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GRAPHIC WORKSHOP 4.6 __________________________________________________________________ If you like this program, please do one of the following: Go down to your local bookstore and buy a copy of "Coven: A Novel", by Steven William Rimmer, published by Ballantine Books. In Canada, try Coles... they usually have it. Read the book and tell your friends about it if you like it. Send us some comments about the book or a photocopy of the cover and we'll consider you a registered user of this program. If your local bookstore doesn't have Coven, ask them to order it for you. Alternately, send us $35.00, the normal user fee for this software. (The book is $3.95 or $5.50 in Canada: considerably cheaper than cash.) Printed documentation for Graphic Workshop is available to registered users for $10.00 extra. 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. NOTE: If you're searching for Coven and having trouble finding it, you can mail order it from the following book store: Christies of Cookstown, P.O. Box 392, Cookstown, Ontario L0L 1L0, Canada, (705) 458-1562. The cost is $6.50, which includes the postage. The author would like to thank everyone who's thus far chased it down (or tried). __________________________________________________________________ ----> NEW: Pictor/PC Paint support Windows 3 BMP support Image Scaling Windows 3 PIF and icon TIFF and LBM details Grey scale TIFF support. WordPerfect Graphic file support. Microsoft Paint support. VGA palette adjustment. Driver update: Please see DRIVERS.DOC. Dot Matrix Printer support: Also see DRIVERS.DOC. Image rotation and flipping. IFF/LBM/CE support. Non-dither halftoning Welcome to Graphic Workshop... WHAT IT IS __________ Graphic Workshop is a program for working with computer graphic files. It will handle most of the popular formats: - MacPaint files - PC Paintbrush files with up to 256 colours - GEM/IMG files of the sort used by Ventura Publisher - GIF files of any size and up to 256 colours - TIFF files (with some restrictions) - EPS files... encapsulated PostScript... for some operations - WordPerfect graphic (WPG) files. - Microsoft Windows Paint (MSP) files. - IFF/LBM/CE files (from Deluxe Paint, among others) - BMP files (as found in Windows 3) - Pictor / PC Paint (PIC) files... also used by Grasp. 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. - Dither the colour ones to black and white. - Reverse the monochrome ones black for white. - Rotate and flip them. - Scale them Using Graphic Workshop, you can have your image files in the formats that your software wants to use them in, 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... most notably GIF files... for use as really excellent 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. At present, it will support the following. - CGA card (Ugh!) - Hercules card - EGA card - VGA card - Paradise Plus card - Dell super VGA card (which is actually a Paradise card) - ATI VGA Wonder card or ATI VGA Edge - Headland Video 7 - Trident - Hercules Graphic Station card As it comes out of the box... or out of the ZIP... Graphic Workshop is configured like this. If you want to change some of these parameters, see the installation section at the end of this file. - Attempts to autodetect the display card type - Uses expanded memory - Uses colour text - Prints titles on its hard copy - Uses the following file name extensions: - MAC: MacPaint files - IMG: GEM/IMG files - PCX: PC Paintbrush files - GIF: GIF files - TIF: TIFF files - EPS: EPS files - WPG: WordPerfect graphic files - MSP: Microsoft Windows Paint files. - LBM: IFF files (Deluxe Paint and others) - BMP: BMP files (Windows 3) - PIC: Pictor / PC Paint (also Grasp) files. FILE FORMATS ____________ A NOTE ABOUT MEMORY AND FILE FORMATS: One of the design criteria of Graphic Workshop is that it should have enough memory left over on a 640 kilobyte PC to be able to unpack a 640 by 480 pixel, 256 colour file without having to resort to using extra memory, which would slow it down. This requires a minimum of 300 kilobytes plus a bit for various internal things. To achieve this, the size of the program itself has to remain at a reasonable degree of hugeness. This is why, for example, the installation functions, GWSINSTL.EXE, is separate from the main program. The lesser used functions of Graphic Workshop, dithering, scaling, halftoning and image transformation, have been implemented for the GIF file format only in order to keep the code size down. This is a bit of an inconvenience, as you will have to convert files in other formats to GIF to use these facilities with them, and then probably convert the results back to the format your files started off in. However, not implementing these features for all the formats supported by Graphic Workshop reduced the code size of the program by something over a hundred kilobytes by our estimates. The result is a much faster program at the expense of a bit of inconvenience. A long time ago someone decided that 640 kilobytes was more memory than anyone could possibly want. Someone should find the person responsible and paint something easily recognizable on his bald head, such that the rest of us will know where to throw things. MacPaint files 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 to MacPaint format you can select which of these two variations on the format you want to use. 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 There are actually quite a few variations on IMG files. Only the monochrome ones are currently supported by Graphic Workshop. This is the format used by Ventura for its monochrome image file format. Any size monochrome image can be converted to this format. PCX files These are the files used to hold images for Z-Soft's PC Paintbrush package. These can range from monochrome to 256-colour images. All the various formats are supported by Graphic Workshop. Note, however, that Graphic Workshop will allow you to create 256-colour PCX files from GIF files which may be too large to work with using the current version of PC-Paintbrush. GIF files These can range from monochrome to 256-colour images in any size you can find 'em. TIFF files Graphic workshop supports monochrome and grey scale TIFF files. If you convert a colour file from PCX or GIF to TIFF, the resulting file will be a grey scale version of the colour file. These import into desktop publishing packages such as Ventura for sharp looking PostScript halftones. Some applications, such as Ventura Publisher, have trouble reading grey scale TIFF files which have been compressed. Others, such as Corel draw, read 'em fine. for this reason, Graphic Workshop defaults to creating uncompressed grey scale TIFF files but you can tell it to compress them if you're sure whatever you'll be importing them into will read them. You can set the grey scale TIFF compression in GWSINSTL or by using the command line switches TGN and TGC. 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. In most cases you will want to create TIFF files using the Intel number format. This is what Graphic Workshop defaults to using, and you can safely ignore this setting most of the time. If you need Motorola format TIFF files... for example, if you intend to port them to a 68000 based system... you can enable Motorola format numbers in the installer or by using the /TFM command line switch. EPS files These are encapsulated PostScript files, and are not strictly speaking image files at all. Graphic Workshop treats them a bit differently. Many EPS files which are created with the intent of importing them into a desktop publishing package include bitmapped "preview" images to be used for positioning. If you attempt to view an EPS file with Graphic Workshop, you will see the preview image. If there is no preview image in the EPS file you select, Graphic Workshop will tell you so. Graphic Workshop will print EPS files to a PostScript printer. It will also convert other graphic files into EPS files, suitable for use with desktop publishing programs. If you convert a colour graphic into an EPS file, the result will be a black and white halftone when you print it... pretty slick, this. WPG files 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 "No bitmap" 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. It doesn't work with two bit files as these are exceedingly rare. MSP files These are the image files used by the paint program which comes with Microsoft Windows. Don't confuse these with PCX files... some versions of Windows 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 files 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. Note that Deluxe Paint seems to be a bit particular about the dimensions of the LBM files it will inhale... it likes them to fit in standard sizes, and for this reason Graphic Workshop pads them to fit in the next larger standard IFF screen format. A picture 512 by 392, for example, would be inset into the upper left corner of an area 640 by 400, which keeps Deluxe Paint happy. Because the extra area is blank, and compresses down to almost nothing, this does not increase the file size a great deal. 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 Deluxe Paint which will occasionally cause it 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 Deluxe Paint. 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. BMP files 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. You can convert any monochrome or sixteen colour image into a BMP file. Graphic Workshop does not support 256-colour BMP files as yet. BMP files use no image compression, as the intention appears to be to make them really fast to load. Plan on your BMP files being very big. 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 PC paintbrush cannot go about changing, as doing so would make the screen and boarder colours change too. Thus, files converted into the BMP format have their palettes altered to the standard BMP palette. The pixels in the image are then remapped to represent the closest approximation of their original colours afforded by the BMP palette. This means that transferring an image to the BMP format will generally result in some colour shifts. Once this is done, you can't get the colours back the way they were unless you have the original image file in some other format. Note also that the colour approximation algorithm in Graphic Workshop isn't precisely the same as the one in PC Paintbrush, and it will occasionally produce slightly different sets of colours than PC Paintbrush under Windows 3 would have. It's also worth mentioning that as of this writing we've been unable to get any official details from Microsoft on how BMP files work. The BMP support in Graphic Workshop was written entirely by debugging the files provided with Windows 3. As such, there may be some holes in the BMP functions as they stand. PC files 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. MEMORY REQUIREMENTS ___________________ 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. Graphic Workshop can run in restricted memory, such as that which is found in 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. PRINTERS ________ 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 printer which is supported by a Graphic Workshop external printer driver. These are described in greater detail in DRIVERS.DOC. 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 allows you to print a picture in four resolution modes to laser printers, ranging from 75 to 300 dots per inch. This will determine the resulting size of your picture. 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. RUNNING GRAPHIC WORKSHOP ________________________ To run Graphic Workshop, type GWS at the DOS prompt. Depending on your installation procedure, you may also want to type some command line switches, as described in the installation section. The main file screen will appear. 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. 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. 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 show you 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 an 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. Esc will return you to the main screen. Several things can go wrong here. 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. There is a specific exception to this. Graphic Workshop will show you GIF files having more than sixteen colours on a sixteen colour EGA card by fudging the colours. Bear in mind that while you'll get to see an approximation of the actual colours in the GIF file... it will not be the real thing. This does not work for 256 colour PCX files, just GIF files. You must have a VGA card of some sort to see 256 colour PCX files. You can see how many colours a colour image has by using the Get Info key, as discussed below. Note that you cannot view grey scale TIFF files without a VGA card. In the VGA display mode... and in the super VGA modes provided by external VGA drivers... you can make small 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 picture that you're viewing... they do not alter the palette in the file on your disk. If you hear a beep while you're playing with these keys, you've gone to the limit of whichever of the adjustments you're using. Graphic Workshop will not allow you to adjust the palette to the point where the picture would start looking weird. Because Graphic Workshop will not allow you to actually distort the colour balance of the palette, there will be some GIF files which will not be adjustable using this feature. OTHER KEYS __________ If you hit "?", you'll see 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 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. If you hit "L", Graphic Workshop will allow you to log in a new disk drive. 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 F5, Graphic Workshop will shell out to the DOS prompt if there's enough memory. 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 F10 key will show you some information about Graphic Workshop as well as your current display adapter and memory settings. GRAPHIC FUNCTIONS _________________ The graphic functions of Graphic Workshop are accessed through the function keys. They may be used on individual files or in batch mode. If no files are tagged, the operation you select will take place using the file name the selector bar is currently on. If one or more files are tagged, the operation will take place on all the tagged files. Hitting Esc will abort any operation. F1 - Print This function will print one or more files to the printer of your choice. Hit it and a menu of printers and resolution settings will pop up. As with all menus under Graphic Workshop, hitting Esc will make it go away if you discover you've gotten to it in error. Colour files printed to a PostScript printer will be halftoned. Colour files cannot be printed to a LaserJet or a dot matrix printer directly... you can dither them to black and white, though, as described in a moment. Big files can take a long time to print... be patient. All printing to laser printers takes place through LPT1. If you want to drive a different printer port, use the DOS MODE command to redirect the output of Graphic Workshop to a different port. Printing to dot matrix printers takes place through whatever port the driver was written to work with. One of the options in Graphic Workshop's installation involves the default screen size for printing colour graphics to PostScript printers. This can be set to anything you like for special effects. However, the best results can usually be had by allowing the PostScript printer to choose the optimum screen setting. Note that there's a potential memory problem involved in printing to a dot matrix printer under Graphic Workshop. We've never encountered it, but it could happen. In order to print to a dot matrix printer through a PDR driver, Graphic Workshop has to create a buffer which holds anywhere from eight to twenty-four lines of your image, depending on how many pins your printer's print head has. It also has to buffer the picture you're printing, of course. Now, it could happen that there's just enough memory to buffer the picture but not enough to create the line buffer. Graphic Workshop will refuse to print the picture under these conditions. This is a pretty unlikely occurrence. If you think it has happened, you can easily check it. See how much free memory there is by hitting a question mark, then open the F4 get info box. See how much memory your picture needs to unpack into. Whipping out a calculator, see how much memory is left over. Figure out how many bytes a line of your picture takes to hold by dividing the horizontal dimension by eight, rounding this number up if the result isn't even. Multiply this number by the number of print head pins in your printer... probably either eight or twenty- four. If the result is bigger than the amount of free memory left when your picture is loaded, you've encountered the aforementioned condition. Note that none of this applies if the help box tells you there isn't enough memory to buffer your picture all by itself. If this happens, Graphic Workshop will use extended, expanded or virtual memory for your picture, leaving the DOS memory free for a line buffer. We'll assume here that there's at least enough memory free for a line buffer all by itself. Note that if you use expanded memory, Graphic Workshop will need thirty-two kilobytes of DOS memory to manage the expanded memory. If you happen to encounter this condition, you can trick Graphic Workshop into getting around it by forcing it to use extended, expanded or virtual memory rather than DOS memory for its picture buffer, thus freeing up the DOS memory for a line buffer. Simply shell out to DOS and run a second copy of GWS. Print from that. When you're done, quit the second copy and type EXIT at the DOS prompt to get back to the first copy. All this is a very unlikely situation, and one you'll probably never run into. F2 - Convert You can 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 touched. As noted above, large images converted into MacPaint files will be cropped to fit. Colour files cannot be converted directly into monochrome-only formats, that is, to MacPaint, Microsoft Paint or IMG. Colour files converted to TIFF will be written as grey scale files. EPS files cannot be converted to any other format. Any file can be converted into an EPS file. If you enable the preview option during installation, the resulting EPS file will have both the original image and a dithered preview image, making it ideal for use with a desktop publishing package such as Ventura. The results are stunning. Note that Ventura will print an EPS file to a PostScript printer. If you attempt to print a chapter with an EPS file in it to a LaserJet, Ventura will print the preview image. See the Ventura section below for more information about using EPS files with Ventura. Note that you can convert monochrome image files to EPS files, but there's no good reason for doing so. EPS files are huge, far larger than a compressed image would be. Leave lots of disk space if you intend to use one. As a rule of thumb, you can figure the size of a colour image packed into an EPS file as being width * depth * 2 plus a few hundred bytes The width and depth can be worked out using the Get Info function, below. EPS files created by Graphic Workshop do not have trailing showpage operators... ignore this remark if it doesn't mean anything to you. Note that 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. F3 - Dither/HT (Halftone) Dithering is a sort of magical process by which colour images can be converted into pretty excellent black and white versions for reproduction on a monochrome screen or a black and white laser printer. Graphic Workshop allows you to dither GIF files down to monochrome IMG, PCX, MSP, WPG or TIFF files. 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. Aside from dithering to a file, you can dither to the screen to see what your selection of dithering parameters will look like. 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, 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. 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 would be dithered to D_PICTUR.IMG, for example. PICTURE.GIF would be left untouched. If you want to dither a colour PCX file, you must first convert it to a GIF file. Dithering only works on colour GIF files. The simplest... and fastest... form of dithering is a Bayer dither. This does not produce great results, but it's extremely quick. The EPS preview images created by Graphic Workshop use Bayer dithering. 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. The last two items in the dither menu are not really dithering functions at all, but rather true halftones They will produce sixteen and sixty-four grey level halftones respectively from a colour image. They do this by approximating the grey levels in dot sizes, just like newspaper halftones do. The destination image will always have four or eight times the dimensions of the source image. There is absolutely no advantage to expanding images for halftoning, so the expansion menu will not appear for sixteen and sixty-four level halftoning. Halftones often look more realistic than dithers. The drawback to using halftones is that the files can get enormous, and even a sixty-four grey level halftone doesn't really handle grey levels as well as an error diffused dither... although in some cases it may look better. F4 - Get Info 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 discussed previously. The amount of available DOS memory is available by hitting the "?" key from within the main screen. The last field in this box displays the file comments if there were any, or "No comments". File comments are, in fact, Macintosh file names if they're present or, in some cases, information about the internal structure of the file. You will find Mac comments in some GIF files and many MacPaint files. 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 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 TIFF and IFF files. You may need some external assistance in fully interpreting the details. F6 - Reverse This function will create a reversed version of any monochrome 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. This function will ignore any files which are not monochrome. F7 - Transform 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, but only if the source images are in the GIF format. You'll have to convert images from other formats to GIF if you want to use the transformation functions on them. 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. F8 - Scale This key will allow you to scale GIF files from twenty five to five hundred percent. Once again, we've limited this function to working with GIF files to keep the code size down. If you wish to scale other types of files, you'll have to convert them to GIF first. 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 forty-two 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. The maximum horizontal image dimension which Graphic Workshop can deal with is 8192 pixels. Avoid scaling pictures to something larger than this. This may not be a common problem... a picture having the dimensions 8192 by 8192 pixels would require sixty-seven megabytes of memory. 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... twenty-five percent... of the original image. Entering 200 will create a destination image twice as big... two hundred percent of... the original. Entering 100 will produce a destination image identical to the source image. INSTALLATION ____________ 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. Using the Installer 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. The installation screen will appear. It looks something like this: Screen colours: COLOUR Memory type: VIRTUAL Display type: EXTERNAL Default printer: LASERJET - 150 DPI PostScript Screen size: PRINTER'S DEFAULT Default dither destination: IMG Default dither type: FLOYD BIDIRECTIONAL Default conversion type: IMG Default expansion factor: SIZE AS PostScript preview: ON MacPaint file extension: MAC GEM/IMG file extension: IMG PCX file extension: PCX GIF file extension: GIF TIFF file extension: TIF EPS file extension: EPS Print filenames: ON Print dates: OFF Print image size: OFF Print image colours: OFF Print output resolution: OFF Print EPS titles: ON External driver path: GRAFDRV.DRV Move the section bar to the option you want to change and hit Enter to step through the available options. The PgUp and PgDn keys will show you additional options. When you're all done, hit F10 to save your changes or Esc to abort and return to DOS. The file name extension fields allow you to type in new extensions. Hit enter, change the field and hit enter again to save the changes. Installing 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. 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. The Configurable Options These are the things which you can change in Graphic Workshop. These parameters can be changed permanently by using the installer or temporarily by using the command line switches. Having installed GWS.EXE for a particular set of options, you might find it convenient to boot it up with one or more of these switches to override the installed configuration for particular circumstances, such as to use virtual memory for a particularly large file when you know you won't have enough extended memory, or to use a different PostScript screen size. Memory: Select EMS for expanded memory. Select XMS for extended memory. Select VIRTUAL to use a disk file if you have neither extended nor expanded memory. Consult your system documentation to if you're unsure about the memory situation of your machine. Note that in order to use EMS or XMS memory, you will need the appropriate driver installed in your machine, as provided with your memory board. Also note that XMS memory will not work properly if you have VDISK.SYS installed. Display card: If you have a fairly typical display adapter, select AUTODETECT. If this doesn't work... if your card refuses to go into the graphics mode you expect... select the specific card type you have. If you have a VGA card and there's a driver available for it, you can set this to EXTERNAL. See below for some additional discussion of drivers. Otherwise, select the straight VGA setting. Note that some ATI EGA Wonder cards will not go into their Hercules graphics modes reliably under Graphic Workshop. We're looking into this one. Print options: This controls the printing of information at the bottom of each page of hard copy. You can enable none, some or all of these items, as follows: - Print the image file name. - Print the date. - Print the image dimensions. - Print the number of colours in the original image. - Print the resolution mode selected. - Print the EPS title for EPS files only. Preview: You can enable or disable the creation of a preview image when Graphic Workshop converts files to the EPS format. Screen size: You can select the screen size for printing colour images as halftones to a PostScript printer. This does not effect converting colour images to EPS files. Unless you particularly want to create special effects, it's recommended that you leave this at its default setting. Note that having printed one image with a fixed size screen, all subsequent ones will print at that size until you reset you PostScript printer or specify a new screen size. Command line switches You can always see a complete list of these by typing GWS ? at the DOS prompt. /EXT - use extended memory /EXP - use expanded memory /VIR - use virtual memory /CGA - use CGA card /HER - use Hercules card /EGA - use EGA card /PAR - use Paradise card /ATI - use ATI VGA Wonder card /PRD - disable all print options /S80 - set screen size to 80 lines /S60 - set screen size to 60 lines /S40 - set screen size to 40 lines /S30 - set screen size to 30 lines /S20 - set screen size to 20 lines /S10 - set screen size to 10 lines /SDF - set screen size to printer default /PRE - enable EPS preview creation /NOP - disable EPS preview creation /PFN - enable printing filenames on hard copy /PDT - enable printing dates on hard copy /PPS - enable printing image size on hard copy /PCL - enable printing number of colours on hard copy /PRS - enable printing resolution on hard copy /PET - enable printing EPS title on hard copy /DRV - use the named external graphics driver (defaults to GRAFDRV.DRV) /PRX - use the named external printer driver (defaults to PRINTER.PRD) 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... anything other than EPS files... 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. Using EPS files is a bit different if you want to get the optimum image quality. (If you aren't too fussy, just pour 'em, stretch 'em and see what happens.) In this case, you must load the EPS file as line art... it's a PostScript file... and use the "Fit in Frame" option of the Sizing and Scaling box. Set the frame size initially to the natural size of the picture. If you are working in inches, you can work this out by dividing the dimensions of the image in pixels by 300. If you have forgotten the dimensions of the original GIF file you halftoned the picture from, use the DOS TYPE command to look at the first few lines of your EPS file. You should see something like this: /width 640 def /depth 480 def These are the natural dimensions of the image in pixels. The initial frame dimensions for this picture would be 2.13 by 1.60 inches. Next, select "By Scale Factors" and "Distorted". Set the scale dimensions to the same values as the frame size. You can now change the frame size if you want to. You can also expand the image dimensions by some integral amount. EPS files used this way can be cropped just like any other picture. In addition to EPS files, you can create halftones from colour images by converting them to grey scale TIFF files. There are several advantages to producing halftones this way rather than using EPS files. The files will be much smaller... by about half... and Ventura will import them with less requisite fiddling in the Sizing and Scaling box. In addition, Ventura allows you a great deal of control over the way the grey scale and screening information is handled in a TIFF file. You might want to experiment a bit with these two types of files to get a feel for the results produced by them in Ventura chapters. 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. COREL DRAW 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 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. Another book plug here: you might want to check out "Mastering Corel Draw" by Steven William Rimmer, published by Sybex Books. This will be available in May of 1990. CUSTOM SCREEN DRIVERS _____________________ If you have a super VGA card you can use its super VGA modes by having Graphic Workshop drive your card through an external driver. External drivers are little blocks of code which know all about your specific VGA card, and present it to Graphic Workshop in a useful form. In order to have Graphic Workshop use an external driver, you must select EXTERNAL for the display type in GWSINSTL and set the screen driver path to reflect the name and location of your driver. For example, if your driver was called TATUNG.DRV and it lived in the directory \COMMON\DRIVERS on drive C:, you would enter C:\COMMON\DRIVERS\TATUNG.DRV in this field. The drivers included with this version of Graphic Workshop are discussed in a separate file called DRIVERS.DOC. Note that every super VGA card must have a custom Graphic Workshop driver if it is to work in its super VGA modes. The driver for one brand of card will not work for a different card. If there's no driver for your particular card you can still use Graphic Workshop in its default VGA mode, but you'll see fewer pixels on your screen at a time. In future releases we hope to include a number of SVGA drivers. If you write one using the GRAFDRV.ASM skeletal driver and care to send us the source, we'll be pleased to include it with future releases of Graphic Workshop, with suitable credit. CUSTOM DOT MATRIX PRINTER DRIVERS _________________________________ Custom dot matrix printer drivers are used to support dot matrix printers or other similar output devices which Graphic Workshop doesn't know how to deal with directly. In order to load one, you must enable the external printer driver option in GWSINSTL and fill in the path to your printer driver. When Graphic Workshop boots up with an external printer driver in place, a ninth entry will be added to the printer selection menu, this being the name of the printer your driver drives. Only monochrome pictures can be printed to dot matrix printers... even if you have a colour dot matrix printer. BUGS ____ There are bound to be some. If you encounter a problem with Graphic Workshop, please contact us. We'll also be interested in hearing your suggestions for future releases of this software. If you encounter a file which Graphic Workshop won't read, we'll be interested in having a look at it. COMING NEXT VERSION ___________________ These are the features we're working on for the next major release of Graphic Workshop: - Targa support If you register your copy of Graphic Workshop, you'll be notified when the next release is available. ROLL YOUR OWN _____________ This is yet another book plug. If you're interested in writing programs which use graphics, you'll find everything you need to know in "The Book of Bitmapped Graphics", also by Steven William Rimmer. It's published by TAB books, (TAB book 3558) and should be available in August 1990. It features code to pack and unpack MacPaint, IMG, PCX, GIF and TIFF files, as well as chapters on screen drivers, dithering and printing. MORAL DOGMA ___________ If you like this program and find it useful, you are requested to support it either by buying the book mentioned at the top of this file or by sending us $35.00. We'd rather you bought the book. This will entitle you to telephone support, notification of updates, a free copy of the latest version of Graphic Workshop and other good things like that. 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. 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. We are Alchemy Mindworks Inc. P.O. Box 500 Beeton, Ontario L0G 1A0 Canada Other programs we've done that you might like include: VFM - Ventura soft font manager deluxe with a side of fries. Adds new fonts and creates width tables with menu driven simplicity. GRAFCAT - Prints a visual catalog of your image files, with sixteen pictures to a page. Drives all LaserJet and PostScript laser printers, and works with any mixture of GIF, PCX, MacPaint, TIFF, WPG, MSP, IFF/LBM, EPS and IMG files. CROPGIF - allows you to crop smaller fragments out of your GIF files. Use graphic Workshop, above, to convert other formats into GIF files for cropping. This program uses a simple mouse interface to make cropping image fragments no more complicated than using a paint program Requires a Microsoft compatible mouse. 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. If you can't find them in the public domain, they're available from us for $35.00 each. REVISION HISTORY ________________ For them what cares... Version 4.6 - Fixed an obscure TIFF bug. Version 4.5 - Added PIC file support. Version 4.4 - Several bug fixes. Version 4.3 - Fixed a bug in the EPS file conversion routine. Version 4.2 - Tidied up the file finder functions. The rename and delete commands don't reset the cursor position and the program can survive attempting to log onto an empty floppy drive with its dignity intact. Tidied up the TIFF details. The TIFF functions can now read files with Macbinary headers, and can generate Motorola format TIFF files. Version 4.1 - Fixed a bug which prevented BMP files from printing or being converted into other formats. Version 4.0 - Added Windows 3 BMP support. Version 3.9 - Allowed for optional IFF file compression and fixed some IFF bugs. All IFF files generated by Graphic Workshop are now ILBM compressed... ignore this if it doesn't mean anything to you... and all files with colours in them get Deluxe Paint previews. Version 3.8 - Fixed several TIFF bugs. Version 3.7 - Fixed a few cosmetic bugs and one persistent one which would cause error messages and deletion of incomplete files to use the previous file name, rather than the current one in some cases. This tended to delete good files in conditions when one's disk was full and such. Version 3.6 - Got the IFF/LBM compression working properly, improved the IFF details, allowed for optional TIFF grey scale file compression. Added Deluxe Paint preview images for 256 colour files. Version 3.5 - Added scaling, perhaps against our better judgement. Changed the TIFF compression routine so the version of Graphic Workshop used to create files is included as a tag. You can see it in the TIFF details. Improved a few cosmetic things. Version 3.4 - Fixed a bug in the monochrome EPS previews. There aren't many uses for monochrome EPS files. Improved the monochrome IMG file reader considerably... it now loads pretty well any two colour IMG file, even the weird ones which Ventura creates when it imports EPS files. Version 3.3 - Added halftoning to the dither... now the dither/halftone... functions. Version 3.2 - Added detailed tag analysis for tag based formats. Also added drop shadows to the menus and such... this adds four bytes of code to the program. Fixed a bug of sorts in the TIFF display code which made it a bit finicky. Version 3.1 - Improved several of the image compression functions... they're a lot more effective now. Also fixed a cosmetic bug in the wait box which caused it to completely close on files longer than about 1600 lines. Version 3.0 - Added descriptive comments to some of the F4 Get Info functions. Added IFF/LBM/CE support. Version 2.9 - Fixed a potential bug in the PCX palette code, added file renaming in the finder. Also, one of our users pointed out that the compiler was adding a debug table to the final EXE file without being asked to do so. Eliminating this has made the code about twenty kilobytes smaller. Thanks, Don... things you learn... Version 2.8 - Added loadable drivers for dot matrix support, fixed a few obscure bugs in the printing and display code. Added image rotation and flipping. Version 2.7 - Added VGA colour adjustment in the view mode. Added Microsoft Windows Paint (MSP) file support. One might ask why... Microsoft Windows Paint is not one of the leading lights in digital artistry. It was mostly in the interest of completeness. We had the format details and it was a hot Saturday afternoon with nothing better to do. Version 2.6 - Added WordPerfect Graphics support, fixed a bug which kept some EGA cards from autodetecting properly, made the TIFF and IMG packing code tighter still for large images. Fixed a bug in the grey scale TIFF printing function. Version 2.5 - Fixed a bug in the monochrome GIF file decoder which caused files with horizontal dimensions not an even multiple of eight to display incorrectly... but only on Tuesdays. Version 2.4 - Fixed some bugs in the external super VGA graphics drivers. Be sure to read DRIVERS.WS if you use and external driver. Version 2.3 - Added grey scale TIFF support (at last). Removed the built in Paradise Plus and ATI VGA Wonder card drivers in favour of the external ones, which frees up a bit of memory and makes maintaining these drivers much simpler. Improved the TIFF file creation routines, such that they now conform to TIFF 5.0, and will import into most applications which accept TIFF, including Corel Draw... which is a bit particular about the sorts of TIFF files it want to deal with. Fixed a bug in the expanded memory manager which caused a few hangs on really immense files. Version 2.2 - Fixed a bug in the dithering code. This would cause some machines to hang if an attempt was made to dither colour GIF files to the screen with an external VGA driver loaded. Nasty but obscure. Version 2.1 - Added Macintosh GIF file reading. Macintosh GIF files ported to a PC have a 128 byte "Macbinary" header before the GIF file proper. Graphic Workshop now detects this, gets around it and reads the GIF information normally. Also added a comment field to the F4 file information box. This will display the Macintosh file names of GIF and MacPaint files with Macbinary headers. Fixed some very obscure bugs in the IMG and TIFF file compression routines. These would occasionally cause very large dithered files to compress incorrectly. Version 2.0 - Fixed a fairly obscure bug in the 16 colour PCX file compression code. Version 1.9 - Added image reversal for monochrome files. The menus got larger. Version 1.8 - Added monochrome GIF file packing... monochrome files in other formats can now be converted into GIF files. Added an external driver for Headland Technologies Video Seven VGA cards. Fixed (or rather sidestepped) a weird bug in the EPS preview code which very occasionally generated unreadable preview images. Version 1.7 - Added loadable custom drivers for super VGA cards other than the ones supported by the built in drivers. Version 1.6 - Fixed a bug in the TIFF decoder and another really tiny one in the file finder. Gettin' down to the aphids and fleas now. Version 1.5 - Added file deletion and fixed an obscure bug in the dithering code. Added EGA palette reduction for GIF files. Version 1.4 - Fixed a bug in the file finder that kept batch processes from working across multiple pages. Also, a cosmetic bug the in the wait bar graph that happened on files longer than about two thousand lines. Version 1.3 - Fixed a few persistent bugs in the ATI VGA Wonder card driver. ATI cards were put in this dimension to vex us. Version 1.2 - Fixed several bugs which prohibited PCX to GIF conversion for 32 colour files, kept some extremely large monochrome PCX files from converting and so on. Version 1.1 - Added ATI VGA Wonder card driver Version 1.0 - Sprung GWS on an unsuspecting universe. SOURCE CODE ___________ After considerable meditation and several bad experiences, we have decided not to release the source code for Graphic Workshop. We do licence 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. 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. 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 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. That's it...