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GRAPHIC WORKSHOP 6.1 ███████████████████████████████ ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ If you like this program, please: Send us $40.00, the normal user fee for this software. Registered users of this software are entitled to phone support, notification of upgrades and good karma. When you register Graphic Workshop we'll send you a copy of the latest version, as well as several other graphic related programs we do. Please tell us the version number of your copy of Graphic Workshop when you register. Our address can be found at the end of this file. Complete details of registration can be found later in this document in the section on registration. NOTE: Release six of Graphic Workshop represents a complete re- write of the package. Numerous things have changed... if you're familiar with Graphic Workshop from previous releases you're urged to read this file all the way through. Version 6.1 has some important changes and new additions over 6.0. NOTE: German users of Graphic Workshop should contact our German distributor, PD-SERVICE-LAGE, Postfach 1743, D-4937 Lage, West Germany. A German language version of the package is available from them as well. NOTE: Australian users of Graphic Workshop should contact our Australian distributor, Budgetware, P.O. Box 496 Newtown NSW 2042. Phone (02) 519-4233 FAX (02) 516-4236. NOTE: French users of Graphic Workshop 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. A French language version of the software is available from them. NOTE: We now have a bulletin board system. See the section on contacting Alchemy Mindworks for more information. ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ CONTENTS ███████████████████ Introduction Hardware and software New features of the level six release 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 Self-displaying EXE pictures Text files Halo CUT 24-bit files Using the main menu Control keys Viewing and colour adjustment Printing Conversion Dithering Getting file information Cropping Reversing Transforming Special effects Scanning Configuration Runtime editing Screen driver selection Printer driver selection DesqView, QEMM and other environments Script language Ventura tricks Corel Draw tricks A word about memory A word about resources If you encounter a problem Installing Graphic Workshop in Windows 3 Contacting Alchemy Mindworks Inc. Shareware registration Bundling Graphic Workshop Source code and books Graphic Workshop accessory disk Shareware distributors Revision history Legal dogma INTRODUCTION ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ Graphic Workshop is a program for working with computer bitmapped graphic files. It will handle most of the popular formats, as listed in the contents section of this file. Graphic workshop is a simple, menu driven environment which will let you perform the following operations on the aforementioned files. - View them. - Convert between any two formats (with a few restrictions). - Print them to any LaserJet Plus compatible or PostScript laser and many dot matrix printers. Graphic Workshop can print colour pictures to colour PostScript and inkjet printers. - Dither the colour ones to black and white. - Reverse them. - Rotate and flip them. - Scale them. - Reduce the number of colours in them and do colour dithering. - Sharpen, soften and otherwise wreak special effects on them. - Crop them down to smaller files - Scan in completely new files, assuming that you have a supported scanner. - Adjust the brightness and colour balance of the colour ones. Using Graphic Workshop, you can have your image files in the formats that your software recognizes, all without keeping track of numerous funky utilities. In addition, using the halftoning and dithering facilities of Graphic Workshop, you can convert full colour digitized photographs for use as superb black and white clip art, suitable for inclusion in your documents. Graphic Workshop will handle image files of any size. It will use extended or expanded memory if you have some, and disk space if you don't. It has a fast and easily understood user interface. Hopefully, it lacks even the merest vestiges of bugs... a likely story, but we hope so. Graphic Workshop will drive all of the popular display cards. A complete discussion of display cards can be found later in this document. As it comes out of the box... or out of the ZIP... Graphic Workshop is configured like as follows. If you want to change some of these parameters, see the installation section of this document. - It attempts to autodetect the display card type. - It uses virtual memory. - It uses colour text. - It prints titles on its hard copy. - It uses the commonly required file format defaults. HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ Graphic Workshop will run on any PC compatible system with at least 384 kilobytes of memory. We strongly recommend that you have at least 640 kilobytes. A few megabytes of extended or expanded memory will make Graphic Workshop a lot faster and more useful if you'll be working with large files. In the absence of extra memory, a lot of free hard drive space will help. Graphic Workshop can drive most graphics cards. A more complete discussion of graphics cards can be found later in this document. If you have a CGA, EGA, stock VGA or Hercules card in your system, Graphic Workshop will probably be able to detect it and set itself up accordingly. If you have a super-VGA card in your system, Graphic Workshop must be configured to use it. If you do not do this, it will default to treating it as a stock VGA card. Configuration is discussed in detail later in this document. Graphic Workshop will run under DOS 2.0 or better. We recommend that you use at least DOS 3.3. You will need a suitable expanded or extended memory driver in your system for Graphic Workshop to recognize your extra memory. You should have received the following files in the Graphic Workshop package: - GWS.EXE - The Graphic Workshop program itself. - GWS.RES - The Graphic Workshop resource file. - GWS.DOC - Yes, you're reading it now. - GWSDRV.RES - All the super-VGA screen drivers. - GWSPDR.RES - All the dot matrix printer drivers. - GWSSCN.RES - All the scanner drivers. - GWSINSTL.EXE - The Graphic Workshop configuration utility. - RMOVER.EXE - A general resource manager. - EXAMPLE1.IMG - A monochrome picture file. - EXAMPLE2.GIF - A sixteen-colour picture file. - EXAMPLE3.GIF - A 256-colour picture file. There is no EXAMPLE4, a 24-bit picture file, as the smallest one we could find ran to over 400 kilobytes. There are several 24-bit files on our bulletin board, should you want one to look at. Note that EXAMPLE3.GIF has a comment block. You can use the Details function of the F4 key to look at it. NEW FEATURES OF THE LEVEL SIX RELEASE ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ Graphic Workshop began life handling five file formats and doing relatively little. Now it handles over a dozen. As it grew, it started to get too big to be useful. Its former architecture also made handling things like 24-bit files very nearly impossible. This new release of Graphic Workshop has been re-written to use "resources". A resource is a data or code structure which lives in a disk file and is only called into memory when it's used. This is similar to the concept of overlays. The resources for Graphic Workshop live in a file called GWS.RES. There is a discussion of the management of the resources used by Graphic Workshop later in this document. You can ignore the details of Graphic Workshop's resources unless you're curious about these things. The code which is specific to the file formats which Graphic Workshop supports, its screen and printer drivers, many function- specific data structures and the message text for non-English language versions of Graphic Workshop are all stored as resources in this file. They're only called for when they're needed, which means that the amount of memory which is tied up by the code of Graphic Workshop itself is greatly reduced. This also means that new file formats can be added to Graphic Workshop fairly effortlessly, and without making the program itself any bigger. In addition, this has meant that all the file handling code has been re-written in assembly language. While something of an undertaking for us, this has resulted in Graphic Workshop doing almost everything a great deal faster. The new structure of Graphic Workshop has allowed it to acquire a lot of new features. Among these are: - Support for twenty-four bit Targa, BMP and TIFF files. - Support for colour printers. - Special effects. - More conversion and viewing options. - The ability to crop images - Scanner support - The ability to adjust the brightness and colour balance of colour images having between three and eight bits of colour. It seems worth noting that in rewriting Graphic Workshop this way, we were forced to abandon a lot of proven C code for brand new assembler code. While we've tested the software thoroughly, please watch for bugs. It's also worth noting that the new architecture of Graphic Workshop has meant the abandonment of several features formerly available in the package. We hope these turn out to be ones which weren't really being used very much... please get in touch with us if you really miss 'em. Specifically, the following things have changed: - A few IFF/LBM options have been removed. Graphic Workshop no longer creates Deluxe Paint preview images when it writes an LBM file, and images can no longer be padded out to fixed Amiga screen sizes. We're told that the current version of Deluxe Paint no longer complains when confronted by odd size files. - The mechanical halftoning features have been deleted. - You can no longer dither to the screen using the F3 dithering function. You can achieve the same result by holding down the left shift key when you view a file and then selecting the appropriate dither. The use of the left shift key while viewing will be discussed at greater length later in this document. - Graphic Workshop now supports a script language interface. This allows other applications which require some of the facilities of Graphic Workshop to invoke it without any of its menus appearing on the screen. - You can now reverse colour images, producing negatives. - You can dither, transform and scale all the formats Graphic Workshop supports, not just GIF files, as was previously the case. - Graphic Workshop is now a lot easier to configure. - You can now define custom screen colours. Note that in dealing with minor bugs in Graphic Workshop, we'll be releasing versions with new revision letters. You can see the current revision letter in the closing beg notice. It will not appear anywhere else in the program. FILE FORMATS ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ Graphic Workshop 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. Graphic Workshop does not support vector files, nor is it likely to in the immediate future. In most cases, the specifications for image files are pretty standardized, and Graphic Workshop will reliably import 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. 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 field in GWSINSTL. 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: 8 ────────────────────────────────────── 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. Graphic Workshop supports files with up to 256 levels of grey. 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 Graphic Workshop. GIF FILES - MAXIMUM BITS: 8 ────────────────────────────────── These can range from monochrome to 256-colour images in any size you can find 'em. Graphic Workshop supports both the 87a and 89a versions of the GIF standard. It will read the first image of GIF files having multiple images. The Details function of the Get Info box will display the entire structure of a GIF file. Many newer GIF files contain text information along with their images. TIFF FILES - MAXIMUM BITS: 24 ──────────────────────────────────── The TIFF options in 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. Registered users of Graphic Workshop are welcome to contact us for help in unraveling the TIFF options if needs be. Graphic workshop supports monochrome, colour and grey scale TIFF files. Grey scale TIFF files can be created by converting any colour format into TIFF with Graphic Workshop set up to produce grey scale TIFF files, either through GWSINSTL 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, Graphic Workshop 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, Graphic Workshop 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 Graphic Workshop 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 Graphic Workshop 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 Graphic Workshop 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. 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. 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 F4 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. 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. 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 Graphic Workshop 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 Graphic Workshop, 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 Graphic Workshop. 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 Graphic Workshop if you like. Note that Graphic Workshop 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 Graphic Workshop 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. Graphic Workshop 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 Graphic Workshop 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. You might want to read the discussion of images with 24-bit colour elsewhere in this document. There are a lot of variations on TGA files, and Graphic Workshop does not handle them all as yet. Specifically, it only handles uncompressed and run length compressed files. It ignores all alpha channel information. EPS FILES - MAXIMUM BITS: 8 ────────────────────────────────── The EPS format... encapsulated PostScript... isn't really a bitmapped format at all. However, it may contain bitmapped data. PostScript cannot be interpreted directly by most PC applications. As such, an EPS file which is to be imported into an application such as Ventura Publisher or PageMaker also includes a "preview". A preview is a small black and white TIFF image which will show you a rough idea of what the EPS file will look like. If you import an EPS file into Ventura, for example, the screen image you see will be the preview but the data printed to your printer will be the PostScript data itself. Graphic Workshop can transform other file formats with between one and eight bits of colour information... between two and 256 colours... into EPS files. Images with more than two colours will be turned into PostScript halftones. If you attempt to view or otherwise read an EPS file from within Graphic Workshop, you will see the preview image, not the actual PostScript data. This will look the same as the source data if you have translated a monochrome file to EPS, and it will look like a very coarse Bayer dither of the source otherwise. Please note that the EPS files which Graphic Workshop creates are only intended to be printed. You cannot read them into applications such as Corel Draw or Adobe Illustrator. These applications will not accept the large mounts of bitmapped data which a Graphic Workshop EPS file contains. For the most part, using EPS files in this way is no longer necessary. Applications which import EPS files will usually allow you to import TIFF files as well, which will provide you with much better halftoning and screen control. If you tell Graphic Workshop to include a preview image in the EPS files it creates, it will write a temporary file to your disk while it's writing the actual PostScript data. You will note that the bar graph will pause for a while at the end of its travel during the write process. 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 EPS files with preview images considerably. Note that if you attempt to convert or print an EPS file under Graphic Workshop, the TIFF preview image will be read, not the actual EPS information. Note also that if you attempt to read an EPS file without a preview, Graphic Workshop will tell you that it has encountered a file read error. The EPS file itself may be fine... Graphic Workshop, however, can only read previews. EXE FILES (SELF DISPLAYING PICTURES) - MAXIMUM BITS: 8 ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── You can convert images with 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. 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 F4 key 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. In order for an EXE picture to display, the system which you attempt to run it on must have a card which supports enough colours to show the picture under Graphic Workshop. Specifically, you will need a VGA card to display an EXE picture with 256 colours, at least an EGA card to display one with 16 colours and so on. EXE picture files support CGA, EGA, VGA and Hercules cards only. Pictures displayed by converting them to EXE files and running them can't be panned around, even if they're larger than your screen. Hitting any key will return you to DOS. An EXE picture created by Graphic Workshop will attempt to autodetect the display card type in the machine it's run on. Some cards are sufficinetly weird that this isn't always possible. The VGA cards in PS/2 systems are an example of this... IBMs are no longer really IBM compatible in this regard. To get around this, you can run EXE pictures with display card command line overrides. These are the command line switches an EXE picture will accept: /CGA - Assume there's a CGA card in the system. /EGA - Assume there's an EGA card in the system. /VGA - Assume there's a VGA card in the system. /HER - Assume there's a Hercules card in the system. /VER - Display the version number of the EXE file. If you run an EXE picture with a question mark as its command line argument, it will display a list of its command line switches, just like Graphic Workshop itself. The command line switches assume that you're using DOS 3.0 or better. Note that EXE pictures will not support your super VGA card. The best resolution you'll see them in is 320 by 200 pixels in the 256-colour mode. You can create EXE picture files either compressed or uncompressed. This can be selected either permanently through GWSINSTL or by using the appropriate command line switches when you run GWS.EXE. Uncompressed files display quickly but take up a lot of disk space. Compressed files usually save space but display a bit slower. Note that especially in complex scanned or dithered images, you might find that compression actually results in a larger file than leaving an image uncompressed. If you don't have need of self booting pictures, you might wish to remove the EXE resource from Graphic Workshop's resource file, as it will cause the main file finder screen to become cluttered with other, unrelated EXE files which may be lying around your directories. One EXE file looks pretty much like another until Graphic Workshop attempts to unpack it. See the section on resources for help in doing this. TXT FILES (TEXT FILES) - MAXIMUM BITS: 1 ─────────────────────────────────────────────── Graphic Workshop will create a 640 by 400 pixel, two colour image from any ASCII text file. The text will by truncated at 80 columns and 25 lines if exceeds either dimension. 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. Note that a suitable text file must be in pure ASCII, not a proprietary word processor format. It must have the extension TXT. Note that the TXT format is only capable of reading files. You cannot write a TXT file from Graphic Workshop... there's no sensible way for Graphic Workshop to create a text file from a graphic. Note that as long as you're attempting to read files, you can treat text files just like other monochrome graphic files from within Graphic Workshop. As such, you can view them, convert from TXT and so on. As with the EXE file format, you might wish to remove the TXT resource from Graphic Workshop if you don't need it and find it's causing a lot of spurious TXT files to be displayed in the Graphic Workshop file finder screen... assuming you use the TXT extension for something. See the section about resources for help in doing this. HALO CUT FILES - 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 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 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. If you're using CUT files and have any suggestions to improve Graphic Workshop'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. 24-BIT FILES ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ Most of the image file formats commonly found in use on a PC which support colour do so using a palette structure, as this is the way most PC full colour display cards work. An image stored in a palette structure file will have a maximum of 256 unique colours, drawn from a potential palette of 16 million. In fact, a VGA card can only support a potential palette of about a quarter of a million colours. There is some theoretical loss in colour resolution in displaying, say, a GIF file on a VGA card. For practical purposes this colour arrangement is sufficient to reproduce pretty convincing colour photographs. However, for a number of reasons, high end photographic manipulation software, colour separation software and so on works better with a non- palette image, one in which every pixel is represented as a distinct colour. In these images, every pixel consists of three bytes of colour information, one each for the red, green and blue components of the pixel's colour. Such pictures are referred to as RGB or 24-bit pictures. Among the formats which currently support 24-bit images are Targa, PCX, BMP and TIFF. Viewing a 24-bit image on a PC equipped with a VGA or super-VGA card presents Graphic Workshop with something of a problem. Such an image can have up to sixteen million different colours in it, while a VGA card can support only 256 different colours at a time. In order to deal with 24-bit images, Graphic Workshop must "quantize" and then "dither" them. Quantizing a 24-bit image involves finding the 256 most unique colours in the image. Dithering involves replacing each RGB pixel in the image with a palette value which is more or less the same colour, allowing for the limitations of a 256 colour format. In addition, dithering adjusts the colours of surrounding pixels to make the image as a whole look as much like the original 24-bit image as possible. If you attempt to view a 24-bit image on a system equipped with an EGA or VGA card, a menu will appear to ask you how you'd like the 24-bit file to be handled. You can display it as a grey scale image if you just want to see what the picture looks like. This is the fastest way to view such a picture. Alternately, you can choose one of the three colour dithering options... the Floyd dither is the fastest of them. This will actually dither the picture down to eight colours, but the results are quite respectable for previewing. Note, however, that the eight colour screen dither has been designed to be reasonably fast, rather than accurate. When you create a 256-colour dither, as discussed in the next paragraph, the results will be a whole lot nicer to look at. In order to convert a 24-bit image into a palette based format... for example, to convert a 24-bit PCX file into a GIF file... you must use the colour reduction function of the F9 special effects key. This will perform a full 256-colour dither, which will usually result in a 256-colour image which is almost as good as the original 24-bit image was. The colour reduction function also contains options to allow you to reduce a 24-bit file to lesser numbers of colours. Choosing fewer than 256 colours will produce a smaller file in some cases, but it will also leave you with a less faithful representation of your original colour image. The fixed eight colour option will produce a destination image file dithered the same way as the eight colour screen preview. These files have a fixed eight colour palette with the colours black, cyan, magenta, yellow, red, green, blue and white. It's also worth noting that this is the same dither used to print files to impact and inkjet colour printers, such as the Hewlett- Packard PaintJet. A fixed eight colour dither will look more or less like the colour hard copy from one of these printers. A WORD ABOUT MEMORY ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ Graphic Workshop will use whatever memory you have going. If you ask it to do something which needs a large amount of memory, it will try to use your normal DOS memory, which is fastest. If there isn't enough DOS memory, it will use extra memory. There are three sorts of "extra" memory which Graphic Workshop can use, to wit, extended, expanded and virtual. Extended memory is also called XMS memory, and is only available on AT and 386 systems. Expanded memory, also called EMS or LIM memory, is available if you have a LIM board and driver in your machine. Virtual memory means using a big disk file and making believe it's memory. Virtual memory is very slow compared to real memory. You must tell Graphic Workshop what to do about extra memory when you install it. See the section on installation. In addition to the three foregoing types of extra memory, Graphic Workshop can be configured to use "extended or virtual" or "expanded or virtual" memory. If one of these options is chosen, Graphic Workshop will attempt to allocate a buffer from extended or expanded memory if it can't do so with DOS memory. If it's unable to allocate a buffer in extra memory, it will switch to virtual memory and see if its luck improves. If there's no room for a virtual memory buffer, it will give up and return an error saying that it can't allocate memory. By default, Graphic Workshop configured to use virtual memory will use the current drive and directory to write its temporary files. You can change this by adding a line to your environment with the SET command such as: TEMP=H:\ In this case, any virtual memory temporary files which Graphic Workshop wants to create will be written to the root of drive H:. If you have a RAM disk, you should use the TEMP environment variable to tell Graphic Workshop to use it for virtual memory operations, as this will speed things up considerably. Graphic Workshop can run in restricted memory, such as that which is found on a really old PC or when running "shelled out" of another program. However, it can do nasty things when it's really starved for memory. Some virtual memory operations will not work in this condition, and if it's really stuck for RAM... if there's only a few tens of kilobytes free... it may manage to crash. Try not to run it when there's almost no room left for it to store things. The help menu will tell you how much memory is free. As is discussed elsewhere in this document in the section on resources, Graphic Workshop frequently swaps blocks of code and data in and out of memory. In addition to the memory required for your pictures, Graphic Workshop must have memory to manage its resources and to allocate small scratch buffers. This is called memory "overhead". It's possible for Graphic Workshop to allocate a lot of DOS memory for a picture file and subsequently be unable to allocate enough memory for the resource which will manipulate the picture. To avoid this situation, Graphic Workshop reserves a fixed amount of memory for its own use before it attempts to allocate an image buffer. The amount of this fixed memory is adjustable through the GWSINSTL program, as is discussed in the section on installation. As it's set in the distribution version of the software, it should be adequate for all the operations the package can perform. There are a few hypothetical cases in which this might not prove true, for example, in unpacking enormously wide GIF files. If you run into problems with allocating scratch buffers or resource buffers, try increasing the memory overhead. Note that Graphic Workshop comes configured to use virtual memory. Use GWSINSTL to change this when you're sure what sort of extra memory is in your system. Finally, note that in order to access the extended or expanded memory in your system, Graphic Workshop must be able to locate a suitable extended or expanded memory driver. Simply having several megabytes of chips on your motherboard will not make that memory accessible unless you have the appropriate driver in place and working. A WORD ABOUT RESOURCES ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ The GWS.RES file is a list of resources. Resources are unrelated bits of data and code which Graphic Workshop might need. These could have been kept as separate files, but keeping them all in GWS.RES makes them easier to manage, requires less space on your hard drive and allows Graphic Workshop to get at them more rapidly. Among the things in GWS.RES are all the code to handle specific file formats, screen and printer drivers, the PostScript code to print pictures and numerous small code and data objects which Graphic Workshop uses. In order to work with resources you'll need RMOVER.EXE, which is included with the package. RMOVER allows you to add resource files together, to extract resources from a file, to delete resources from a file and to list all the resources in a file. Ordinarily you will not require RMOVER, and you probably will never want to modify GWS.RES. If you do, please make sure that you keep a copy of the original GWS.RES file somewhere. It's not hard to make mistakes with RMOVER, and once a resource has been deleted, it can't be brought back to life. The primary use of RMOVER, if you use it at all, will be to delete the EXE and TXT file format handlers from GWS.RES if you don't want them, and possibly to install patches into Graphic Workshop, should any prove necessary in the future. You can safely skip this section if you like. LISTING RESOURCES ──────────────────────── Let's begin with the simplest function of RMOVER, listing the resources in a resource file. GWS.RES is a resource file. To see what was in it, you would do this. RMOVER GWS /L You would see something like the following list for the GWS.RES file which comes with the distribution version of Graphic Workshop. Resource mover version 1.1 - copyright (c) 1990 Alchemy Mindworks Inc. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Description: Resource file created by RMOVER 30 resource(s) _____________________ Rsrc 0000 - type:INIT - nmbr:000000000 - 00743 bytes Rsrc 0001 - type:IFMT - nmbr:000000000 - 03252 bytes MAC (MacPaint) Rsrc 0002 - type:IFMT - nmbr:000000001 - 04213 bytes GEM/IMG (Ventura) Rsrc 0003 - type:IFMT - nmbr:000000002 - 06195 bytes PCX (PC Paintbrush) Rsrc 0004 - type:IFMT - nmbr:000000003 - 26342 bytes GIF (CompuServe) Rsrc 0005 - type:IFMT - nmbr:000000004 - 05198 bytes BMP (Windows 3) Rsrc 0006 - type:IFMT - nmbr:000000005 - 07433 bytes IFF/LBM (Amiga) Rsrc 0007 - type:IFMT - nmbr:000000006 - 04548 bytes TGA (Truevision Targa) Rsrc 0008 - type:IFMT - nmbr:000000007 - 02870 bytes MSP (Microsoft Paint) Rsrc 0009 - type:IFMT - nmbr:000000008 - 05897 bytes WPG (WordPerfect) Rsrc 0010 - type:IFMT - nmbr:000000009 - 06915 bytes PIC (PC Paint/Pictor) Rsrc 0011 - type:IFMT - nmbr:000000010 - 15560 bytes TIFF Rsrc 0012 - type:IFMT - nmbr:000000011 - 10158 bytes EXE (Self displaying) Rsrc 0013 - type:IFMT - nmbr:000000012 - 06195 bytes TXT (Text files) Rsrc 0014 - type:IFMT - nmbr:000000013 - 12466 bytes EPS (PostScript) Rsrc 0015 - type:SCRD - nmbr:000000000 - 00672 bytes Rsrc 0016 - type:GRAF - nmbr:000000001 - 00342 bytes Colour Graphics Rsrc 0017 - type:GRAF - nmbr:000000003 - 01236 bytes Enhanced Graphics Rsrc 0018 - type:GRAF - nmbr:000000002 - 01705 bytes Standard VGA 320 x 200 Rsrc 0019 - type:GRAF - nmbr:000000007 - 01169 bytes Hercules Graphics Rsrc 0022 - type:RMAP - nmbr:000000001 - 00256 bytes Rsrc 0023 - type:RMAP - nmbr:000000002 - 00256 bytes Rsrc 0024 - type:PSHD - nmbr:000000001 - 00380 bytes Rsrc 0025 - type:PSHD - nmbr:000000002 - 00565 bytes Rsrc 0026 - type:PSHD - nmbr:000000003 - 00585 bytes Rsrc 0027 - type:PSHD - nmbr:000000004 - 00404 bytes Rsrc 0028 - type:PSHD - nmbr:000000005 - 00589 bytes Rsrc 0029 - type:PSHD - nmbr:000000006 - 00608 bytes Rsrc 0030 - type:SCPT - nmbr:000000001 - 01050 bytes Rsrc 0031 - type:REGN - nmbr:000000001 - 00967 bytes DELETING RESOURCES ───────────────────────── This is how you would delete a resource from GWS.RES with RMOVER. Let's delete the IFMT resource for EXE files. This resource is used for reading and writing self displaying pictures. You might want to delete it from your copy of GWS.RES if you don't want to work with self displaying pictures and find that having all sorts of other EXE files turn up in Graphic Workshop's file list is inconvenient. This has resource number 11. RMOVER GWS /D /TIFMT /N11 The /D switch tells RMOVER to delete a resource, /T switch tells it the type of the resource to delete and the /N switch tells it the number of the resource to delete. Note that the argument for the T switch is case sensitive. EXTRACTING RESOURCES ─────────────────────────── This is how you would extract a resource from GWS.RES, that is, to copy it from GWS.RES to a separate resource file of its own. Extracted resources live in resource files having one resource. You could later add such a resource to another resource file. In this example, we'll extract the GRAF resource for Hercules cards. Note that this will not delete it from GWS.RES. RMOVER GWS /E /TGRAF /N7 /FHERCULES.RES The /T and /N switches work as before. The /E switch tells RMOVER to extract a resource. The /F switch tells it the name of the file to put the extracted resource in. This file... HERCULES.RES... will be deleted if it exists and a new one created. ADDING RESOURCES ─────────────────────── This is how you would add a resource to GWS.RES. In this example we'll add IFMT_XXX.RES to GWS.RES. This is the handler resource for a hypothetical new file format, presumably having the extension XXX. RMOVER GWS /A /FIFMT_XXX.RES The /A switch tells RMOVER to add a resource. Note that all the resources in the file indicated by the /F switch will be added to GWS.RES. IF YOU ENCOUNTER A PROBLEM ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ While we have tested Graphic Workshop thoroughly, it's possible that you may encounter a situation we hadn't anticipated, and perhaps a file which will not read. If this happens, we would be interested in knowing about it so we can deal with it in the next release of Graphic Workshop. Here's how to report a problem to us. Problems should be reported using a 5 1/4 inch disk. We can't accept 3 1/2 inch microfloppies for problem reports. Alternately, upload the relevant files to our bulletin board. The bulletin board is discussed in the section on contacting Alchemy Mindworks. Copy your CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files onto a floppy. Include a screen dump of each page of GWSINSTL as it was set up when the problem occurred. Alternately, write down the settings. Copy the image files which resulted in the problem and provide a description of what you did and what happened. If we can't recreate it, we probably won't be able to fix it. Before you contact us with a problem in Graphic Workshop, please make sure you've read this document thoroughly and that you understand how the software should work. Many problem reports which receive aren't problems with the software at all. USING THE MAIN MENU ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ Graphic Workshop always shows you all the names of the image files it knows how to deal with in the current directory, along with all the visible subdirectory names, if any are present. If you are in a subdirectory, you will also see a subdirectory entry which is two periods. The cursor mover keys will move the file selector bar around. If you move it to a directory entry... shown in dim text... and hit Enter, you will move into that directory. If you select the two period entry, you will move back up your directory tree by one step. If there are too many files in your current directory to see all at once, Graphic Workshop will organize them into pages. The PgUp and PgDn keys will step you through the pages. Here are the keys which Graphic Workshop recognizes for basic file handling and session functions: Hitting the question mark will cause Graphic Workshop to display a menu of the keys which control the main file screen of Graphic Workshop. This box also tells you how much free DOS memory is available, the display card you have Graphic Workshop configured to use and the type of extra memory it's set up for. The Esc key will allow you to quit Graphic Workshop and return to DOS. If you hit "T" the currently selected file name will be "tagged". The "U" key will untag it. The batch operations described below will work with multiple files if you have some of them tagged. If you hit "C", all the tags will be cleared. Note that for the graphic functions of Graphic Workshop... the ones accessed by the function keys... the currently selected file will be processed if there are no tagged files. Otherwise, each of the tagged files will be processed in turn. If you hit "L" Graphic Workshop will allow you to log in a new disk drive. A box will appear prompting you for the drive letter you want to log into. If you hit "D" you will be prompted to delete the current file. Note that this is not a batch command... it only works on one file at a time. If you hit "R" you can rename the current file. Note that it the renamed file will have the same extension as the old one, no matter what extension you give it. If you hit "S", Graphic Workshop will attempt to shell out to the DOS prompt. If you do this, Graphic Workshop will still be in memory. Type EXIT at the DOS prompt to return to it right where you left off. If you change drives or subdirectories while you have the DOS prompt active, Graphic Workshop will restore the previous drive and subdirectory when you return to it. The alphabetic control keys can be upper or lower case. Other keys will be ignored. VIEWING FILES AND ADJUSTING COLOUR ───────────────────────────────────────── If you place the selector bar on a file name and hit Enter, Graphic Workshop will attempt to show you the file. It will start by showing you a wait box, which has a bar graph in it to indicate the status of what you've asked Graphic Workshop to do. When the picture is fully unpacked, Graphic Workshop will switch to your display card's graphic mode and show you the picture. You can always abort any operation when the wait box is visible by hitting the Esc key. If the picture is larger than your screen, the cursor keys will allow you to pan around it. Normally you will pan around in small increments. If you hold down either shift key when you hit a cursor key, you will move around in increments of half your screen dimensions. Esc will return you to the main screen. If the Ctrl key is held down when a file is selected for viewing, you can control the screen mode it's displayed in... assuming that your display card has more than one display mode. If your card is supported by a driver of version 2.0 or lower, holding down the Ctrl key will force the screen into its lowest resolution mode. For example, if you're looking at a 256-colour picture on a super VGA card, holding down the Ctrl key will force the screen into the 320 by 200 pixel standard VGA mode. If you're using a driver of version 2.1 or better, holding down the Ctrl key will cause a menu to appear offering you a choice of the available display modes with the most appropriate one highlighted. Select a mode and hit Enter or hit Esc to let Graphic Workshop select the most appropriate mode, that is, what it would have done had you not held down the Ctrl key. Note that you must take your finger off the Ctrl key before you try to move the menu item selector. Note also that the Ctrl key must be held down when you hit Enter to select a file... you can release it thereafter. The menu will not appear until the wait bar finishes its travel. You can see what version your screen driver is by looking in the "?" box from the main menu. Also, be aware that some drivers only have one screen mode available. In this case, no menu will appear. Several things can go wrong in viewing a file. If you have installed Graphic Workshop for the wrong kind of display card, you might see random characters rather than a picture. In this case, check your installation. If Graphic Workshop could not find enough memory to unpack your picture into, it will abort the process and say so. Finally, if your picture requires more colours than your card can display, Graphic Workshop will tell you this. Specifically, it will pop up a menu which will ask you how you want it to deal with the colour problem. The available options will vary with the type of display adapter you're using and the number of colours in your source image. You can force this menu to appear when you view an image by holding down the left Shift key when you hit the Enter key. You might wish to do this to view some pictures in ways other than a normal displayed. For example, you can preview an image dithered this way. This is what the menu options do: Display normally ---------------------- This will display the picture as if you hadn't reached this menu. This option will always be disabled if the menu pops up by itself. Display as grey --------------------- This is the fastest way to see what a picture with too many colours looks like. It will show you the image in grey scale. Remap fixed ----------------- This will remap an image down to a fixed sixteen colour palette. It's very crude but fairly fast. Remap quantized --------------------- This will remap an image down to the best sixteen colour palette. It's also pretty crude but fairly fast. Bayer dither mono ----------------------- Floyd dither mono ----------------------- Burkes dither mono ------------------------ Stucki dither mono ------------------------ These four options will dither your image down to monochrome. You might want to see the discussion on dithering later in this document to better understand them. Threshold --------------- This will display your image as a high contrast black and white picture. Floyd dither colour ------------------------- Burkes dither colour -------------------------- Stucki dither colour -------------------------- These three options will display your image as a fixed eight- colour dither. It's a pretty reasonable representation of a colour image for a quick 'n nasty preview. Dithering a 24-bit file down 256 colours will result in a much better display, but it will take considerably longer. It's worth noting that this dither is the same as the one used to print colour images to colour inkjet and colour dot matrix printers... you can use it to see what hard copy sent to these devices will look like. Display reversed ---------------------- This option will display your image reversed. Colour images will appear as negatives. In the sixteen and 256 colour display modes, you can make adjustments to the VGA colour palette while a picture is being displayed. The 'r' and 'R' keys will increase and decrease the amount of red in a picture, the 'g' and 'G' keys will adjust the amount of green, the 'b' and 'B' keys will adjust the amount of blue. The 'i' and 'I' keys will adjust the overall intensity of the picture. The '=' key will return the picture to its normal state. Note that these adjustments only affect the original picture that you're viewing... they do not alter the palette in the file on your disk unless you save the changes to a new file. If you hold down the left shift key when you hit the Esc key to leave the view mode, a file format menu will pop up. Select a format and you can save the file you've viewed and adjusted the colours of. The new file will be saved with "A_" before the file name... if your viewed and adjusted PICTURE.GIF, it would be saved as "A_PICTUR.GIF". In fact, you can have it saved as any suitable file type. If you hit the Esc key when the file format menu pops up your new file will not be saved. PRINTING - F1 ──────────────────── You can print to any sort of LaserJet Plus compatible printer with one megabyte of memory or more or any sort of PostScript printer. You can print to any dot matrix or inkjet printer which is supported by a Graphic Workshop external printer driver. Note that if you attempt to print PostScript data to a LaserJet or a dot matrix printer you'll get reams of meaningless ASCII text. Graphic Workshop comes with built in PostScript and LaserJet print drivers. This includes colour PostScript and LaserJet II and III series printers. You only need an external print driver if you wish to print to a dot matrix or inkjet printer. Graphic Workshop allows you to print a picture in four resolution modes to laser printers. These allow you to print your pictures in four possible sizes. You might want to experiment with them to see what they can do. If you want your picture to fill as much of the printed page as possible, select the appropriate autosize mode. This will cause Graphic Workshop to choose the resolution and orientation which is most appropriate for each picture you print. Note that it will still select one of the four available resolutions, so your picture probably will not print right to the edge of the page. Colour and grey scale pictures printed to black and white PostScript printers will be reproduced as halftones. If you attempt to print a colour or grey scale picture to a LaserJet or dot matrix printer, the image will be dithered for you. The dither type is set using GWSINSTL. You might want to consult the section on dithering elsewhere in this document to help you choose a suitable dither. Colour images can be printed in colour to a colour PostScript device and to a colour inkjet or dot matrix printer with a suitable driver. Colour PostScript printing can be enabled through GWSINSTL or with the appropriate command line switches. As of this writing, the only colour non-PostScript driver available is for the Hewlett-Packard PaintJet and Kodak Diconix inkjet printers. Laser output can be printed in either portrait or landscape mode. You can set this up using GWSINSTL or the appropriate command line switches. Note that if you print to a PostScript printer in landscape mode, the printer itself will rotate the image data. This isn't actually all that fast for many printers. If you have a lot of images to print in landscape mode, you'll probably find that it's quicker to have Graphic Workshop rotate them and then print the rotated files. The orientation setting has no effect for dot matrix printing. You can print to ports LPT1, LPT2 or LPT3. The default printer port can be set up using GWSINSTL or the appropriate command line switches. Note that the printer port settings are ignored by external printer drivers. All of the standard dot matrix and inkjet drivers included with Graphic Workshop print to LPT1. You can cause Graphic Workshop to print to a file, rather than directly to the disk, by using the appropriate command line switch. The command line switches are discussed elsewhere in this document. Print files are named using the name of your source image file and the extension PRN. Note that you can only print to a file for laser printer output. Dot matrix and inkjet drivers will ignore the print to file switch. Each page of Graphic Workshop output can include any combination of data about the picture on it you like. See the installation section for more information about enabling this feature. The size and resolution of dot matrix printing is determined by the driver being used. Note that if you have a printer for which there is no driver available, one of the Epson FX-80 drivers will probably work, as most dot matrix printers support the Epson FX-80 standard. The print might not be as good as your printer can manage, but it'll be better than a blank sheet of paper. Printing is a batch function. If you tag multiple files and then hit F1, each will be printed. CONVERTING - F2 ────────────────────── Graphic Workshop allows you to convert a file of any format into a file 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.MAC into an IMG file will create PICTURE.IMG. PICTURE.MAC 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 simply be ignored. The ongoing status will appear at the bottom of the screen. You cannot convert pictures having more bits of colour than the destination format can handle. For example, you cannot convert a 24-bit Targa file directly to an 8-bit GIF file. You would have to use the F9 colour reduction facility to do this. Likewise, to convert a colour file to a monochrome one, you'd have to use the F3 dithering function. There are a few other useful things to note about conversion. You can't convert to TXT files. You can convert from EXE files, provided they were created by Graphic Workshop. You can convert from EPS files, but the resulting image will be the monochrome TIFF preview, and probably won't look very good. You can't convert from files which Graphic Workshop won't read. For example, you can't convert from a vector WPG file. DITHERING - F3 ───────────────────── 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 one bit of colour information. 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 if you have enough memory. You can see what an image will look like dithered by using the view options menu in the view mode. Note that the F3 function only dithers to monochrome. Colour dithering is handled by one of the functions of the F9 key. Dithering is a fairly slow process, and the better the dithering algorithm, the slower it gets. Big files and really good dithering can take half an hour or more on a slower computer, although the results are usually worth it. At its best, dithering can look better than halftoning, and a dithered file can be printed on both PostScript and LaserJet printers. Dithered files sent to a PostScript printer will print faster than halftoned files. If you have Graphic Workshop dither a file, it will create a new file for you of the type selected and with "D_" before the name. Thus PICTURE.GIF could be dithered to D_PICTUR.IMG, for example. PICTURE.GIF would be left untouched. The simplest... and fastest... form of dithering is a Bayer dither. This does not produce great results, but it's extremely quick. The remaining three dithering algorithms use what is called "error diffusion". These produce really nice looking dithers, but they're quite slow. 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, UD... unidirectional... and BD... 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. Dithering scans an image line by line, starting in the upper left corner and working down to the lower right corner. For this reason, you will find that if you rotate an image by ninety degrees, dither it and then rotate the dithered version by a further two hundred and seventy degrees, you'll get different results than you would have had you dithered the original image. Dithering is a batch function. You can tag a number of files and then set them up to dither unattended. GET INFO - F4 ──────────────────── This box will show you some basic information about one or more selected files. Among other things, it will tell you how much memory the file needs to unpack into. You can use this number to figure out whether the file in question will fit in your available DOS memory or whether extra memory will be required, as was discussed previously. The amount of available DOS memory is available by hitting the "?" key from within the main screen. Having said this, it's worth mentioning that this number actually represents the lowest memory requirement for the image in question. Some functions will require significantly more memory. The last field in the Get Info box displays the file comments if there were any. The comments vary from format to format. In some cases, having nothing better to say, they'll tell you what software created the file. Some file formats actually contain a lot more information than can be displayed in the normal Get Info box. 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 sort of optional information for formats which support it by using the "details" option of the F4 box when it's available. The arrow keys will scroll you through the detail window. Details are available, for example, if you get information about GIF, TIFF or IFF/LBM files. Note that the Get Info and details information for EPS files actually pertain to the TIFF preview. You may need some external assistance in fully interpreting the details. CROPPING - F5 ──────────────────── This function will prompt you for a destination file type and then display your selected file on a dithered monochrome cropping screen. Your image will be scaled to fit the screen, no matter how big it is in real life. Initially, the exterior of the image will be framed by a cropping box. If you hold down the left shift key, the four arrow keys will adjust the upper left corner of the box. Note that you'll have to use the down and right keys before the up and left keys will do anything. If you hold down the right shift key, the arrow keys will move the lower right corner of the box. If you hit the Home key, the box will snap back to its original position. The co-ordinates of the upper left and lower right corners as well as the dimensions of the cropped fragment will be displayed at the top of the screen. If you hit F10, your cropped fragment will be written to a new file. The file will have the name of your original file with "C_" appended to the front of it and the extension of the destination format you selected. If you hit Esc no destination file will be written. The cropping function requires a revision two screen driver. Most of the current Graphic Workshop screen drivers will work... a few of the unusual ones may not have been updated. The revision level of revision two drivers can be found in the screen driver installation screen of GWSINSTL. Cropping is a batch function. Note that if you use Esc to abort one cropped file in a batch, the rest of the batch will be aborted. REVERSE - F6 ─────────────────── This function will create a reversed version of any image file. The new file will have the same name as the original file, with "R_" appended to the front of it. Thus, reversing PICTURE.MAC will leave you with R_PICTUR.MAC. If you reverse a colour image, you'll get a colour negative. These look weird... we haven't found a use for them as yet. Reversing is a batch function. TRANSFORM - F7 ───────────────────── This key will pop up a menu offering you five image transformations. You can rotate an image in ninety degree increments and you can flip it horizontally or vertically. These functions work on images of any number of colours. Note that the ninety and two hundred and seventy degree rotation functions will take a very long time if your images are large and require the use of virtual memory... this assumes that you lack extended or expanded memory. Them's the breaks. Transformed images will be stored in files with "T_" in front of the names. Thus PICTURE.GIF will become T_PICTUR.GIF after any of the five transformations have been wrought upon it. If you rotate it and then flip the rotated image, for example, it will become T_T_PICT.GIF, and so on, with intermediate files along the way. Transforming is a batch function. SCALE - F8 ───────────────── This key will allow you to scale files from 25 to 500 percent. Your original files will not be altered when you scale them. New files with the prefix "S_" will be created. Thus, PICTURE.GIF will produce S_PICTUR.GIF after scaling. 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. Scaling is fairly time consuming. You should probably avoid scaling dithered monochrome pictures down. Nothing terribly bad will happen, but for reasons which will become obvious if you think about it, the results will almost always be really ugly. Note that the scaling percentage you enter determines the size of the destination image relative to the source image, not the actual percentage of scaling. Thus, entering 25 will produce a destination image which is 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 will be the same in both dimensions. If you hit F8 while the scaling box is visible, you will be able to enter independent horizontal and vertical values. Scaling is a batch function. SPECIAL EFFECTS - F9 ─────────────────────────── This function has a submenu which will allow you to access a number of special tools for working with colour image files under Graphic Workshop. All of these are batch functions. The destination files will have "X_" in front of their names. Note that these functions require substantial amounts of memory. Colour reduction ---------------------- This function allows you to 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 reducing 24-bit files down to 256-colour files. Whenever you reduce the number of colours in a file, some image information will get lost. The simplest form of colour reduction is "remapping". This simply 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 aren't usually very attractive. Colour dithering, also available in this function, 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. Grey scale ---------------- This function creates a grey scale destination image from a colour source image. The number of bits of colour will remain the same. Sharpen ------------- This function will create a destination image with more contrast than its source image. Soften ------------ This function will create a destination image with less contrast than its source image. This function is particularly useful for minimizing the effects of scanning moire patterns caused when you attempt to scan a previously screened original. In less technical terms, if you scan pictures of nude women from magazines, softening the image files will reduce the interference patterns. Smudge ------------ This function will create a destination image which looks like it's being viewed through water drops. Spatial posterization --------------------------- This function will create a destination image in which the image is made up of large square areas. This effect is similar to the one used by television news to obscure the faces of people whose identities are to be kept secret. Promote to 24 bits ------------------------ This function will create a 24-bit file with the same image information as a file with fewer colours. SCANNING - F10 ───────────────────── This function will inhale images into Graphic Workshop from a scanner, assuming that you loaded a suitable scanner driver when you installed the software. Note that scanner drivers are pretty specific to the scanners they're written for. The Scanjet Plus driver, for example, will only drive a Scanjet Plus and will be of no real use if you have a different sort of scanner. We will be creating more scanner drivers in time... check with the Alchemy Mindworks bulletin board for more information about new drivers. All the current drivers check to see if they're really connected to the scanners they were designed for. If you select the Scan function, a menu will pop up with the following functions: Scan ---------- This item will cause the current image to be scanned using the existing settings. Set mode -------------- This item will allow you to choose the number of bits of colour to scan your image with. Some of the options may be inaccessible, depending upon the capabilities of your scanner. Set area -------------- This item will allow you to have only a portion of your image scanned. In effect, it allows you to crop a coarse pre-scanned image and then applies this window to an image with higher resolution. See the section of cropping elsewhere in this document for instructions on using this window. Set resolution -------------------- This item will allow you to select the number of dots per inch at which your scanner will scan the current image. Test scanner ------------------ This item will allow you to make sure your scanner is still working properly. This test is performed every time you select the Scan function, so you need not perform it explicitly unless you think something has gone wrong. Check error ----------------- This item will display the most recent error message from your scanner. Most of the time this will be "No error". Get info -------------- This item will tell you how big a file your current image would create if it were to be scanned as well as the number of colours or grey levels it would contain. Note that the "Packed size" field of this box is largely meaningless. Reset scanner ------------------- This item will reset the scanner to its power-up defaults. It will also delete any image data you have in memory from a previous scan... be warned. Set intensity ------------------- This item will allow you to set the brightness of the current scan. It must be set prior to scanning. Set contrast ------------------ This item will allow you to set the contrast of the current scan. It must be set prior to scanning. Save file --------------- This item will allow you to select a format to save your current file in. It will then save it and return you to the main screen. Any formats which are incapable of supporting your current image will be inaccessible. Abort ----------- This item will leave the scanning menu without scanning or saving anything. If you have previously scanned an image which has not been saved it will ask if you want to save it before you go. The Esc key also works. Other options ------------------- The items after Save file in the scanning menu are defined by the scanner driver for your scanner. See your manual for more information about how to use them. As a rule, they default to safe values. SCRIPT LANGUAGE AND COMMAND LINE MODE ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ In addition to being run through its menus, Graphic Workshop can handle script files. A script file is a list of Graphic Workshop commands. Having been given a script file to work with, Graphic Workshop can perform a number of functions and then return to DOS or to the program which called it. The Graphic Workshop script language facility is primarily for use in situations in which another application wishes to call Graphic Workshop, have it convert, print, view or otherwise manipulate some files in the background and then return control to the program which called it. The Graphic Workshop script language and command line mode are discussed in detail in the documentation for the Graphic Workshop accessory disk, as found elsewhere in this document. CONFIGURATION ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ Making permanent changes to the modifiable features of Graphic Workshop involves using the installer, GWSINSTL.EXE. The configuration of Graphic Workshop is handled by a separate program in order to keep GWS.EXE as small as possible, leaving lots of memory for putting graphics in. The GWSINSTL program actually modifies GWS.EXE. In order for it to work, GWS.EXE and GWSINSTL.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 GWS.EXE, there is the outside chance that a bug in the installer might crop up and kill GWS.EXE beyond repair. Make sure you have a virgin copy of GWS.EXE somewhere before you use the installer. Place GWSINSTL.EXE and GWS.EXE in the same directory and type GWSINSTL. 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 GWSDRV.RES. The printer drivers are contained in a file called GWSPDR.RES. These files must be in the same directory as GWSINSTL for it to be able to find them. If one or both of them is missing, the corresponding options in the main screen of GWSINSTL will not be available. EDIT RUNTIME - F1 ──────────────────────── If you select this option, you'll see a screen which will allow you to fine tune Graphic Workshop'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 GWSINSTL 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 GWSINSTL menu. Note that these items can be overridden by using command line switches when you run GWS.EXE, should you need them set differently from time to time. Screen colours -------------------- This item allows you to set the screen colours. By default, there are two sets of screen colours, to wit, a colour set which is predominantly blue and a monochrome set. If you don't like either of these, hit F1 when the cursor is on this item to create a custom set. Memory type ----------------- Hit Enter when the cursor is on this item to move 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. Display type ------------------ This item allows you to select the type of video card your system will be using. It defaults to AUTODETECT, which will cause Graphic Workshop to attempt to figure out what sort of card is in your system. You may have to change this if you have a multiple mode card which causes it to guess incorrectly. You will have to change it if you have a super VGA card wish to use it in its higher resolution modes. If you have a super VGA card, set this field to SUPER VGA & OTHER and use the screen driver setup screen, discussed later in this section, to select a suitable driver. 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. See the section on printing elsewhere in this document for more information. Memory overhead (Kbytes) ------------------------------ This is an editable item. It selects the number of kilobytes of memory overhead which Graphic Workshop will reserve. See the section on memory elsewhere in this document for more information. Colour PostScript printing -------------------------------- This item selects whether to assume that your PostScript printer can print in colour. Default print dither -------------------------- This item selects the type of dithering to use if you attempt to print a colour or grey scale picture to a LaserJet or dot matrix printer. This defaults to BAYER, which is fast but ugly. Select one of the other options if you'd like better results. PostScript orientation ---------------------------- This item selects the default orientation for printing graphics to a PostScript printer. Print filenames --------------------- Print dates ----------------- Print image size ---------------------- Print image colours ------------------------- Print output resolution ----------------------------- These items allow you to determine what, if anything, will be printed at the bottoms of pages which Graphic Workshop prints. MacPaint header --------------------- This item allows you to determine whether MacPaint files generated by Graphic Workshop will have MacBinary headers in them. Leave this on if you don't know what these are. Note that this does not affect how Graphic Workshop 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. EPS preview ----------------- This item determines whether EPS files will be created with TIFF previews. TIFF compression ---------------------- This item determines whether TIFF files will be created compressed. Some applications, such as Gray F/X, don't like compressed files. TIFF grey scale expansion ------------------------------- This item determines whether TIFF grey scale files should be created with their grey scales expanded. This should be set ON if you'll be importing grey scale files into a desktop publishing package or otherwise using them to print with and to OFF if you'll be editing them. TIFF colour/grey scale ---------------------------- This item determines whether TIFF files with more than one bit of colour will be created as colour or grey scale images. The grey scale expansion item will be ignored if this item is set to COLOUR. EXE file compression -------------------------- This item determines whether self-displaying EXE pictures will be compressed. See the section on EXE pictures elsewhere in this document for more information. Graphic Workshop path --------------------------- This should be a complete path to the subdirectory and drive where GWS.EXE and GWS.RES live. For example: C:\GRAPHICS\ When this item is set correctly, you will be able to run Graphic Workshop from anywhere on your hard drive if its location is in your DOS path. EDIT SCREEN DRIVER - F2 ────────────────────────────── This page will allow you to select a super-VGA screen driver. 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 Graphic Workshop 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 kilobytes 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. Note that the cropping and scanning functions require revision 2.0 screen drivers or better. The F2 screen display will show you the revision numbers of drivers with revision two or better. Finally, as of version 6.1e of Graphic Workshop, the drivers can set up a menu to allow you to select a screen mode if you hold down the Ctrl key when you go to view a file. This facility is only available if you have a driver of version 2.1 or better for your card. New drivers are coming... if your card is not supported by a version 2.1 driver yet, please be patient. All the other driver based features will still be available. The following are some details about the drivers. Some of these drivers have been written by users of Graphic Workshop. If you'd like to write a driver, see the section on the Graphic Workshop accessory disk. Amstrad 16 colour 640x200 ------------------------------- This driver was developed by Marcel Ward in Aberystwyth, Wales. It allows owners of Amstrad PCs having the custom sixteen-colour display cards supplied with these systems to look at colour images. We haven't tested this driver, lacking an Amstrad, but the source code looks right. VGA in pseudo 640x480 --------------------------- 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. Thanks to all these authors for their drivers. 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 supoort 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. Hercules TIGA 31.5k ------------------------- This driver supports the Hercules Graphic Station card. Note that unlike a Graphic Station card, a VGA card only actually does 18- bit colour. The 24-bit colour mode of the Graphic Station card has a resolution of 512 by 480 pixels. Its aspect ratio isn't all that good, but you can fiddle the monitor controls... for most monitors... to get pretty reasonable pictures. This driver should work on other cards supporting the Texas Instrument TIGA chip, but no promises. Note that this is a VGA level driver only... it does not do 24 bits 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. Note: rumour has it that some Dell systems have been shipped with Headland Video 7 cards rather than Paradise cards. If your Dell system is so equipped... or if you can't get GWS to work in the super-VGA modes with one of the above two drivers... try VIDEO7.DRV. 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. Graphic Workshop does support external colour printers. At present, the only colour driver available is for the Hewlett-Packard PaintJet and Kodak Diconix inkjet printers. If you don't find a driver for your printer in the available list of drivers, you can probably use the Epson FX-80 driver. Most dot matrix printers emulate this standard. If you'd like to write a driver, see the section on the Graphic Workshop accessory disk elsewhere in this document. Note that the Epson LQ and LX drivers, the IBM ProPrinter drivers and the Panasonic and Roland drivers were all written by Chris Rogers of Ashtree Software. They're particularly slick, in that they will ask you what resolution you want to print at. We have not tested these, but they look to be well written. EDIT SCANNER DRIVER - F4 ─────────────────────────────── This page will let you select a scanner driver. At present, only the Hewlett-Packard Scanjet Plus and Scanjet IIC are supported. We will be creating more scanner drivers if registrations indicate that this feature is of interest. INSTALLING GRAPHIC WORKSHOP IN WINDOWS 3 ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ You can install Graphic Workshop in Windows 3 as a non-Windows application. It gets along well with Windows. Use the PIF provided, open a new application and fill in the blanks. You'll probably have to use the Windows PIF editor to change things like where your copy of GWS.EXE lives, the default directories and perhaps the memory settings. Use the Properties item of the program manager file menu to change the default DOS icon initially assigned to Graphic Workshop to GWS-1.ICO, provided with the software. COMMAND LINE SWITCHES ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ When you run Graphic Workshop by typing GWS at the command line, it will run using the default settings, as configured by GWSINSTL. There may be times when you'll want to override these settings temporarily, and rather than running the installer, you can use the command line switches. These only change the configuration of Graphic Workshop when they're used. The next time you run Graphic Workshop, it will return to its default configuration. As a rule, command line switches should only be required in special circumstances. You can always see a complete list of the command line switches by running Graphic Workshop as GWS ? In using the command line switches, make sure that each one is separated on the command line by a space. Note that they are not case-sensitive. For example, this is a legal invocation of Graphic Workshop with some command line switches. GWS /SVG /vir /Psc This has told Graphic Workshop to work with a super VGA card, virtual memory and a colour PostScript printer. If you're using Graphic Workshop both under DOS and under Windows, you can add command line switches to the command line field of the Windows PIF file for Graphic Workshop to adjust its configuration if needs be. The following are the command line switches which Graphic Workshop recognizes. Most of these options correspond to installation options in GWSINSTL. MEMORY SWITCHES ────────────────────── /VIR - use virtual memory /EMS - use expanded memory /XMS - use extended memory /XMV - use extended or virtual memory /EMV - use expanded or virtual memory VIDEO DRIVER SWITCHES ──────────────────────────── /CGA - use the CGA card driver /EGA - use the EGA card driver /VGA - use the VGA card driver /HER - use the Hercules card driver /SVG - use the currently installed super VGA driver (if any) PRINTER SWITCHES ─────────────────────── /PFN - enable printing filenames /PDT - enable printing dates /PPS - enable printing image size /PCL - enable printing number of colours /PRS - enable printing resolution /PRD - disable all the foregoing print options /POR - print in portrait orientation on PostScript printers /LAN - print in landscape orientation on PostScript printers /PFN - print to a file, rather than to the printer /PSM - assume a monochrome PostScript printer /PSC - assume a colour PostScript printer /PHn - set print dither (n=B:Bayer, F:Floyd-Steinberg, U:Burkes, S:Stucki) /LPn - set printer port (n=1,2 or 3) /Snn - set Postscript screen size (n=10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 or 80) /SDF - set PostScript halftone screen to the printer's default FILE FORMAT SWITCHES ─────────────────────────── /EPP - enable EPS preview creation /EPN - disable EPS preview creation /IFN - No compression on IFF files /IFC - RL compression on IFF files /MBH - MacPaint MacBinary header on /MBN - MacPaint MacBinary header off /TCL - Create colour TIFF files /TCG - Create grey TIFF files /TGN - TIFF files no compression /TGC - TIFF files RL compression /TXP - Expand TIFF grey scale /TXN - Do not expand TIFF grey scale /EXC - Compress EXE pictures /EXN - Do not compress EXE pictures DESQVIEW, QEMM AND OTHER ENVIRONMENTS ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ Graphic Workshop has not been written to run under DesqView, and in most cases will not do so reliably. In practical terms, software must be specifically written to be DesqView-aware if it is to work under DesqView, and in the case of Graphic Workshop the speed and memory penalties involved in doing so were prohibitive. One of the frequent problems which Graphic Workshop runs up against is QEMM, the Quarterdeck memory manager. Its extended memory interface does not appear to be fully compatible with that of HIMEM.SYS, the standard XMS memory manager which Graphic Workshop was written to look for. If you set up Graphic Workshop to use extended memory and you have QEMM installed to manage your extended memory, you may encounter problems with large files. In this case, you might want to consider using virtual memory... possibly with a RAM disk... expanded memory or a different memory manager. Because of the way Graphic Workshop uses memory, we don't recommend running it under multi-tasking or task switching environments, with the exception of Windows 3. Things like DesqView, Double DOS, GeoWorks and such may cause it to misbehave. VENTURA PUBLISHER TRICKS ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ Graphic Workshop is great for getting images into Ventura Publisher documents. Here are a few tips for getting the most out of it. Monochrome bitmapped images should be converted into IMG files for use with Ventura. Note that while Ventura will import colour PCX files with up to 16 colours, the results are rarely pretty. You'll do much better to halftone or dither colour PCX files for use with Ventura. Having poured an image into a frame, use the Sizing and Scaling box in the Frames menu to select "By Scale Factors." Set the scale width to the natural size of the image... as it defaults to... or to some integral multiple of it. This will eliminate distortion or plaiding of the image. You can create halftones from colour images by converting them to grey scale TIFF files. Ventura allows you a great deal of control over the way the grey scale and screening information is handled in a TIFF file. You can also create halftones in Ventura by converting colour and grey scale files to IMG files and importing these. The only drawback to this over using grey scale TIFF files is that the grey scale and screening information will not be adjustable. Note that as of this writing the Windows and Macintosh implementations of Ventura did not seem to like IMG files with more than one bit of colour. If you use the Define Colours option of the Frame menu to display colours as shades of grey rather than as colours... and if you're using an EGA or VGA monitor... grey scale TIFF files will appear in your chapters as pretty slick little photographs. Note that if you will be creating grey scale TIFF files for use with Ventura, you should enable grey scale TIFF and grey scale expansion. CORELDRAW TRICKS ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ If you import bitmapped images into Corel Draw, you can decide how they'll be handled once they get there by choosing the image type you use. Imported PCX files will be scaled to an arbitrary size upon entering Corel Draw, with the result that it's almost impossible to adjust them to get a one to one relationship between the image pixels and the printer pixels. This will make many PCX files print badly. TIFF files, on the other hand, import initially with one to one scaling. If you use TIFF files and leave them at their initial size, or stretch them to integral multiples of their original sizes, they'll print without distortion or plaiding. Grey scale TIFF files imported into Corel Draw come up as PostScript halftones... these can look very slick as part of a line drawing. Colour TIFF files are useful if you'll be outputting your Corel Draw files to a colour output device or if you'll be getting them separated. You might want to check out "Mastering Corel Draw 2" by Steven William Rimmer, published by Sybex Books (Sybex book 814). GRAPHIC WORKSHOP ACCESSORY DISK ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ The Graphic Workshop accessory disk provides you with tools to: - Write a custom super-VGA screen driver for Graphic Workshop - Write a custom scanner driver for Graphic Workshop. - Write a custom external printer driver for Graphic Workshop - Use the command line and script language of Graphic Workshop. - Better manipulate the resource files of Graphic Workshop. Most users will not need this disk. It's primarily useful for programmers, and anyone wishing to integrate Graphic Workshop with their applications. The disk includes the source code for a skeletal super-VGA driver, the source code for a printer driver, the source code for a scanner driver and a script resource, among other things. You will need MASM and LINK or TLINK to create drivers in addition to the tools provided with this disk. You'll also need a moderate level of ability in 8088-series assembly language programming. Complete instructions for using the script language interface are also included. The Graphic Workshop accessories disk is available to registered users of Graphic Workshop for $10.00 if it's ordered at the time you register, or for $20.00 afterwards. CONTACTING ALCHEMY MINDWORKS INC. ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ We hope you'll contact us to register Graphic Workshop... see the section about registering Graphic Workshop 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 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 Graphic Workshop 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 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 Graphic Workshop, 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 Graphic Workshop 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 Graphic Workshop 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 this program 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 Graphic Workshop and other worthwhile things. More to the point, though, it'll make you feel good. We've not infested the program with excessive beg notices, crippled it or had it verbally insult you after ten days. We trust you to support Graphic Workshop if you like it. If you want to see additional features in Graphic Workshop... your VGA card, printer or scanner supported, mayhaps... register your software. 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 If you have previously registered Graphic Workshop, you can update your copy to revision six for $20. 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 Graphic Workshop 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. CANADIAN USERS ───────────────────── The registration fee for Graphic Workshop is $40.00 (CDN) plus seven percent GST, or $42.80. If you live in Ontario, please add eight percent PST to this, for a total of $45.80. 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 is $40.00 (US). The exchange on US funds pretty well covers the extra postage to the States. OTHER USERS ────────────────── The registration fee for Graphic Workshop 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. Please don't send us Eurocheques... they are not accepted outside Europe. 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 Graphic Workshop. We do license parts of it for specific applications... if you want more information about using some of the functions of Graphic Workshop 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", 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), will be available in mid-1992. It 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. 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 GRAPHIC WORKSHOP ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ If you'd like to include Graphic Workshop 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 Graphic Workshop and we don't have to set our leather winged demon of the night on 'em. SHAREWARE DISTRIBUTORS ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ We receive numerous requests for copies of Graphic Workshop from shareware distributors and we don't have the facilities to send out disks in response to all of them. We can provide you with a disk containing copies of our larger shareware applications for $10.00 (US). Alternately, you can download the current versions of our applications from CompuServe in the GRAPHSUPPORT forum or from our bulletin board at (416) 729-4609. You can also order them from one of the larger distributors we use, such as Public Brand Software, 3750 Kentucky Avenue, Indianapolis, IN 46241. They always have the current versions of our programs. If you obtain current copies of our shareware, you have our permission to distribute it under the following 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. You do have our permission to copy the ZIP files from our quad density disk to multiple lower density disks for distribution. 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. IMAGE GALLERY ──────────────────── 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. 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 requires no extended or expanded memory. It will run with any VGA card. It uses a Microsoft compatible mouse and will drive any PostScript or LaserJet Plus compatible laser printer. It will read all the image file types that Graphic Workshop supports. DESKTOP PAINT 256 ──────────────────────── Desktop Paint 256 is a powerful super-VGA paint program. Desktop Paint 256 will let you create and edit pictures stored as PCX, GIF, TIFF and IFF/LBM files. 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 makes a quick and easy to use editor for grey scale TIFF files, too. It supports Paradise (and compatibles), Headland Video 7, Tseng Labs 4000 series cards, Trident cards which use 8900 series chips and ATI VGA Wonder cards. 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 ───────────────────── Desktop Paint is a powerful monochrome paint package fine tuned for use with desktop publishing applications. It will read and write MacPaint, Ventura IMG, PCX, WordPerfect WPG and TIFF image files. 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 256 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. CROPGIF ────────────── CrogGIF allows you to crop smaller fragments from your GIF files. Use Graphic Workshop, above, to convert other formats into GIF files for cropping. This program uses a simple mouse driven interface to make cropping image fragments no more complicated than using a paint program. It requires a Microsoft compatible mouse. It supports EMS memory to handle really huge files. CINEMA ───────────── Cinema display a continuous "slide show" of image files. You can set up the images to be displayed using a simple script language. Cinema works with most super VGA cards, using the same drivers as Graphic Workshop, and with CGA, EGA and Hercules cards. It works with any mixture of GIF, PCX, MacPaint, TIFF, WPG, MSP, IFF/LBM, EPS and IMG files. FI ───────── File Information is a small utility which will examine mystery image files and tell you what they are and some details of what's inside them. GIFINFO ────────────── GifInfo creates catalog files from your GIF collection, allowing you to store fifty or more miniature full colour representations of GIF files on a single quad floppy. STORYTELLER ────────────────── Storyteller is a hypertext program with a mouse driven graphical user interface which will allow you to create reports, manuals and interactive fiction, among other things, which has a tree structure. Each page of a Storyteller document can lead to related sub-pages, which can in turn have their own sub-sub pages, and so on. It looks slick and is exceedingly user friendly. Storyteller requires a Microsoft-compatible mouse. 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. REVISION HISTORY ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ For them what cares... Version 6.1l - Fixed several bugs in the PIC and WPG format resources and one in GWSINSTL, which caused the EPS preview flag to be set incorrectly. Version 6.1k - Improved the TIFF file format resource to handle still more TIFF file variations. TIFF files and Tory politicians were sent here to vex us... it's a shame you can't look forward to voting TIFF files into oblivion. Fixed a minor bug in the 24- bit to monochrome dithering code. Version 6.1j - Fixed a bug in the WPG format which caused some really huge WPG files not to read correctly. Version 6.1i - Considerably sped up the colour remapping code for the F9 effects functions. This will shorten the time it takes to do colour remapping, dithering, softening, sharpening and spatial posterization. Added a Tseng 4000X driver to support Tseng cards with the Sierra DAC. This will allow users of these cards to view 24-bit files directly. Fixed a bug in the TIFF format which prevented it from properly decoding some TIFF files, most notably those from Corel Draw. Improved the EXE format to display sixteen-colour grey scale files correctly on VGA cards. Version 6.1h - Fixed a potential memory allocation bug in the file finder screen. Added new Paradise D series drivers, including one for the one megabyte Paradise card with a RAMDAC. If you have this card, the new drivers will let you view 24-bit files directly. Added a work-around for the EXE file format's problem detecting some types of display cards and improved the Hercules card detection. Added a tag all command to the main file finder. Added a mode selection menu to the RGB display mode. Version 6.1g - Fixed a bug in the quantized dither view function. Added Promote to 24 bits to the F9 effects menu. Added an ATI-XL true colour driver. Fixed a bug in the remap to grey view function which only turned up after adding the ATI-XL driver. Fixed a bug in the Targa format which caused true colour images with palettes to be read incorrectly. Why would a true colour image require a palette, you ask... Added landscape printing for LaserJet printers and autosize modes for PostScript and LaserJet printing. Fixed a bug in the PCX format which caused some eight- colour PCX files to view improperly. Improved the precompensation for printing multiple-bit images to PostScript printers... this should make them print out with more lifelike halftones. Improved the precompensation for expanded grey scale TIFF files as well... same curve. Added new drivers for ATI and Trident cards. Busy week, this one. Version 6.1f - Fixed a bug in the rotate function which would cause monochrome files rotated by 90 or 270 degrees to get mangled or crash Graphic Workshop, depending on how big they were. Very nasty. Version 6.1e - Added a menu so that screen drivers can prompt you for a display mode in viewing. Updated the Hercules driver to version 2.0 so it supports cropping. Fixed a bug the the rename function which caused it to lock up occasionally. Fixed a bug in the WordPerfect Graphics format which caused it to abort on some files. Fixed two bugs in the TIFF format... one which kept Macintosh TIFF files from reading properly and another which caused four bit grey scale TIFF files to be written incorrectly. Version 6.1d - Fixed another bug in the Targa format which caused some 16-bit files to be read with the wrong colour intensity. Fixed a bug in the IFF/LBM format which caused some odd sized IFF files to be read incorrectly. Fixed a bug in the cropping function which caused it to behave erratically now and again. Added a wait box for the virtual memory allocation. Fixed a bug in several of the file format resources which caused F9 special effects to mangle sixteen-colour images and the scale and print functions to misbehave for some files. Version 6.1c - Fixed a bug in the Targa format which caused the red and blue pixel values to be interchanged in some types of 24- bit files. Disabled several features in the the view mode options menu which should have been disabled all along. Added large step panning in the view mode. Version 6.1b - Fixed a bug in the Hercules card driver. Added foreign language support. Version 6.1a - Added cropping, scanning and interactive colour adjustment. The currently supported scanners include the HP ScanJet Plus and the HP ScanJet 2C. Almost all the screen drivers got updated. Added Halo CUT file support and we fixed a bug in several of the image file formats which would cause certain types of very large image files to compress poorly. We fixed the virtual memory manager, which previously declined to delete its scratch files if there was no TEMP variable in the environment. We upgraded the VGA screen drivers to display sixteen-colour images with no colour shift. Version 6.0d - Fixed several PostScript printing bugs and improved the way the Graphic Workshop file format resources manage memory. Version 6.0c - Fixed a bug in the GIF format resource which caused GIF files to be written with bad screen descriptors. This bothered some other applications which read them. Also, replaced the Tseng Labs drivers... these seem to get along better with some of the newer cards. Version 6.0b - Added details to the GIF format. Fixed a bug in GWSINSTL that caused an "Error loading GRAF" message if the display type was set to VGA. Version 6.0a - Fixed a bug which causes 16 x 16 pixel spatial posterization to hang or crash back to DOS and one which caused the view function to omit the last line in 256-colour images. Version 6.0 - A complete rewrite with countless new and improved features (a likely story, this.) LEGAL DOGMA ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ The author assumes no 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. Graphic Workshop is a trademark of Alchemy Mindworks Inc. That's it...