If you are an unregistered user of this software, we will at our discretion assist you to the extent required for you to ascertain whether this software is suitable for your application.

Callers who are rude, abusive or pig-headed with our technical support staff will wind up as demon-chow. See the section on Registration elsewhere in this document.

Please do not call our 800 number for technical support. The people who answer our sales line can put a credit card machine into warp drive, but they know less about software than most cats know about quantum mechanics. They are unable to transfer your call.

You can contact us by snail-mail at:

Alchemy Mindworks Inc.

P.O. Box 500

Beeton, Ontario

L0G 1A0

Canada

Our FAX number is 1-905-936-9502.

We are unable to provide technical support by FAX or snail-mail.

The Alchemy Mindworks BBS – poor, barnacle-encrusted antique that it is – is available twenty-four hours a day at 1-905-936-9503. As of this writing, the protocol was 300, 1200 or 2400 baud, or 9600 baud v.32bis, eight data bits, no parity and one stop bit. The bulletin board always has the most recent versions of all our shareware on it, plus bug fixes, drivers and other relevant information. It only exists to support Alchemy Mindworks' shareware... it does not have a general file area.

We ask that in contacting us you appreciate that we are a small company with limited resources. If you have not registered this software we will not tell you to go to hell, but please don't ask us for half an hour of free technical support. We have not built the price of technical support into the cost of Graphic Workshop, as few users require it. We believe very strongly in not making everyone pay for something that only a small group needs. If our various governments felt the same way, our various economies wouldn't be in the midst of melting down.


Resource Extractor

Resource Extractor is an ancillary application included with Graphic Workshop. You can access it through its desktop icon, or by selecting Resource Extractor from the Graphic Workshop Professional section of the Programs menu. It cannot be accessed through Graphic Workshop itself.

Windows applications and the libraries they use are constructed of executable programs – the things your computer actually runs to make something happen – and chunks of data. These chunks of data are called “resources.” Windows resources are structured to allow them to be accessed as discrete entities by the programs that use them. Resources can include things like graphics, icons, text, sounds and so on. Windows resources also include a lot of fairly technical objects, such as dialog templates and accelerator tables, which will be if little interest if you don’t actually write Windows software. These latter entities will not turn up in this discussion.

The nature of Windows resources is that they can be accessed by applications other than the ones that own them. Using suitable software, it’s possible to open a Windows executable file or library, browse the resources therein and copy the ones you like to new files.

One of the most commonly accessed Windows libraries in this regard is the file MOREICON.DLL, which can be found in your \WINDOWS directory. This is a library of Windows desktop icons. You can use this library to replace the icons of common Windows applications if you want to customize your Windows desktop.

Resource Extractor is a tool for snooping around in Windows executable files and libraries to search for icons, graphics, sound and text resources. It will allow you to browse through files having the extensions EXE, DLL and VBX. If you find resources you like, you can save them to disk.

Resource Extractor will save graphics to BMP files, icons to ICO files, string tables to TXT files and binary data to BIN files. If it encounters binary data which is in fact a Windows sampled sound, it will save the resource to a WAV file. In a Windows application, binary data is any collection of stuff that Windows can’t think of a better name for. With the possible exception of Windows WAV files stored as resources, most binary data only makes sense to the applications that own it, and can safely be ignored.

To use Resource Extractor, run the Resource Extractor application and select Open from the File menu. Locate a suitable EXE, DLL or VBX file. The file will open in Resource Extractor and present you with a list of resource types in the left part of the Resource Extractor main window.

There are several potential problems Resource Extractor can encounter upon opening a file:

- The file is not a standard Windows executable or library: This means that you have attempted to open a file which Resource Extractor doesn’t recognize as being a Windows application. It could be a DOS application or an OS/2 application, for example, or it could be corrupted.

- The file appears to be corrupt or there was a problem allocating memory: This usually means the file is damaged. A damaged file can confuse Resource Extractor into thinking it requires enormous amounts of memory to unpack it.

- There are no interesting resources in the file you attempted to open: The oddest things interest software. This message means that there are either no resources at all in the file you attempted to open – not an unheard-of situation – or that none of them are graphics, icons, text or binary data.

When Resource Extractor has successfully opened a file, it will display a tree which lists each of the resources it finds. Click once on any resource to view it. Select Save As from the File menu or the right-click menu to save the selected resource to a file. If the selected resource is a sound stored as binary data, the Play item in the File menu and in the right click menu will be active – select Play to heard the sound.

Keep in mind that Resource Extractor only reads the applications and libraries it opens – it cannot change them. As such, you can extract resources ‘til your mouse melts without any risk of damaging any of your applications or system files.

You can turn Resource Extractor loose on any EXE, DLL or VBX files on your hard drive. The \WINDOWS, \WINDOWS\SYSTEM and \Program Files directories are a good place to start looking for things to try it out on.

Legal dogma: In browsing through applications and libraries on your hard drive, you’ll probably find some interesting graphics and quite a few icons to make your desktop more colourful. As long as the things you find stay on your hard drive, no one is likely to complain about this. Note, however, that the icons, graphics and other resources Resource Extractor can locate are typically copyrighted entities belonging to the developers of the software in question. Distributing these objects to someone else or modifying them for commercial use would be a clear violation of said copyright – as well as being unethical, doing so offers a fairly good possibility that someone’s lawyer will show up at your digs and start chewing on your leg.

Important: Resource Extractor makes calls to the main executable file of Graphic Workshop Professional. It will not run if it's moved to a directory other than that of GWSPRO.EXE, or if it's distributed without the rest of Graphic Workshop. If you register Graphic Workshop Professional by entering your registration code and name in the Graphic Workshop Setup dialog, Resource Extractor will not recognize the code until you have exited Graphic Workshop once.


Rotator

The Rotator application can be used to have Windows change your wallpaper and your screen saver periodically. It can be configured to change one or both every time windows boots up, or once a day.

When Graphic Workshop is installed, two Rotator icons will be created. The second one is titled Rotator (drag to StartUp) – this icon must be moved to the StartUp group of your Windows desktop before Rotator will operate. To do this:

1.	Locate the Rotator (drag to StartUp) icon in the Graphic Workshop Professional shortcut group.

2.	Use the right button of your mouse to click on the Start button of your Windows taskbar.

3.	Select Open from the short menu that appears.

4.	Double click on the Programs group in the Start Menu window.

5.	Locate the StartUp group in the Programs window and double click on it.

6.	Drag the Rotator (drag to StartUp) shortcut icon to the StartUp window.

You can now close the StartUp, Programs and Start Menu windows.

The remaining Rotator shortcut icon can be used to configure Rotator. Double click on it to access the Rotator application window. The Rotator application will show you two lists – the leftmost list contains all your current Windows wallpaper. The rightmost list contains all your current Windows screen savers.

There are three options at the top of each of the lists in the Rotator application window. These tell Rotator how often to rotate the items in question. They are:

Never: Rotator will never rotate the selected items, and will make no changes to your current Windows configuration.

Daily: Rotator will rotate the selected items once a day, the first time Windows is started up. If you have to start Windows a second time on the same day, Rotator will not change anything.

Always: Rotate will rotate the selected items every time you start Windows.

Note that if Never is selected, the list of items it pertains to will be disabled. You must select Daily or Always to access the items in one of Rotator's lists.

Click on a list item to toggle its status. Items marked with an X will be included in the rotation. You can have as many selected items as you like.

You can preview a list item by right-clicking on it. The right-click dialogs will also let you configure the items in question. If you right-click on a wallpaper item, you'll see a preview of the wallpaper graphic and you'll be able to specify whether the wallpaper should be displayed on your desktop centered or tiled. If you right-click on a screen saver item, you'll see a preview of the screen saver and you'll be able to configure the wait time before the screen saver activates. While Rotator will allow you to rotate sixteen-bit Windows 3.1 screen savers, it will not display anything in its preview window if you right-click on one.

Note that Rotator only saves the configuration values for selected items in its lists. As such, for example, if you set a wallpaper item to display as tiled but it's not selected – that is, if there's no X in the check box in its list item – it will not have the Tiled option selected in its right-click dialog the next time you run Rotator.

You can force Rotator to step through its rotations with the Rotate Wallpaper and Rotate Screensaver items in its File menu. The lists corresponding to these menu items must have their rotation options set to Daily or Always to activate these items.

While it's not necessary to understand what Rotator is up to use it, here's how it works, should you be curious.

The Rotator (drag to StartUp) shortcut icon differs from the Rotator shortcut icon in the Graphic Workshop Professional shortcut group in that it has /R appended to its command line. When the Rotator application runs and finds this command line argument, it knows to rotate through its lists and then terminate immediately.

Any application with a shortcut icon in the StartUp shortcut group will be automatically run every time Windows starts up. This gives Rotator the opportunity to change your wallpaper and screen saver.

The Rotator shortcut icon in the Graphic Workshop Professional shortcut group does not have a /R in its command line, and as such it allows Rotator to start normally and display its application screen.

Rotator's configuration items, including the names of the wallpaper files and screen savers in its rotator, are stored in a file called GWPROTR.INI in your \WINDOWS directory.

Important: Rotator makes calls to the main executable file of Graphic Workshop Professional. It will not run if it's moved to a directory other than that of GWSPRO.EXE, or if it's distributed without the rest of Graphic Workshop. If you register Graphic Workshop Professional by entering your registration code and name in the Graphic Workshop Setup dialog, Rotator will not recognize the code until you have exited Graphic Workshop once.


GCSUltraLight
GIF Construction Set

GIF Construction Set UltraLight is a reduced version of Alchemy Mindworks' popular GIF Construction Set software. It's a powerful tool for creating web page animations, as well as transparent and interlaced GIF files.

Note that the full version of GIF Construction Set can do a lot that the UltraLight edition cannot. We invite you to visit our web page at http://www.mindworkshop.com/alchemy/gifcon.html to download the full version. See http://www.mindworkshop.com/alchemy/gcsdemo.html for an extensive interactive demonstration of what the GIF Construction Set can do.

The GIF Construction Set UltraLight application is part of the Graphic Workshop Professional bundle. Registering Graphic Workshop Professional also registers GIF Construction Set UltraLight. Please note that this registration does not extend to the full version of GIF Construction Set.


GCSHeader
Editing the Header Block

You can modify the following fields of the header block of a GIF file:

Screen width and Screen depth: These are the dimensions in pixels of the screen the GIF file would like to be displayed on. They can be any value greater than zero. Note that the screen dimensions do not affect the dimensions of images displayed from a GIF file, but they may affect where on your screen the images are placed in a fully compliant GIF viewer. For GIF files destined for web pages, these fields should define a rectangle which just encloses all the other elements in your file. GIF Construction Set will set these fields correctly each time you save a file.

Background: The background is the colour of the area around the images to be displayed if the images in question don't fill your screen. The background is actually a number drawn from the current global colour palette. To change the background colour, click on the colour button in the Edit Header dialog and select a new colour. The number in the Background colour button is the actual palette index being used. Note that the background colour value is ignored by web browsers.

Global Palette: The global palette flag tells GIF viewers whether a GIF file includes a global palette. If you change this flag, GIF Construction Set for Windows will look at the GIF file you're working on to see if there are images which expect a global palette and prompt you accordingly. In most applications of GIF files, it's desirable to have a global palette.

Sorted: The Sorted flag of Edit Header box allows you to set the state of the sorted palette flag in the header of GIF files. This flag has no affect on how GIF Construction displays images – it may be of importance to other applications which read your GIF files.

When you create a new GIF file, a header block will be created automatically. The colour depth is set to 256 colours, and a default palette is applied to the header.


GCSImage
Editing Image Blocks

The Edit Image dialog includes the following fields:

Left and Top: These fields determine where the image in question will be displayed on your screen relative to the upper left corner. The values are in pixels.

Interlaced: This flag determines whether the image in question will be stored interlaced or normally.

Local Palette: You can enable a local palette for any image block in a GIF file. By default, the palette for the image in question will be used.


GCSComment
Editing Comment Blocks

A comment block consists entirely of text. The Edit Comment Block dialog is a text editing window in which you can add, modify and delete the text of a comment block. Under GIF Construction Set, a comment block can include up to 32,767 characters.


GCSPlaintext
Editing Plain Text Blocks

Plain text blocks consist of text and some information about how to display it. The text can be edited the same way comment block text is handled. The following fields define how plain text blocks will be displayed:

Text left and Text top: These fields define where the text will appear on your screen, relative to the upper left corner of the viewing area. These values are defined in pixels.

Foreground and Background: These are the colours used to display the text in question. Note that if a plain text block is preceded by a control block which defines a transparent colour, one of these colours can become transparent. You can select these colours either by clicking on their colour buttons or by using the eyedropper tool to pick colours from the previous image block if one is present. The eyedropper tool will not be active if there is not at least one image block before the current plain text block.


GCSControl
Editing Control Blocks

A control block includes the following fields:

Transparent Colour: If this switch is turned on, one of the global palette colours in subsequent image or plain text blocks will be regarded as being transparent by GIF Construction Set for Windows when you view a complete GIF file. This means that rather than displaying areas of this colour, it will allow whatever is underneath the displayed image or text to show through. You can select this colour either by clicking on the colour button to the right of the switch or by using the eyedropper tool to pick a colour from the next image block if one is present. The eyedropper tool will not be active if there is not at least one image block after the current plain text block.

Delay: This is the number of 100ths of a second a GIF viewer will pause after displaying the next image or plain text block.

Remove by: This tells a GIF viewer what do with an image after it has been displayed. Be careful of the Previous Image option – some web browsers don't support it.


GCSLoop
Editing Loop Blocks

A loop block includes one field, to define the number of times the images in the GIF file in question will repeat. Note that a Loop block will always appear as the second block in a GIF file, no matter where you insert it. Only one Loop block can appear in a GIF file.


GCSInsert
Inserting Blocks

You can add blocks to a GIF file by selecting Insert from the File menu of GIF Construction Set. A dialog will appear to allow you to select the type of block you wish to insert. Inserted blocks are always inserted immediately after the currently selected block.

If you attempt to insert an image block into an existing GIF file, a dialog will appear prompting you for the file to insert from. Source images for GIF Construction Set UltraLight must be in the GIF format.

You can insert multiple images into a GIF file at once – each one will appear as a separate Image block. Select multiple images in the Open dialog by holding down the Ctrl key and clicking on each image you want to insert. Hold down the Shift key and click to select a range of images.

Note that if you import an image from a GIF file using the Insert function, the first image in the file will be read, even if the file actually contains multiple images.

If you attempt to insert an image which has a different palette from the current global palette of your GIF file, a dialog will appear asking how you'd like to handle the new image's palette. These are the available options:

Remap this Image to the Global Palette: This is a good choice for mechanical images... drawings and such... and a really bad choice for photographs. Each colour in the source image will be replaced by the closest match from the global palette. This will usually make photographs look posterized.

Dither this Image to the Global Palette: This is a good choice for photographs. It will give you the best colour match... and usually the most attractive results... with a slight loss in detail resolution.

If you insert other types of blocks... specifically control, comment or plain text blocks... default blocks will be created which you can subsequently edit, as has been discussed.

The Use This Selection for Subsequent Images option will save time if you're importing multiple images into a GIF file in one pass. It will apply the current selection in the dialog to the remainder of the images to be imported. Note that this item will not be enabled if you have selected Use This Image as the Global Palette, as a GIF file can only have one global palette.


GCSAnimationWizard
Using Animation Wizard

The Animation Wizard feature of  GIF Construction Set will walk you through creating an animated GIF file. It offers fewer options than you'd have if you were to create an animated GIF file from scratch, but it's dead easy to use. It will prompt you for information about the animation you want to create, assemble all the necessary blocks and finally open the file in GIF Construction Set's main window. You can edit it further, or just save it to disk.

To create a GIF file with Animation Wizard, simply select this feature from the File menu of GIF Construction Set and follow the prompts. You can fine tune your GIF file after it has been created by Animation Wizard. The most important questions are:

Do you want to create an animated GIF file for use in World Wide Web Page?

If you answer Yes to this question, Animation Wizard will choose a palette for your GIF file which is optimally compatible with Netscape Navigator.

Are the images for your GIF file photorealistic or drawn?

Photorealistic images are scanned graphics and computer generated art which has gradients. Anything that looks as if it might have started life as a photograph should be regarded as photorealistic. Drawn images are graphics with hard lines, such as text and line art. Draw images with sixteen colours are text and line art which are constrained to use the default Windows palette, that is, graphics with very few colours.

The Match to Superpalette option of Animation Wizard will create a new optimized palette for your animation based on the palettes of all the source images you have selected. This will usually produce the best looking animations.

The Match to First Palette option of Animation Wizard will match all the colours in all the images you select to the palette of the first image. This will eliminate dithering problems when you assemble an animation from source GIF files as long as you choose the first image appropriately

Especially if you're new to using animated GIF files in a web page, it's a really good idea to start with Animation Wizard.