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Image Gallery ████████████████████████ ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ If you like this program, please: Send us $40.00, the normal user fee for Image Gallery. Registered users of Image Gallery are entitled to phone support, notification of upgrades and good karma. When you register it, we'll send you a copy of the latest version. Please tell us the version number of your copy of Image Gallery when you register. Our address can be found in the Registration section of this document. NOTE: You can register Image Gallery with a Visa card by calling 1-800-263-1138 (toll free) from the United States or 1-416-729-4969 from other places. (The area code for Alchemy Mindworks' non-800 numbers will change from 416 to 905 after October 4, 1993.) NOTE: British users of Image Gallery should contact our UK distributor, The Public Domain & Shareware Library Ltd., Winscombe House, Beacon Road, Crowborough, Sussex, TN6 1UL, England, telephone 0892 663298, FAX 0892 667473, BBS 0892 661149. NOTE: Danish users of Image Gallery should contact Prof Shareware, Benloese Skel 4 G, DK 4100, Ringsted, Denmark. NOTE: French users of Image Gallery should contact our French distributor, DP Tool Club, 102 rue des fusilles, 59650 Villeneuve d'Ascq, France, telephone (33) 20 56 55 33, fax (33) 20 56 55 25. NOTE: German users of Image Gallery should contact our German distributor, PD-SERVICE-LAGE, Postfach 1743, D-4937 Lage, West Germany. NOTE: We now have a bulletin board system. See the section on contacting Alchemy Mindworks for more information. ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ TABLE OF CONTENTS ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ Introduction New Features of Release 1.1 Hardware and software Starting Image Gallery File formats Macpaint GEM/IMG PC Paintbrush PCX CompuServe GIF TIFF WordPerfect Graphics WPG Deluxe Paint/Amiga IFF/LBM PC Paint Pictor PIC Truevision Targa Windows 3 BMP Microsoft Paint MSP Encapsulated PostScript EPS Halo CUT Windows RLE PFS First Publisher ART Image Gallery's menus Desk Menu About... Help Save Screen File Menu Open Close New Set files Add Add many Sort Print Volume name Quit Edit Menu Details Find Statistics Kill Merge Extract View Export Configuration Runtime editing Command Line Switches A Word About Mice A Word About Resources Contacting Alchemy Mindworks Inc. Registration Paying by credit card Source code availability and books Bundling Image Gallery Shareware Distributors Other Alchemy Mindworks Shareware Revision History Legal Dogma INTRODUCTION ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ Image Gallery is a tool to help you keep track of a large collection of bitmapped image files. It's a visual database which will catalog files, allowing you to add comments and key words to each entry. Having created an Image Gallery database... a gallery... you will be able to search it either visually... looking through the images by eye... or by key words. Here are examples of search keys that you might use to search a large gallery. - Find all the files with the keyword "girl". - Find all the files with the keyword "girl" or the keyword "frog". - Find all the files with the keyword "girl" and the keyword "frog". Each entry in a gallery also contains a small thumbnail of the original image. These thumbnails can be stored in either landscape or portrait orientation, and as monochrome, grey scale or colour images. Note that these thumbnail images are intended to be representations of the original images... they are, of necessity, quite a bit lower in resolution. In essence, Image Gallery is an electronic photograph album. It allows you to attach notes to all your pictures, and to find any picture or group of pictures you want quickly... something you can rarely do with a real photograph album. Invariably, everyone will want to look at the embarrassing ones, slowing your progress. In addition to searching through a gallery, you can print entries which correspond to a keyword search or which you have explicitly selected. You can also extract entries by keyword or selection to another gallery and merge galleries together. A gallery can contain up to 65280 entries... although at about five kilobytes per entry, such a gallery would be fairly enormous. Finally, you can view files which are represented by gallery entries so long as the files remain where they were when you created the entries. Image Gallery uses a conventional graphical user interface with menu and dialogs. You should have received the following files in the Image Gallery package: - GAL.EXE - The Image Gallery program itself. - GAL.RES - The Image Gallery resource file. - GAL.DOC - Yes, you're reading it now. - GALDRV.RES - The super VGA screen drivers. - GALPDR.RES - The dot matrix printer drivers. - GALINSTL.EXE - The Image Gallery configuration utility. - EXAMPLE1.GAL - An example grey scale gallery - EXAMPLE2.GAL - An example colour gallery - ORDER.FRM - A registration order form The best way to really understand Image Gallery is to boot it up and play with it. NEW FEATURES OF THE 1.1 RELEASE ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ Image Gallery version 1.1 has been largely rewritten, and offers a number of important new features, as well as numerous small enhancements. Here are the important bits: COLOUR THUMBNAILS ──────────────────────── Image Gallery now allows you to have colour thumbnail images as well as the previous grey scale and monochrome ones. These are a bit of a trade off... they're certainly in colour, but because Image Gallery runs in a sixteen-colour screen mode, the colours available to display images in are decidedly limited. You'll notice a considerable colour shift in most thumbnails. DOT MATRIX PRINTER SUPPORT ───────────────────────────────── Image Gallery will now print its galleries to a dot matrix printer, as well as to a laser. See the discussion of printing later in this document. For everyone who said they'd most certainly register if it would drive a dot matrix printer... MULTIPLE ENTRY SELECTION ─────────────────────────────── You can select multiple entries in a gallery for printing, deletion, viewing, exporting and so on. Just hold down the Shift key and click. VIEW ─────────── If the original image files from which you created a gallery are still in place, you can view them in full colour by using the View function. As Image Gallery is initially configured, clicking with the right mouse button will also invoke the View function. EXPORT ───────────── If the original image files from which you created a gallery are still in place, you can have Image Gallery fetch selected files from wherever they reside and translate them to the format of your choice, writing them to a specified directory. ON LINE HELP ─────────────────── If you get lost in Image Gallery just open the Help item of the Desk menu or hit Alt H. HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ Image Gallery requires a VGA card to operate. It will not work if your system has a different type of display card, such as a CGA, EGA or Hercules card. It requires a Microsoft compatible mouse. It will not operate if a suitable mouse driver has not been loaded. Finally, it requires at least a full 640 kilobytes of memory. A few megabytes of EMS or XMS will prove useful if you'll be making extensive use of the View function with fairly large files. Plan to have a fair bit of hard drive space available too... gallery files can get pretty big. Image Gallery will run under DOS 2.0 or better, although we recommend that you use at least version 3.3. It should behave itself under Windows as a non-Windows application. STARTING IMAGE GALLERY ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ Before you use Image Gallery, you should configure it, as will be discussed later in this document. Having said this, if you want to have a peek at it first, you can just run it with its defaults for the moment. You can start Image Gallery from the DOS prompt by typing GAL. The screen will turn grey, a unicorn will appear in the middle of it... no foolin'... and Image Gallery will be all set to go. You can open a file by selecting the Open item from the File menu. If you'd like to start by looking at the example gallery file that's included with this package, you can start Image Gallery with a gallery file from the DOS prompt like this: GAL EXAMPLE.GAL This will load up Image Gallery and open the EXAMPLE.GAL gallery file. A white box will appear in the centre of the screen... no unicorn this time, sadly... and twenty little pictures will appear in it. At the bottom of the screen you'll find four buttons. From right to left, these are: - Move to the first page - Move to the previous page - Move to the next page - Move to the last page The example gallery has two pages in it. Click on one of the two rightmost buttons to see the second page. You can also change pages by clicking in the white box between the two sets of buttons, changing the number therein to that of the page you want to go to and then clicking in this box again. This isn't all that useful in a two-page gallery, but it will be if you create larger ones. If you click within one of the pictures in a gallery, it will be selected. Hold down the Shift key and click in additional pictures to select them too. If you subsequently select the Details function from the Edit menu... or just hit Alt D... a window will appear to let you read and edit the details about the selected pictures. More will be said about details and how they're used later in this document. You can get back to DOS by selecting the Quit item from the File menu or by hitting Alt Q. Note that the View function will not work on the images in the example gallery, as you don't actually have the files that the gallery was created from. IMAGE GALLERY'S MENUS ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ The easiest way to become familiar with the functions of Image Gallery is arguably to have a quick look at what its menu items do. If you've read this far, you're to be commended. Most people don't bother with instructions for software that has menus. DESK MENU ──────────────── About... -------------- The About function will tell you the version of Image Gallery you're using, tell you how much free conventional memory is available and let you see our unicorn, should you have missed it on the way in. Note that the free memory display will not include any EMS or XMS memory you have in your system. As an aside, there's a diagnostic box available from within the About window, should you like these things. Hold down the Ctrl key and click anywhere in the window. The contents of this box vary from version to version of Image Gallery. Help ---------- The Help function will present you with detailed on-line help to assist in using Image Gallery. You can work your way through the help by clicking on the highlighted text items in the help window. Click on the Previous button to back up on level, the Index button to return to the first page and the Done button to exit Help. Note that each step down in the hierarchy of help pages requires some memory. If you're running Image Gallery with very little free memory, you may not be able to fully access Help. Save Screen ----------------- The Save Screen function will capture the current screen to an image file. The image file type is set using GALINSTL, as will be discussed later in this document. It defaults to PCX. Unless you're writing a review of Image Gallery or otherwise documenting it, you probably won't need this feature. Note that you can capture the screen from anywhere in the program by hitting Alt 1. FILE MENU ──────────────── Open ---------- The Open function will open a gallery file. Seems fairly obvious, this. Hitting Alt O also accesses this function. The Open function only works if there is no gallery open at the moment. Close ----------- The Close function will close the current gallery file and allow you to open a different one. Hitting Alt Z will also close the current gallery. New --------- The New function will create a new gallery file. It will prompt you to select the type of file you want to create. There are six types of gallery files... portrait and landscape orientation in either two or sixteen colours, the latter being shades of grey or colours. Hitting Alt N will also create a new gallery if there isn't one open at the present. The two-colour options are good for galleries which will contain primarily monochrome images. The sixteen-colour grey scale modes are good for galleries which will contain primarily colour images... they'll be displayed as grey scale images in Image Gallery. You can, of course, have colour source images in two- colour galleries and two-colour images in sixteen-colour galleries. Consider using two-colour galleries if you'll be printing them on a dot matrix printer. Because of limited range of colours available under Image Gallery, you will see a noticeable colour shift in the colour modes. Set Files --------------- The Set Files function will allow you to temporarily exclude specific file types from the Add and Add many directory searches. Click on the ones you don't want to include to disable them. Add --------- The Add function will allow you to add a file to the current gallery. Hitting Alt A will also add a file. Add many -------------- The Add many function will allow you to add multiple files to the current gallery with one command. When the file selector box comes up, click on the names you want to add... an arrow will appear beside each one you've selected. Clicking on a previously selected name will unselect it. Click on Ok when you're done. Sort ---------- The Sort function will allow you to sort your current gallery into a new gallery. You can sort by name, by file size, by the date the files in the gallery were created and by the date when you last modified their entries in the current gallery. Your sorted entries will be written to a new gallery file. Alt S will also call up the Sort dialog. Note that the Sort function creates a temporary index file while it's sorting. By default, this will be written to your current drive and directory. However, you can direct it to somewhere else by including the following line in your environment, for example: SET TEMP=H:\ This will cause the temporary file to be written to the root directory of drive H:. You can, of course, specify any path you like. If drive H: is a RAM drive, this will speed up the sorting of large galleries considerably. You cannot sort a gallery to itself. Print ----------- The Print function will print all or part of your current gallery to your choice of printers. Each entry will be printed as a thumbnail image, the entry details and your description of the image's contents. Grey scale images are halftoned... the PostScript halftoning is quite a bit better than the LaserJet halftones at the moment. If you don't have a dot matrix printer resource installed in GAL.RES, no dot matrix printer option will be available in the Print dialog box. Note that the relatively low resolution of the images printed by Image Gallery means that there's no need to print at the higher resolution of a 24-pin dot matrix printer. Pretty well all dot matrix printers will emulate either an Epson FX80 or an IBM ProPrinter. Drivers for both are supplied with Image Gallery. The Print function will find entries to print using the same search keys as the Find function, as will be discussed later in this document. If you don't enter any search keys, it will print the entire gallery. You can also print selected entries... this option will only be available if you have one or more entries selected when you invoke the Print function. Hitting Alt P will also print. Volume name ----------------- The Volume name function will add or change the volume names on a series of floppy disks so they represent sequential numbers. As Image Gallery maintains a record of the volume names of the disks it find files on, you can use these to keep track of image files stored on floppies. The volume name you use to start with should consist of some characters with digits at the end, such as VOLUME_001. Each time you click on Ok, the volume name will be written to the floppy drive you've selected and the digits will be incremented. Quit ---------- The Quit function will get you back to DOS. Alt Q also works. EDIT ─────────── Details ------------- The Details function will allow you to see the dimensions, colour depth, creation date, volume and other particulars of an entry in your current gallery. It always works on the currently selected entries, and will not work if there is no entry selected. The Details box will also allow you to enter and edit comments and key words for each entry in a gallery. The comments should be any description you want to attach to the entry, such as what the picture is of, who took it or drew it, where or how it was created and so on. The key words should be single words which you'll be able to use to search through your gallery. For example, if you entered the word "girl" into the key word field of every entry in a gallery which represents a picture of a girl, you'd be able to subsequently find all the girls in the gallery by searching for this key word. More will be said about the search facilities in the section on the Find function. Each of the comments and the key word fields can hold up to 256 characters. To enter text into one, click in it. A text entry cursor will appear. The following keys will move the cursor around. - Home - Moves the cursor to the start of the field - End - moves the cursor to the end of the field - Cursor Left - moves the cursor left one character - Cursor Right - moves the cursor right one character - Backspace - deletes the character to the left of the cursor. - Del - deletes the character to the right of the cursor - Esc - deletes the entire field Note that the keywords are case insensitive... it doesn't matter if you enter them in upper or lower case. Hitting Alt D will also get you to the Details box. Note that you must have at least one entry selected to use the Details function. You can configure Image Gallery so that the right mouse invokes the Details function. This will be discussed later in this document. Find ---------- The Find function will locate entries based on the key words you enter into its text editing box. This box works just like the key words box in the Details function. When you enter more than one key word into the Find text entry field, the current gallery will be searched based on the status of the Or and And controls in the Find box. If the Or option is enabled, all the entries in your gallery with any one or more keywords that match the ones you've entered in the Find box will be found. With the And option enabled, only those entries which have all the keywords you've entered into the text entry field will be found. When an entry is found that matches your search key, it will be displayed in a Details box. Note that you cannot edit the comments or key words when an entry is displayed by the Find function. Hitting Alt F will also get you to the Find box. Statistics ---------------- The Statistics function will tell you how your current gallery is structured. It will also allow you to edit the comments for the current gallery. Note that this has nothing to do with the entry comments, as discussed in the Details section. The gallery comments are printed at the bottom of each page when you use the Print function to drive a laser printer. They're also useful as a place to keep notes about what a particular gallery contains in general. The gallery comments can be up to 56 characters long. Kill ---------- The Kill function will delete the currently selected entries from the current gallery. Each deleted entry will be replaced by the last entry in the gallery, and the gallery will be shortened by one entry. In fact, the file itself will not get any smaller... the last entry will be freed up for use the next time you add an image to the gallery. If you have the Prompt Before Kill option enabled, you will be asked if you want to kill an entry before Image Gallery does away with it. Once an entry is dead, it's unrecoverable. Hitting Alt K will also kill the current entry. Note that you must have at least one entry selected for the Kill function to work. Merge ----------- The Merge function will combine the contents of another gallery with your current gallery. Both galleries must be of the same type. For example, if your current gallery is a grey scale, landscape orientation gallery, any gallery you merge into it must be as well. Extract ------------- The Extract function will extract entries from your current gallery based on a search key and write them out to another gallery. If you select a destination gallery which exists and is of the same type as your current gallery, the extracted entries will be added to it. If you give the Extract function a new name, it will create a gallery for you. The Extract function finds entries just like the Find function does. View ---------- The View function will locate the original file you have based an entry on, read it into memory and allow you to view it full size and in colour. There are a few catches to this. To begin with, when you create a gallery entry, the complete path to the file the entry is based on is stored in the entry record. This path is what Image Gallery uses to locate a file for viewing. If the original file is moved or deleted, or is otherwise unavailable, Image Gallery will not be able to view it, and will tell you so. Image files can get pretty big. If there's not enough DOS memory to load an image file into, Image Gallery will use extra memory. Extra memory can be virtual, extended or expanded, as set up when you configure the software. It defaults to virtual memory. A complete discussion of memory can be found elsewhere in this document. Image Gallery will display images using a standard VGA card as well as most of the popular super VGA cards. A standard VGA card can only display a 256-colour image at 320 by 200 pixels... you'll have to use the arrow keys to move around the image if it's larger than this. Super VGA cards can usually do better than this. A standard VGA card and most super VGA cards cannot display an image with more than eight bits of colour. If you attempt to view a 24-bit true colour image under these conditions, Image Gallery will dither it down to eight colours and show you an approximation of it. You can view 24-bit images in their real colours if you use a super VGA driver and card which support a high colour or true colour mode. In the view mode, the following keys will affect what you see: Arrow keys - move in small increments Shifted arrow keys - move in large increments Home - moves to the upper left corner End - moves to the lower right corner Esc - returns to the main screen Clicking with the right mouse button will also return to the main screen. Image Gallery will automatically select the most appropriate mode for display cards with multiple resolution options. You might want to get a copy of our Graphic Workshop application for a more extensive range of viewing options. Hitting Alt V will also invoke the View function. Note that you must have at least one entry selected to use the View function. You can configure Image Gallery so that the right mouse button invokes the View function. This will be discussed later in this document. Export ------------ The Export function will read the source files of selected gallery entries from wherever they reside on your disk and convert them to the format of your choice, writing the new files to a specified subdirectory. This will allow you, for example, to find all the files in a gallery which match a specific search criteria and have them fetched and written out in a format suitable for use with your desktop publishing or word processing software. You can also export files which you have explicitly selected. The Export function can only work for gallery entries whose source files are located as they were when the entries were created. To use the Export function, set up a set of keywords in the search field as you would for the Find or Print functions, or select one or more entries with they mouse. If you leave the search field blank and don't use the Selected Entries option, the whole gallery will be exported. Select a destination format and a destination path. FILE FORMATS ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ Image Gallery works exclusively with bitmapped image files. This is as opposed to vector or line art files. Vector files include DXF, GEM, CDR, Harvard Graphics, Lotus PIC and CGM files, among others. Image Gallery does not support vector files, nor is it likely to in the immediate future. In most cases, the specifications for image files are pretty well standardized, and Image Gallery will reliably handle image files in its supported formats without difficulty. There are a few exceptions to this, as will be discussed in detail throughout this section. Each of the formats listed here also includes the maximum number of bits of colour the format will support. You can work out the number of colours this represents as 2 to the power of the number of bits. Hence, an eight-bit file has 2^^8 possible colours, or 256. Twenty-four bit files have essentially an infinite number of possible colours. MACPAINT FILES - MAXIMUM BITS: 1 ─────────────────────────────────────── These can come in two flavours. The most common one is straight ported MacPaint files, that is, files having the "MacBinary" header. The other is "headerless" files, these being the ones used with PFS:First Publisher. Image Gallery 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 field in GALINSTL. You can override this with the appropriate command line switches. 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 files, since MacPaint in a monochrome-only format. GEM/IMG FILES - MAXIMUM BITS: 24 ─────────────────────────────────────── There are actually quite a few variations on IMG files... they handle monochrome and grey level images. The primary application for IMG files is as the bitmapped image file format of Ventura Publisher. Image Gallery supports files with up to 256 levels of grey and 24-bit colour IMG files. Note that 24-bit IMG files are only read and written by Ventura Publisher version 4.0 or better. PCX FILES - MAXIMUM BITS: 24 ─────────────────────────────────── These are the files used to hold images for Z-Soft's PC Paintbrush package. These can range from monochrome to 24-bit images. All the various formats are supported by Image Gallery. GIF FILES - MAXIMUM BITS: 8 ────────────────────────────────── These can range from monochrome to 256-colour images in any size you can find 'em. Image Gallery supports both the 87a and 89a versions of the GIF standard. It will read the first image of GIF files having multiple images. By default Image Gallery writes GIF 89a files. If you require GIF 87a files, use the /G87 command line switch or set up the GIF type option in GALINSTL. TIFF FILES - MAXIMUM BITS: 24 ──────────────────────────────────── The TIFF options in Image Gallery 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. Registered users of Image Gallery are welcome to contact us for help in unraveling the TIFF options if needs be. Image Gallery supports monochrome, colour and grey scale TIFF files. Grey scale TIFF files can be created by converting any colour format into TIFF with Image Gallery set up to produce grey scale TIFF files, either through GALINSTL or by using the /TCG switch. These import into desktop publishing packages such as Ventura for sharp looking PostScript halftones. Note that as of this writing Ventura will read grey scale TIFF files correctly. It seems to invert colour TIFF files. Colour TIFF files are useful in Corel Draw, among other places. Corel Draw 2.0 will import colour TIFF files for inclusion in CDR graphics. This is preferable to importing colour PCX files, as the size of a TIFF file in Corel Draw is preserved. Some applications have trouble reading grey scale TIFF files which have been compressed... Gray F/X chokes on them as of this writing, for example. Others read 'em fine. For this reason, Image Gallery defaults to creating compressed grey scale TIFF files but you can tell it not to compress them if you're not sure that whatever you'll be importing them into will read them. There are command line switches to set up these options. Note that due to the wide variations among the programs which produce TIFF files, Image Gallery would be lying rather badly if it claimed to be able to read all TIFF files. Specifically, it does not read Huffman or LZW compressed TIFF files as yet, as we haven't devised code to do this in a reasonable amount of space. Colour TIFF files are another area in which Image Gallery only handles files from some sources. When you're creating TIFF files which will be used as desktop publishing art or in other situations wherein they'll be printed to a PostScript printer, you should create them with greyscale expansion enabled. If they will be displayed on a monitor or edited in a paint program, you may want to create them with greyscale expansion disabled. Whether you create colour or grey scale TIFF files will be largely dependant on the application you want your TIFF files to be read by. Here are a few guidelines: - If you want to import TIFF files into Ventura or PageMaker so they'll output as halftones to a PostScript printer, use grey scale TIFF files with grey scale expansion enabled. - If you want to import colour TIFF files into Corel Draw to print to a colour output device, use colour TIFF files... the grey scale expansion doesn't matter. - If you want to import colour TIFF files into Corel Draw to print to a monochrome output device, use grey scale TIFF files with the grey scale expansion enabled. - If you want to import grey scale TIFF files into a paint or image editing package, such as ImageIn or Desktop Paint 256, use grey scale TIFF files with the grey scale expansion disabled. Note also that Image Gallery packs TIFF files with an eye to maximum unpacking speed, rather than for optimum compression. As such, pictures with between 32 and 256 colours will be promoted to 256 colours. Pictures with between four and sixteen colours will be promoted to sixteen colours. We have found a very small number of applications which will read colour TIFF files, and hence have not had much opportunity to test the colour TIFF facility of Image Gallery with real world software. The TIFF files it works with are correct according to the TIFF specifications... but this rarely means a lot. We will be most grateful for any feedback in this area. If you're having trouble with TIFF files, our Graphic Workshop package may help you unravel them. You might also want to get a copy of the book Graphic File Toolkit, as discussed later in this document. WPG FILES - MAXIMUM BITS: 8 (OR MAYBE 4) ─────────────────────────────────────────────── These are the native import graphic files for WordPerfect. These files can contain both bitmaps and line art, or vector graphics. Image Gallery 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 Image Gallery are usually those which contain only vector elements and no bitmaps. Image Gallery 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. The WPG specification allows for 256-colour files. As of this writing, WordPerfect itself would not read them. If you wish to use 256-colour images in a WordPerfect document, you might want to either reduce them to sixteen colours or dither them to monochrome, depending upon what you'll be outputting them to. MSP FILES - MAXIMUM BITS: 1 ────────────────────────────────── These are the image files used by the paint program which came with Microsoft Windows version 2. Don't confuse these with PCX files... some versions of Windows 2 came with a Windows implementation of PC Paintbrush from ZSoft as well. The two programs... and the two file formats... are not compatible. MSP files are monochrome only. IFF/LBM FILES - MAXIMUM BITS: 8 ────────────────────────────────────── These started out on the Amiga. The IFF file standard is extremely flexible, and allows all sorts of things besides images to be stored in IFF files. IFF files are found on the PC having been ported from Amiga systems. They are also created on the PC by several applications such as Electronic Arts' Deluxe Paint package and Digital Vision's Computer Eyes video scanner board. In the first case they are given the extension LBM. In the second they are given the extension CE. The basic file structure is the same, however. Deluxe Paint is a bit of a problem in the way it deals with IFF files, actually. This affects 256 colour files. Its native format is a subclass of IFF called PBM, and compresses its images as bytes. It's somewhat unique to Deluxe Paint, and Electronic Arts won't tell anyone quite how it works. You can actually work it out to a large degree, but every so often a file created in this format in the way it seems like it should be done refuses to load into Deluxe Paint. The standard form for IFF image files is called ILBM, compressing all images as planes. This is much slower, but it means that files thus compressed will be readable by pretty well all IFF readers... even if you port 'em back to the Amiga. This is how Image Gallery creates IFF files. Unfortunately, there's a problem with old versions of Deluxe Paint which will occasionally cause them to stop reading one of these files part way through the image. This happens to IFF files from sources other than Image Gallery, so it's probably a bug in these versions of Deluxe Paint. It appears to have been rectified in more recent releases. If you encounter an image which, when converted into an IFF file will not read into Deluxe Paint, use the /IFN command line switch when you run Image Gallery. This will disable the IFF compression. Uncompressed files read into Deluxe Paint with no difficulty. You can permanently set IFF compression off when you install Image Gallery if you like. Note that Image Gallery only reads "pure" IFF files, and will not handle the countless variations on the format which have appeared on the Amiga. Specifically, it does not read hold and modify, or HAM, files. BMP FILES - MAXIMUM BITS: 24 ─────────────────────────────────── These are the files which are used as "wallpaper" under Windows 3. They can be created using the version of PC Paintbrush supplied with Windows. BMP files use no image compression, as the intention appears to be to make them fast to load. Plan on your BMP files being very large. There is a very important aspect of colour BMP files which you should bear in mind when you use this format. Windows uses a fixed palette which Windows Paint cannot go about changing, as doing so would make the screen and border colours change too. This means that transferring an image to the BMP format will generally result in some colour shifts when BMP files are imported into Windows applications. The BMP format can support 24-bit files, which Image Gallery does generate. However, as of this writing importing a 24-bit BMP image into Windows Paint results in a noticeable colour shift. This appears to be a peculiarity of Windows Paint. PIC FILES - MAXIMUM BITS: 8 ────────────────────────────────── These should not be confused with Lotus 1-2-3 PIC drawing files. PIC files are created by PC Paint (not PC Paintbrush) and are used by Grasp, among other things. They come in many flavours. Image Gallery has been tested with the most common ones. In theory it should support them all, but that's only a theory. PIC files are structured exceedingly weirdly, especially in their sixteen-colour manifestations. For this reason, it's necessary for Image Gallery to create a temporary scratch file while it's packing or unpacking a sixteen-colour PIC file. You will note that upon beginning to read or write one, the bar graph will appear to pause for a few seconds before it starts to move. By default, the temporary file will be written to the current directory. However, you can direct it to somewhere else by including the following line in your environment, for example: SET TEMP=H:\ This will cause the temporary file to be written to the root directory of drive H:. You can, of course, specify any path you like. If drive H: is a RAM drive, this will speed up the packing and unpacking of sixteen-colour PIC files considerably. TGA FILES - MAXIMUM BITS: 24 ─────────────────────────────────── The Truevision Targa format is used by several high end paint programs and things like ray tracing packages. It can handle images with up to sixteen million unique colours. HALO CUT FILES - MAXIMUM BITS: 8 ─────────────────────────────────────── The CUT format is exceedingly awkward, and Image Gallery 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. Image Gallery 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 assumes that the CUT file in question only has two bits of colour. Otherwise, it assumes that there are 256 colours in the file. Files written to the CUT format from Image Gallery 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. If you're using CUT files and have any suggestions to improve Image Gallery's handling of them, or if you encounter problems with its CUT files, please get in touch with us. The CUT format, while occasionally requested, turned out to be very weird. WINDOWS RLE FILES - MAXIMUM BITS: 8 ────────────────────────────────────────── The RLE format is actually a variation on the BMP format discussed previously. It has two primary uses under Windows. It can be used to create compressed wallpaper files and it can be used to replace the opening Windows logo screen with one of your own choosing. The RLE format uses compression, unlike BMP files, and as such wallpaper created as RLE files will occupy less space on your disk. At least, it should. If you store very complex scanned or dithered images in the RLE format, they may confuse the run length encoding procedure and actually result in larger files than they would have created as BMP files. To use an RLE file as wallpaper, place the file you wish to use in your \WINDOWS subdirectory. Use the Windows control panel to select your wallpaper file as you normally would... the only difference is that you will have to type in the name of the RLE file you wish to use, as the file selector in the control panel only looks for BMP files. Technically, RLE files used as wallpaper should take a little longer to load. In practice, this is rarely noticeable. Using an RLE file to change the startup Windows logo is a bit tricky, but it's arguably worth the effort if you're tired of looking at the Microsoft ad. You will need a sixteen-colour RLE image of the dimensions 640 by 480... 640 by 350 if you use an EGA card. The RLE file should be no larger than 40 or 50 kilobytes, and smaller if possible. For this example, we'll allow that the file is called NEWLOGO.RLE, located in the \WINDOWS subdirectory. Go to the \WINDOWS\SYSTEM subdirectory and issue the following command at the DOS prompt. COPY /B WIN.CNF+VGALOGO.LGO+C:\WINDOWS\NEWLOGO.RLE C:\WINDOWS\WIN2.COM This will create a new program called WIN2.COM. If you start Windows by typing WIN2, rather than WIN, you will see your logo rather than Microsoft's. This will not affect your normal WIN.COM program. There are several things to be aware of in this procedure. The most important is that the resulting WIN2.COM cannot be bigger than 65535 bytes, which is why you must keep your RLE file down to a modest size. If it exceeds these limits, WIN2.COM will refuse to run. Secondly, if your RLE file is of dimensions other than those of your screen, it will appear incorrectly placed. Thirdly, if you will be using an EGA card, replace the VGALOGO.LGO file, above, with EGALOGO.LGO. Note that when a file is converted to the sixteen-colour RLE format by Image Gallery, it is permanently remapped to the Windows default palette. This may result in a noticeable colour shift for some images. Image Gallery will read most RLE files from other sources. One known exception is the VGALOGO.RLE file provided with Windows 3.1. PFS ART FILES - MAXIMUM BITS: 1 ────────────────────────────────────── These files are used by the PFS:First Publisher application. Note that Image Gallery can only read and create uncompressed ART files. If you have difficulty reading an ART file from another source it's probably compressed. A WORD ABOUT MICE ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ Image Gallery calls the driver of a Microsoft or Microsoft- compatible mouse. The driver itself is what makes the arrow cursor appear. Most Microsoft-compatible mice, such as the Logitech mice, have complete implementations of the driver and will not prove to be a problem with Image Gallery. Some very economical mice do not implement the graphic cursor. In these cases, Image Gallery will appear to function but the cursor will not be visible. If this happens to you, you will probably find that getting a copy of the real Microsoft MOUSE.COM mouse driver and replacing the one for your mouse with it will solve the problem, and will make anything else you use your mouse with work a bit better as well. There are a very few clone mice which are sufficiently peculiar as to be unrecognizable by the Microsoft mouse driver. These mice will not work with Image Gallery. You can find the latest version of the Microsoft mouse driver on our bulletin board. CONFIGURATION ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ Making permanent changes to the modifiable features of Image Gallery involves using the installer, GALINSTL. The configuration of Image Gallery is handled by a separate program in order to keep Image Gallery as small as possible, leaving lots of memory for putting graphics in. The GALINSTL program actually modifies GAL.EXE. In order for it to work, GAL.EXE and GALINSTL.EXE must be in the same directory and must be so named. Both programs must be of the same version. Be aware that as it directly modifies GAL.EXE, there is the outside chance that a bug in the installer might crop up and kill GAL.EXE beyond repair. Make sure you have a virgin copy of GAL.EXE somewhere before you use the installer. Place GALINSTL.EXE and GAL.EXE in the same directory and type GALINSTL. A menu will appear which will let you edit the runtime settings, add or change your screen driver and add or change your dot matrix printer driver. Note that the screen drivers are contained in a file called GALDRV.RES. The printer drivers are contained in a file called GALPDR.RES. These files must be in the same directory as GALINSTL for it to be able to find them. If one or both of them is missing, the corresponding options in the main screen of GALINSTL will not be available. EDIT RUNTIME - F1 ──────────────────────── When you select this option, you'll see a screen which will allow you to fine tune Image Gallery's performance to suit your requirements and hardware. You can use the up and down arrow keys and the Home and End keys to move through the items of this screen. Hitting Enter when the cursor is over an item which toggles will change its state. Hitting Enter when the cursor is over an editable field will allow you to type in a new data. Note that you can run GALINSTL and select this screen as often as you want to adjust the settings of its various parameters. When you're done changing things, hit F10 to get back to the main GALINSTL menu. Note that many of these items can be overridden by using command line switches when you run GAL.EXE, should you need them set differently from time to time. Default Printer --------------------- This can be PostScript, LaserJet or Dot Matrix. If you have a laser printer which can be set up to emulate both protocols, note that all other things being equal, it takes Image Gallery longer to print to a PostScript printer. However, PostScript printers allow you to have true halftones, which a LaserJet will not. You must have at least one megabyte of memory in a LaserJet for it to work with Image Gallery. The LaserJet driver will also drive LaserJet II and III series printers. Note also that the relatively low resolution of the images printed by Image Gallery means that there's no need to print at the higher resolution on a 24-pin dot matrix printer. Pretty well all dot matrix printers will emulate either an Epson FX80 or an IBM ProPrinter. Drivers for both are supplied with Image Gallery. This choice can be overridden in the Image Gallery Print dialog box. Printer Port ------------------ This item selects which parallel printer port to print images to. Note that you can only select LP1, LPT2 or LPT3. Note also that this selection only affects laser printers. Page Delay: ----------------- Some laser printers dislike having a lot of data blasted at them while they're spitting out a page. This field sets a delay in seconds during which Image Gallery will do nothing after issuing a form feed. Set it to zero to disable the delay. Show Export Results ------------------------- Set this item to Yes if you'd like to see a list of all the files you export from a gallery and to No if you only want to see the list if an error occurred while exporting. Right Mouse Function -------------------------- This item will allow you to assign an action to the right button of your mouse. The current choices are View and Details. Clicking on a gallery entry with the right mouse will invoke the appropriate function. Prompt Before Kill ------------------------ If this item is set to Yes, Image Gallery will prompt you to confirm that you want to delete an entry before going ahead and snuffing it. Beep when done -------------------- If this item is set to Yes, Image Gallery will beep when it has completed a long procedure, like searching or printing. Startup Function ---------------------- This field will allow you to tell Image Gallery which dialog box to call up when it first runs, assuming that no command line arguments have been passed to it to load a gallery. Gallery extension ----------------------- This is the extension used for gallery files. The default is GAL. File Type for Save Screen ------------------------------- This field will allow you to define what type of files will be written if you invoke the internal save screen function of Image Gallery. Note that this field is not checked for accuracy... you must specify a file type Image Gallery knows how to create. Menu Type --------------- This field will allow you to define whether Image Gallery's menus will be Windows-style drop down menus or Macintosh-style pull down menus. Drop down menus remain visible until you select an item... pull down menus close as soon as you release your mouse button. Image Memory ------------------ Hit Enter when the cursor is on this line to step through the available extra memory options. See the section dealing with memory elsewhere in this document for more information about selecting the correct memory type. Macbinary Header ---------------------- This item allows you to determine whether MacPaint files generated by Image Gallery will have MacBinary headers in them. Leave this on if you don't know what these are. Note that this does not affect how Image Gallery reads MacPaint files... it will handle both types no matter you set this item. IFF/LBM Compression ------------------------- This item determines whether IFF/LBM files will be compressed. Some old versions of Deluxe Paint choked on compressed files. TIFF Compression ---------------------- This item determines whether TIFF files will be created compressed. Some applications, such as Gray F/X, don't like compressed files. Expand Grey TIFF Files ----------------------------- This item determines whether TIFF grey scale files should be created with their grey scales expanded. This should be set to Yes if you'll be importing grey scale files into a desktop publishing package or otherwise using them to print with and to No if you'll be editing them. Create Grey TIFF Files ---------------------------- This item determines whether TIFF files with more than one bit of colour will be created as colour or grey scale images. Set it to Yes to create grey scale files or to No to create colour TIFF files. Default Export Type ------------------------- This field will allow you to set the default file type for exporting from a gallery. Note that this field is not checked for accuracy... you must specify a file type Image Gallery knows how to create. This choice can be overridden in the Image Gallery Export dialog box. Default Export Path ------------------------- This field defines where exported files will be written to. This choice can be overridden in the Image Gallery Export dialog box. Drive map: ---------------- This should be a string with a capital letter representing each of the valid drives in your system, starting with A. Path to GAL.RES --------------------- This should be a complete path to the subdirectory and drive where GAL.EXE and GAL.RES live. For example: C:\GALLERY\ When this item is set correctly, you will be able to run Image Gallery from anywhere on your hard drive if its location is in your DOS path. This field will initially default to the current directory when you run GALINSTL for the first time. This will be correct in most situations. Registration name ----------------------- When you have registered Image Gallery, type your name into this field. This, in conjunction with the registration number provided when you registered the software will disable the closing beg notice and counter. Note that you must enter your name exactly as it is written on the page with your registration number. Case, spaces and punctuation matter. Registration number ------------------------- Enter your registration number in this field. EDIT SCREEN DRIVER - F2 ────────────────────────────── This page will allow you to select a VGA or super-VGA screen driver for Image Gallery to use with its View function. You must select a driver which is in keeping with the super VGA card you have in your system. If you attempt to display a large graphic in Image Gallery and the display misbehaves, chances are you have the wrong super-VGA screen driver installed. Note that some drivers are intended for use with cards having a half megabyte or more of memory. If you have a 256 kilobyte VGA card, choose a suitable 256 kilobyte driver. Note that not all the drivers support higher resolution modes. If you have a card which can display pictures in 1024 by 768 pixel resolution, you also need a driver which can drive it in that mode. As a rule, all the super VGA drivers will handle 640 by 480 pixels. Some can do better than this, but not all of them. We're working on improving the high end drivers. The following are some details about the drivers. Standard VGA ------------------ This is a driver for a VGA card using the 320 by 200 pixel mode in 256 colours and the 640 by 480 pixel mode in sixteen colours and monochrome. Use this driver if none of the others suits your display hardware. VGA in pseudo 640 x 480 ----------------------------- This is a very clever driver by Gregory Weeks which displays 640 pixel wide 256-colour files on a 320 pixel wide screen by leaving out every alternate pixel. As the author notes, nothing is free and some detail is lost. However, if you have a VGA card with no 640 pixel wide, 256-colour mode... or one which there is no driver for as yet... you'll find that this driver is often preferable to the stock 320 by 200 pixel MCGA mode. General VESA ------------------ The VESA standard is supported by a number of super VGA cards in addition to their own proprietary standards. If your card supports VESA, either directly or through the use of a TSR, you can use this driver. This is especially handy if your card is not supported by a dedicated driver as yet. This card provides 256- colour resolution out to 1280 by 1024 pixels assuming your card supports this mode. Note that the driver will only attempt to select display modes which your card actually supports... if you call for a mode which does not exist on your card, the nearest available mode will be used. This driver does not work with some fairly flaky VESA implementations, such as the one on the Orchid Fahrenheit 1280 card. Oak Tech 640 by 480 ------------------------- Oak Tech 800 by 600 ------------------------- These drivers support cards which use the Oak Technologies chip set. The higher resolution drivers also support the lower resolution modes, and will select the appropriate mode automatically. Tseng 4000 640 by 480 --------------------------- Tseng 4000 800 by 600 --------------------------- Tseng 4000 1024 by 768 ---------------------------- Tseng 4000X 1024 by 768 ----------------------------- These drivers support cards which use the Tseng Labs chip set. The higher resolution drivers also support the lower resolution modes, and will select the appropriate mode automatically. The Tseng 4000X driver will support 1024 by 768 pixels at 256 colours, and 640 by 480 or 800 by 600 pixels of 24-bit colour. You'll need a Tseng 4000 board with the Sierra DAC on it to use this driver. It will allow you to view 24-bit images directly. Trident -------------- Drivers are included to drive Trident 8900 series cards to 1024 by 768 pixels in 256 colours and 800 by 600 in sixteen colours and monochrome. Choose the one which is appropriate for your hardware. The two lower resolution drivers have also been tested on the older 8800 series Trident chips. Video Seven 1024i ----------------------- This is a driver for the Headland Technologies Video Seven VRAM and Video Seven 1024i cards. It supports the 640 by 480 line 256- colour mode. Paradise Plus Card ------------------------ This is a full featured driver for the Western Digital Paradise Plus card. This driver also works with the Dell super-VGA card, which is actually a Paradise sixteen-bit card. Paradise Pro Card ----------------------- This is a driver for the Paradise Professional card (and clones thereof). It supports both the 640 by 400 and 640 by 480 pixel, 256 colour modes. Paradise D 640 by 480 --------------------------- Paradise D 800 by 600 --------------------------- Paradise D 1024 by 768 ---------------------------- These are drivers for the newer Paradise cards which use the D series chips. You can tell if you have one by the markings on the large chip... you'll find the number 90C30 thereon. The 1024 by 768 driver requires a megabyte on board. It supports the Paradise true colour mode, which means that if you have a RAMDAC on your card it will allow you to look at 24-bit images directly in 640 by 480 and 800 by 600 pixel resolution. Stunning. Dell Super VGA 256K ------------------------- This is a version of the Paradise Plus driver, above. It has been modified so as not to use the 800 by 600 pixel EGA and monochrome modes of the Paradise card, as this causes the super-VGA monitor on a Dell to click a (loud) internal relay every time it changes modes. If you don't mind the relay, or you want the 800 by 600 modes, use the Paradise Plus driver. Dell Super VGA 512K ------------------------- This is a 512K version of the Dell Super VGA driver, that is, a Paradise driver with the 800 by 600 pixel monochrome mode disabled. ATI VGA Wonder -------------------- Drivers are included to drive ATI VGA Wonder series cards to 1024 by 768 pixels in 256 colours and 800 by 600 in sixteen colours and monochrome. Choose the one which is appropriate for your hardware. There is also a driver for the ATI-XL card, which adds 24-bit colour support at 640 by 480 pixels. This requires a full megabyte of memory on your card. Standard VGA 320 x 400 ---------------------------- This is a "gadget" driver for a stock VGA card which reprograms the beast into an undocumented 320 by 400 line mode. It should work on any VGA card, but being undocumented one cannot be sure. In any case, while interesting, this mode has such a squashed aspect ratio that it's not really useful for anything. In addition, having heavily interlaced memory, it's painfully slow to update. Standard VGA 360 x 480 ---------------------------- This is another undocumented mode. It gets still more on the screen, with still more distortion. EDIT EXTERNAL PRINTER DRIVER - F3 ──────────────────────────────────────── This page will allow you to select an external printer driver. You do not need an external printer driver if you will be printing to a PostScript printer or any sort of LaserJet or LaserJet compatible printer. For the most part, external printer drivers are used to drive black and white dot matrix printers. COMMAND LINE SWITCHES ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ You can use command line switches when you run Image Gallery to temporarily adjust the settings which GALINSTL configures. Each command line switch is of the form /XXX, a slash and three letters. Multiple switches should be separated by spaces. These are the current command line switches. /DOS - use conventional memory for an image buffer /EMS - use expanded memory for an image buffer /XMS - use extended memory for an image buffer /EMV - use expanded or virtual memory for an image buffer /XMV - use extended or virtual memory for an image buffer /LP1 - print to LPT1 /LP2 - print to LPT2 /LP3 - print to LPT3 /MBH - write MacPaint files with MacBinary headers /MBN - write MacPaint files without MacBinary headers /IFN - don't compress IFF/LBM files /IFC - compress IFF/LBM files /TGN - don't compress TIFF files /TGC - compress TIFF files /G87 - write GIF 87a files /G89 - write GIF 89a files /NEW - start with the New dialog box /OPN - start with the File Open dialog box /ABT - start with the About dialog box /NON - start with no dialog boxes /DDM - use drop down menus /PDM - use pull down menus /IDR - ignore drive letters in View and Export functions /UDR - Use drive letters (the default); The /IDR switch will force Image Gallery to look for source files when its views or exports relative to your current drive, rather than on the drive they were originally stored on. This is useful in creating CD-ROMs in which the drive the disc is in may vary from user to user. REVISION HISTORY ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ Version 1.1e - Changed the appearance of the user interface. Added colour thumbnail modes. Improved the way directory paths are handled. Updated the screen and resource drivers. Version 1.1d - Sped up the user interface a bit. Version 1.1c - Fixed a bug in the Details function. Version 1.1b - Fixed a bug in the extended memory manager and one in the 24-bit BMP export. Added the option of exiting the View mode with the right mouse button. Version 1.1a - Added View and Export functions, multiple selection, dot matrix printer support and numerous small enhancements. Version 1.0d - Fixed a bug in the Volume Name function and added a trap for off line volumes being serialized. Version 1.0c - Updated all the graphic format resources... dispensing with numerous little bugs. Added registration numbers. Version 1.0b - Fixed a bug that caused the Add Many function to abort if it encountered a bad file. Now it just skips 'em. Fixed numerous file format bugs... see the Graphic Workshop revision history for the complete list. Added a trap to prevent people from sorting galleries to themselves. CONTACTING ALCHEMY MINDWORKS INC. ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ We hope you'll contact us to register Image Gallery... see the section about registering your software elsewhere in this document. You can contact us by mail by writing to us at: Alchemy Mindworks Inc. P.O. Box 500 Beeton, Ontario L0G 1A0 Canada You can register Image Gallery with a Visa card by calling 1-800-263-1138 from the United States or 1-416-729-4969 from other places. Please note that this number is for ordering only. (The area code for Alchemy Mindworks' non-800 numbers will change from 416 to 905 after October 4, 1993.) We will attempt to answer questions from unregistered users who write to us to the extent that their answers are needed for you to fully determine whether this software will suit your requirements. We can also be reached through the Alchemy Mindworks bulletin board. It's available twenty-four hours a day at (416) 729-4609. 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 area code for Alchemy Mindworks' non-800 numbers will change from 416 to 905 after October 4, 1993.) 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. If you encounter problems with a file, you're welcome to upload the errant file to our bulletin board. Actually, you can upload any picture files you like to the board... we enjoy getting pictures. If you have a question about Image Gallery, feel free to leave it on the bulletin board. We try to answer all questions within twenty-four hours. Note that you must call back to retrieve your answer... please don't ask us to phone you or to leave the answer on another bulletin board. Registered users of Image Gallery will receive our voice number for immediate technical support. The voice number is only available for use from 10:00am to 5:00pm EST. If you call and get our answering machine... it does happen... please leave us a message or call back later. We are only able to return long distance calls if we can call you collect. In this regard, please note that as of this writing Canada has a very peculiar electronic voice mail collect call system... if the phone company's computer starts talking when you pick up the phone, it's probably us returning your call. 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. REGISTRATION ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ If you like Image Gallery and find it useful, you are requested to support it by sending us $40.00. This will entitle you to telephone 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 Image Gallery 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. If you want to see additional features in Image Gallery, 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. Our address is: Alchemy Mindworks Inc. P.O. Box 500 Beeton, Ontario L0G 1A0 Canada You can register Image Gallery with a Visa card by calling 1-800-263-1138 from the United States or 1-416-729-4969 from other places. (The area code for Alchemy Mindworks' non-800 numbers will change from 416 to 905 after October 4, 1993.) If you have previously registered Image Gallery, you can update your copy to the current release for $20.00. If you have a FAX number, please include it in your registration. We're hoping to be able to handle notification of future updates of this software by FAX where we can. This is both considerably faster and a lot cheaper than mail. You can FAX your order to us at (416) 729-4156. You'll find an order form in this ZIP to make this easier. (The area code for Alchemy Mindworks' non-800 numbers will change from 416 to 905 after October 4, 1993.) When you register Image Gallery, please specify the disk size you require. In addition, please state whether you require dual density disks... some of our packages normally ship on quad density disks. You should only require dual density disks if you're using an old-style 8088-based XT system. Please note that we are not able to accept purchase orders for fewer than six copies of Image Gallery at a time. We cannot ship software COD. CANADIAN USERS ───────────────────── The registration fee for Image Gallery is $40.00 (CDN) plus seven percent GST, or $42.80. 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 Image Gallery is $40.00 (US). The exchange on US funds pretty well covers the extra postage to the States. Please note that when you send us your order... and then when we send you your update back... 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. OTHER USERS ────────────────── The registration fee for Image Gallery is $40.00 (US). If you pay us by cheque, please make sure that it's a cheque drawn on an international bank, and that it will be negotiable in Canada. If there's no bank clearance number along the bottom of the cheque, it will not clear. Payment from countries outside Canada must be in US dollars. PAYING BY CREDIT CARD ──────────────────────────── We can accept payment by Visa only. We need your Visa card number and expiry date and the name which appears on your card. We also need written authorization to debit your Visa account for the specific amount you're sending us. We cannot accept MasterCard, American Express or other credit cards. SOURCE CODE AVAILABILITY AND BOOKS ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ It isn't. After considerable meditation and several bad experiences, we have decided not to release the source code for Image Gallery. We do license parts of them for specific applications... if you want more information about using some of the functions of this package in your software, please contact us. If you're interested in writing programs which use graphics, you'll find everything you need to know in Bitmapped Graphics, second edition, by Steven William Rimmer. It's published by TAB Books, (TAB book 3558). It features code to pack and unpack MacPaint, IMG, PCX, GIF and TIFF files, as well as chapters on screen drivers, dithering and printing. An additional book on this subject, Supercharged Bitmapped Graphics, (TAB Book 4102), discusses the GIF 89a, WordPerfect, BMP, IFF/LBM, TGA, MSP, 24-bit PCX and colour TIFF file formats, as well as such subjects as colour dithering and colour printing. If you'd like to write applications which use menus, icons, windows and all the other paraphernalia of a graphical user interface, you might find the book PC Graphical User Interfaces handy. It's published by TAB Books (TAB Book 3875). It includes the C source for a complete graphical user interface library, related code to manage fonts and bitmaps and a tiny paint program. Bitmapped Graphics for Windows, by Steven William Rimmer, published by TAB Windcrest, will be available at the end of 1992. It deals with the most popular image file formats in a Windows environment. A complete discussion of graphic file formats for use in word processing documents and desktop publishing chapters can be found in The Graphic File Toolkit, by Steven William Rimmer, published by Addison-Wesley. This is an invaluable reference for anyone who wants to use graphic files but does not want to become a programmer in the process. If your local bookstore doesn't have these books, they can be mail or phone ordered from Christies of Cookstown, P.O. Box 392, Cookstown, Ontario L0L 1L0, Canada. Their phone number is (705) 458-1562. It has a FAX machine on it after hours. As of this writing, they're open seven days a week. BUNDLING IMAGE GALLERY ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ If you'd like to include Image Gallery with your product, please get in touch with us. We have several ways to help you do this so your users get the most out of our software and we won't have to set our leather winged demon of the night on 'em. SHAREWARE DISTRIBUTORS ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ We will, at our discretion, send out disks of our shareware applications to shareware distributors. Alternately, you can download the current versions of our applications from CompuServe in the PICS forum or from our bulletin board at (416) 729-4609. We encourage you to use our bulletin board, as it will allow you to keep your copies of our applications up to date. If you obtain current copies of our shareware, you have our permission to distribute them under the following terms. No written permission from us is required if you abide by these terms. - That nothing be added to, deleted from or changed in the archive files which contain our packages. This includes adding ZIP file comments to them. - That our shareware is not included in or bundled with other hardware or software without our written permission. - That no printed documentation regarding our shareware is included with the package without our written permission. - That hard copy explaining that our packages are shareware is included with the disks. - That no more than $10.00 (US) be charged for the distribution of whatever package our applications are part of. If you will be charging more than this, please get in touch with us for bundling rates. You do have our permission to copy the ZIP files from our quad density disk to multiple lower density disks for distribution. Please note that if you would like to distribute Image Gallery in "rack" packaging, that is, in a store rather than directly from a shareware distributor, we request that you contact us for permission to do so. We will require a proof copy of the packaging you intend to use prior to giving our consent for rack packaging. OTHER ALCHEMY MINDWORKS SHAREWARE ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ The following are the other shareware packages we have available as of this writing. Our newsletter, available for the asking, will list all the current ones. GRAPHIC WORKSHOP ─────────────────────── This is the last word in image programs. It converts, prints, views, dithers, thresholds, transforms, flips, rotates, scales, crops, colour adjusts, scans, quantizes and wreaks special effects on MacPaint, GEM/Ventura IMG, PCX, GIF, TIFF, WPG, MSP, IFF/LBM, BMP, RLE, Halo CUT, Targa, ART, EXE, TXT and EPS files. It drives CGA, Hercules, EGA, VGA and pretty well all super VGA cards. It will drive PostScript and LaserJet Plus laser printers, colour PostScript printers, colour inkjets and most dot matrix printers. It features batch processing, extended and expanded memory support, an intuitive user interface and easy to follow menus. It allows you to convert colour image files into superb black and white clip art for desktop publishing, among other things. GRAPHIC WORKSHOP FOR WINDOWS (RELEASE 1.1) ───────────────────────────────────────────────── Offering the same functionality as Graphic Workshop for DOS, the Windows implementation of this package offers a traditional Windows interface, multitasking and lots of things to click on. It converts, prints, views, dithers, thresholds, transforms, flips, rotates, scales, crops, colour adjusts, scans, quantizes and wreaks special effects on MacPaint, GEM/Ventura IMG, PCX, GIF, TIFF, JPG, WPG, MSP, IFF/LBM, BMP, RLE, Halo CUT, Targa, ART, text and EXE picture files. Graphic Workshop for Windows will display and print on any card and printer respectively that can be driven by Windows. It features batch processing, an intuitive user interface and easy to follow menus. The 1.1 release adds a thumbnail preview mode, context sensitive help, easier installation and all sorts of new features. Includes several unicorns. IMAGE GALLERY (RELEASE 1.1) ────────────────────────────────── Image Gallery is a visual database to help you keep track of a large number of image files quickly and effectively. It will create database files... galleries... of any combination of bitmapped image files, displaying them as small ``thumbnail'' images. It works with all the file formats supported by Graphic Workshop, with the exceptions of EPS, EXE and TXT. You can search a gallery visually or by key words. Each entry in a gallery supports key word and comment fields, as well as the dimensions, location and other specifics of each image. You can also print all or part of a gallery, producing hard copy catalogs of your images when you need them. Image Gallery will run with any VGA card. It uses a Microsoft compatible mouse and will drive any PostScript or LaserJet Plus compatible laser printer, and most dot matrix printers. Release 1.1 includes a full colour view function, colour thumbnails, exporting and multiple selection. DESKTOP PAINT 256 (RELEASE TWO) ────────────────────────────────────── This is a complete rewrite of our popular super VGA paint package. Desktop Paint 256 is a powerful painting application. It will let you create and edit pictures stored in the MacPaint, GEM/Ventura IMG, PCX, GIF, TIFF, WPG, MSP, IFF/LBM, BMP, Halo CUT, and Targa formats. It features a rich selection of drawing and image manipulation tools, XMS and EMS support to work on large images and a user friendly interface. Looking very much like monochrome Desktop Paint in colour, it's a powerful application which will be equally useful for picture collectors, artists and desktop publishing users. It supports Paradise (and compatibles), Headland Video 7, Tseng Labs 4000 series cards, Trident cards which use 8900 series chips, Oak Technologies cards, ATI VGA Wonder cards and all cards with VESA capabilities. Note that you must have one of these super-VGA cards to use Desktop Paint 256... it does not run in the standard 320 by 200 pixel "standard" VGA mode. Desktop Paint 256 requires a Microsoft-compatible mouse. DESKTOP PAINT 16 ─────────────────────── Desktop Paint 16 is a VGA paint package for use with images having up to sixteen colours. As with the monochrome implementation of Desktop Paint, it will read and write image files in the MacPaint, GEM/IMG, PCX files, GIF, TIFF, WPG, MSP, IFF/LBM, BMP and PIC formats. It has EMS and XMS support to handle images of virtually any size, an intuitive user interface and a wide selection of image creation and manipulation tools. Desktop Paint 16 can utilize fonts from many other sources, including Ventura Publisher, Macintosh FONT and NFNT resources and Windows FNT files. It requires a VGA card and a Microsoft- compatible mouse. DESKTOP PAINT (RELEASE THREE) ──────────────────────────────────── Desktop Paint is a powerful monochrome paint package fine tuned for use with desktop publishing applications. It will read and write image files in all the formats Graphic Workshop supports with the exceptions of EPS and RLE. It has EMS and XMS support to handle images of virtually any size, an intuitive user interface and a wide selection of image creation and manipulation tools. Desktop Paint can utilize fonts from many other sources, including Ventura Publisher, Macintosh FONT and NFNT resources and Windows FNT files. Desktop Paint requires a Microsoft- compatible mouse. GRAFCAT (RELEASE THREE) ────────────────────────────── GrafCat prints a visual catalog of your image files, with fifteen or sixteen pictures to a page, depending on the image orientation you choose. It supports all the file types that Graphic Workshop handles, and will drive any PostScript or LaserJet Plus compatible laser printer, including LaserJet II and LaserJet III series printers. This is a complete re-write of GrafCat... it now supports a file finder screen like the one in Graphic Workshop and numerous print options. If you can't obtain them from the usual sources of shareware, they're available from us for $40.00 each preregisterd. They're also all available for downloading from our bulletin board at (416) 729-4609. (The area code for Alchemy Mindworks non-800 numbers will change from 416 to 905 after October 4, 1993.) LEGAL DOGMA ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ Neither the author nor Alchemy Mindworks Inc. assumes responsibility for any damage or loss caused by the use of these programs, however it comes down. If you can think of a way a picture program can cause you damage or loss you've a sneakier mind than mine. All the registered trademarks used herein are registered to whoever it is that owns them. This notification is given in lieu of any specific list of trademarks and their owners, which would not be as inclusive and would probably take a lot longer to type. If you register Image Gallery, we will assume that you are doing so having tested the shareware version and ascertained that it's suitable for your hardware and requirements. We cannot provide refunds for shareware registration if you subsequently change your mind. Graphic Workshop, Desktop Paint, Image Gallery, GrafCat and Storyteller are trademarks of Alchemy Mindworks Inc. That's it...