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Graphic Workshop ███████████████████████████ ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ If you like this program, please: Send us $40.00, the normal user fee for Graphic Workshop. Registered users of Graphic Workshop are entitled to phone support, notification of upgrades and good karma. When you register it, we'll send you a copy of the latest version. Please tell us the platform and version number of your copy of Graphic Workshop when you register. Our address can be found in the Registration section of this document, and in the end screen of Graphic Workshop. ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ NOTE: You can register Graphic Workshop with an American Express, Mastercard or Visa card by calling 1-800-263-1138 (toll free) from the United States and Canada or 1-905-936-9500 from other places. NOTE: CompuServe users can register Graphic Workshop by typing GO SWREG at any CompuServe prompt. You can contact us directly over CompuServe at 70451,2734. Our Internet address is alchemy@accesspt.north.net -- we do not recommend that you leave credit card information on the Internet. Overseas distributors: AUSTRIA: PEARL AGENCY Osterreich, Grunburgerstr. 7a, A-4540 Bad Hall BRITAIN: The Public Domain & Shareware Library Ltd., Winscombe House, Beacon Road, Crowborough, Sussex, TN6 1UL, England, telephone 0892 663298, FAX 0892 667473, BBS 0892 661149. CZECH REPUB: JIMAZ s.r.o., Hermanova 37, 170 00 Praha 7, Czech Republic Telephone: +42-2-379-498, FAX: +42-2-378-103. DENMARK: Prof Shareware, Benloese Skel 4 G, DK 4100, Ringsted, Denmark. FRANCE: DP Tool Club, 102 rue des fusilles, 59650 Villeneuve d'Ascq, France, telephone (33) 20 56 55 33, fax (33) 20 56 55 25. GERMANY: 1. Der PD-Profi, Schulstraae 13, D-86666, Burgheim-Wengen Telephone 8432-1296, FAX 8432-8674 2. PEARL AGENCY Tel 07631 120 91-99, Fax 07631 120 08-9 JAPAN: P&A Shareware, 302 Bellwins, 1367-23, Nakagami, Akishima, Tokyo, JAPAN 196, telephone (81) 425-46-9141, FAX (81) 425-46-9142 NOTE: We have a bulletin board system. See the section on contacting Alchemy Mindworks for more information. NOTE: Registered users of Graphic Workshop will receive the Graphic Workshop accessory disk and the Graphic Workshop screen capture utility at no extra cost. NOTE: With release seven of Graphic Workshop we've changed the registration numbers required to establish a registered copy. We did this because it appears that the program which generated the old numbers has fallen into unfriendly hands. If you have previously registered Graphic Workshop for DOS version 6.1 any time on or after the summer's solstice... June 21, 1993... please write us and we'll provide you with a new number at no cost. We are unable to provide registration numbers by phone, electronic mail or FAX. CONTENTS ███████████████████ Introduction New Features in Release Seven Hardware and Software Frequently Asked Questions File Formats Macpaint GEM/IMG JPEG PC Paintbrush PCX CompuServe GIF TIFF (including group III, group IV and LZW) 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 Windows 3 RLE PFS:First Publisher Art files Sun Raster HRZ slow scan television UUE uuencoded graphics from the Internet PNG portable network graphics 24-bit files Using the Main Menu Help Control keys Viewing and colour adjustment Printing Conversion Dithering Getting file information Cropping Reversing Transforming Special effects Cataloging Screen Capture 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 Mice If you Encounter a Problem Contacting Alchemy Mindworks Inc. Shareware Registration Update Policy Technical Support -- IN CASE OF EMERGENCY READ THIS -- Bundling Graphic Workshop Books Graphic Workshop Accessory Disk Shareware Distributors Revision History Legal Dogma INTRODUCTION ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ Graphic Workshop is a program for working with bitmapped graphic files. It will handle most of the popular formats, as listed in the contents section of this document. 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 most dot matrix printers. Graphic Workshop can print colour pictures to colour PostScript and inkjet printers. - Dither and threshold 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 - Create catalogs of a collection of images. - Adjust the brightness, contrast and colour balance of the colour ones. - Capture your screen to a PCX file in most of the popular VGA and super VGA text and graphic modes. 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 work with a Microsoft-compatible mouse if you have a suitable mouse driver loaded in your system prior to running GWS.EXE. 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. - It does not prompt for a destination directory. - It creates dithered, three-dimensional catalog images. NEW FEATURES OF RELEASE SEVEN ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ Release seven of Graphic Workshop represents a major rewrite of the software. Its new features include: - PNG support. - Support for JPEG compression and the Independent JPEG Group's JFIF file format. - Additional colour reduction and dithering options. - Better memory management. - PFS:First Publisher ART file support. - Sun raster file support. - Expanded TIFF options, including group III, group IV and LZW. - HRZ slow scan TV support. - High colour PIC support. - Easier setup installation. - In-session parameter overrides. - Improved and expanded VESA drivers, now including true colour. - Catalog function. - Optional prompt for destination directories. - Monitor gamma compensation. - Plus numerous other improvements... Note that with release seven of Graphic Workshop scanner support has been removed from the package. HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ Graphic Workshop will run on any PC compatible system with at least 640 kilobytes of memory. 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. Some functions may not work, or may work very slowly, in restricted memory. In the absence of extra memory, a lot of free hard drive space will help. Graphic Workshop can drive most graphic cards. A more complete discussion of graphic 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. - GWSHELP.RES - The on line help resource. - GWSDRV.RES - All the super-VGA screen drivers. - GWSPDR.RES - All the dot matrix printer drivers. - GWSINSTL.EXE - The Graphic Workshop configuration utility. - EXAMPLE1.BMP - A monochrome picture file. - EXAMPLE2.GIF - A sixteen-colour picture file. - EXAMPLE3.GIF - A 256-colour picture file. - VIEW-ME.GIF - View this file. - VGACARD.COM - A tool to help select a screen driver. - VGACARD.DOC - Read this before you use VGACARD.COM. - ORDER.FRM - Order form to register Graphic Workshop 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. Registered users will also receive: - ACCESS.ZIP - The Graphic Workshop accessory disk contents. - GWSCAP.COM - The GWSCAP screen capture utility. - GWSCAP.DOC - The documentation for the screen capture. It's inadvisable to run Graphic Workshop for DOS while shelled out of other applications, such as Microsoft Windows 3.1, DOSSHELL, Norton Commander, Quarterdeck and so on. FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ If you encounter a problem with Graphic Workshop, please read this document, and the following section particularly, before you get in touch with us. CAN I READ EPS FILES WITH GRAPHIC WORKSHOP? ────────────────────────────────────────────────── Graphic Workshop will create EPS files from bitmapped graphics and it will display the EPS preview images of EPS files from other sources which have previews. It will not read the PostScript data from EPS files, and if there is no preview header available it will display an error message. IF I SAVE AN IMAGE FILE OF SCANNED TEXT TO A TXT FILE FROM GRAPHIC WORKSHOP, WILL THE TEXT FILE I CREATE BE THE WORDS FROM THE SCANNED IMAGE? ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── No. This requires an optical character recognition package. WILL GRAPHIC WORKSHOP SUPPORT CDR, WMF OR CGM FILES IN THE FUTURE? ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── It's not likely. In creating Graphic Workshop, we chose to have it do one thing well... working with bitmapped graphics... rather than several things badly. Formats such as CDR, WMF, CGM and EPS are vector graphics, which require completely different applications. Graphic Workshop for Windows has some facilities for reading vector graphics. WHY WILL SOME WPG FILES READ UNDER GRAPHIC WORKSHOP AND SOME WON'T? ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── The WPG format can support both bitmapped and vector graphics. Graphic Workshop will deal with the bitmapped ones only. The Get Info function will tell you which files contain bitmaps and which one only have vector graphics in them. WHY DOES ATTEMPTING TO READ SOME EXE FILES FAIL? ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── The extension EXE is normally used to indicate actual application files, that is, programs. Graphic Workshop uses it to indicate pictures which it has converted into programs as well... which it must do, such that DOS will recognize them as programs when you choose to run them. Unfortunately, one file name looks pretty much like another when Graphic Workshop is assembling its file list, and it can't tell which EXE files are programs and which are pictures. WHY WON'T GRAPHIC WORKSHOP READ SOME TIFF FILES? ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── The TIFF standard is a huge, fairly confusing thing which allows applications which create TIFF files to do so in an almost limitless variety of ways. It's probably technically impossible to write software that will read all of them... at the very least, such an application would be huge. Graphic Workshop attempts to read a sensible range of TIFF files, and we improve on its TIFF handling frequently. However, there will probably always be unusual TIFF files it won't be able to handle. In creating TIFF files to be read by Graphic Workshop, we recommend that you begin by trying the simplest defaults, such as no compression. WHAT HAPPENED TO THE SCANNER SUPPORT IN GRAPHIC WORKSHOP? ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── In creating release seven of Graphic Workshop we were confronted with a space problem. The available 640 kilobytes of memory in a conventional PC was getting full. Something had to go, and scanner support seemed to be the function which was the least used. WHY DO A I SEE A MENU WITH VIEWING OPTIONS WHEN I ATTEMPT TO VIEW SOME FILES? ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Your current display adapter or display adapter driver can display fewer colours than the image contains. Graphic Workshop is offering to dither or otherwise modify the image to make it viewable. WHY DO I SEE A COARSE IMAGE WITH ONLY PART OF MY IMAGE IN IT IF I ATTEMPT TO DISPLAY A 256-COLOUR IMAGE? ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── By default, Graphic Workshop configures itself for standard VGA mode. The only 256-colour mode available in this case is the coarse 320 by 200 pixel mode. Use VGACARD and GWSINSTL to select a screen driver for your display card. HOW CAN I MAKE THE PICTURES PRINTED BY GRAPHIC WORKSHOP TO MY LASER PRINTER LARGER? ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Choose a lower resolution print option or the appropriate Autosize selection. 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: 24 ─────────────────────────────────────── There are actually quite a few variations on IMG files... they handle monochrome and grey level images. The primary application for IMG files is as the bitmapped image file format of Ventura Publisher. Graphic Workshop supports files with up to 256 levels of grey and 24-bit colour IMG files. Note that 24-bit IMG files are only read and written by Ventura Publisher version 4.0 or better. PCX FILES - MAXIMUM BITS: 24 ─────────────────────────────────── These are the files used to hold images for Z-Soft's PC Paintbrush package. These can range from monochrome to 24-bit images. All the various formats are supported by Graphic Workshop. Note that some FAX boards which export PCX files do so in a peculiar way... they include one fewer lines of image data than the files purport to contain. Graphic Workshop regards these as being corrupted files. If you encounter these files, the PCXPATCH utility available on the Graphic Workshop accessory disk, discussed elsewhere in this document, will fix the problem. 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. By default Graphic Workshop writes GIF 89a files. If you require GIF 87a files, use the /G87 command line switch or set up Graphic Workshop appropriately with GWSINSTL. 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. Some versions seem 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. 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. 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, or display an error message. 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: 24 (WELL, 16, ACTUALLY) ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────── 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 GWSTEMP=D:\ or SET TEMP=D:\ This will cause the temporary file to be written to the root directory of drive D:. You can, of course, specify any path you like. If drive D: is a RAM drive, this will speed up the packing and unpacking of sixteen-colour PIC files considerably. See the section of this document which deals with memory for more information about environment variables. As of this writing, the PIC format supports high-colour images having fifteen or sixteen bits of colour and in theory supports true colour, with twenty-four bits of colour. In fact, the latter is still a bit flaky, and is not supported in Graphic Workshop. True colour images converted to the PIC format will be written as fifteen-bit high-colour files. 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. You can configure Graphic Workshop to write 24-bit images to the Targa format with either 24 or 16 bits of colour. Selecting 24 bits will give you the best colour fidelity, but it will also create pretty large files. Selecting 16 bits will reduce the file size by about a third, at the the cost of a bit of colour resolution. In practice, it takes a pretty good eye to tell the difference. If you're using a high colour screen driver with Graphic Workshop you won't be able to tell the difference at all, as high colour boards only show you 16 bits of colour. 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 GWSTEMP=D:\ or SET TEMP=D:\ This will cause the temporary file to be written to the root directory of drive D:. You can, of course, specify any path you like. If drive D: is a RAM drive, this will speed up the packing and unpacking of EPS files considerably. See the section of this document which deals with memory for more information about environment variables. 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 applications not created by Alchemy Mindworks. 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 sufficiently 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. /PAR - Assume there's a Paradise card in the system. /ATI - Assume there's an ATI card in the system. /TNG - Assume there's a Tseng 4000 card in the system. /TRI - Assume there's a Trident 8900 card in the system. /OAK - Assume there's an Oak Technologies card in the system. /VSA - Assume there's a VESA card in the system. /DIS - Disable the return to text mode. /Wnn - Wait nn (00 through 99) seconds and then return to DOS. /KEY - Allow keyboard hits to abort waiting /FAD - Fade in and out (VGA cards only) 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. In its standard VGA or autodetection modes, a 256-colour EXE picture will display at 640 by 480 by 256 colours if it detects a super VGA card it recognizes, or at at 320 by 200 pixels. This assumes that your card has at least 512 kilobytes of memory in board and that your monitor will sync at this resolution. If you have a super VGA card which the EXE pictures support, but which they do not detect correctly, you can force them into the appropriate mode with one of the switches from the foregoing list. 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-displaying 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 in the accessory disk for help in doing this. Note that when you hit a key to end the display of a picture, the ASCII code of the key will be returned as a DOS error level, which can be trapped in a batch file. If your picture terminates because of the /Wnn switch instead, the error level will be zero. You can use the /DIS, /Wnn, /KEY and /FAD switches to create slide shows and interactive displays. Use a batch file to set up the pictures you want to work with. The /DIS switch will make the transition between images clean... just make sure you omit it from the last image you display. Here's a typical batch file: ECHO OFF PICTURE1 /FAD /DIS /W10 PICTURE2 /FAD /DIS /W10 PICTURE3 /FAD /W10 Note that if you use the /W00 switch, your image will return immediately to DOS or to whatever application spawned it. This is useful, for example, should you want to use an EXE picture to display an image and then have the program that called it further modify the screen contents. The /FAD switch times its fades based on the vertical refresh rate of your monitor, something which doesn't change from system to system. As such, its fades should take about the same amount of time no matter what machine you run your EXE pictures on. Likewise, the time delays set by the /Wnn switch are based on the system clock, and are processor independent. 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. 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. You can use the CUT format to fool Graphic Workshop into promoting monochrome pictures to 256 colour pictures. Here's how to do it. In this example, we'll convert the EXAMPLE1.IMG file included with this package to a 256-colour GIF file. 1. Convert EXAMPLE1.IMG to EXAMPLE1.CUT. 2. Convert EXAMPLE2.GIF to EXAMPLE2.CUT 3. Hit S to shell to DOS. 4. Rename EXAMPLE2.PAL to EXAMPLE1.PAL. 5. Type EXIT to return to Graphic Workshop. 6. Convert EXAMPLE1.CUT to EXAMPLE1.GIF. Having done this, EXAMPLE1.GIF will prove to have 256 colours. You can delete all the CUT and PAL files involved. This procedure works because it creates a PAL file for EXAMPLE1.CUT, even though by rights it shouldn't have one. Graphic Workshop will thereupon assume that EXAMPLE1.CUT is a 256-colour image, since there's a PAL file for it. The original EXAMPLE2.GIF's palette has black for colour zero and something approaching white for colour one... these are the colours that will be assigned to the original black and white pixels in EXAMPLE1.CUT. If you have Desktop Paint 256 or some other paint package that will let you change colour values around, you might want to create a version of EXAMPLE2.GIF with its first colour set to pure black and its second colour set to pure white for this procedure. WINDOWS RLE FILES - MAXIMUM BITS: 8 ────────────────────────────────────────── The RLE format is actually a variation on the BMP format discussed previously. It has two primary uses under Windows. It can be used to create compressed wallpaper files and it can be used to replace the opening Windows logo screen with one of your own choosing. The RLE format uses compression, unlike BMP files, and as such wallpaper created as RLE files will occupy less space on your disk. At least, it should. If you store very complex scanned or dithered images in the RLE format, they may confuse the run length encoding procedure and actually result in larger files than they would have created as BMP files. To use an RLE file as wallpaper, place the file you wish to use in your \WINDOWS subdirectory. Use the Windows control panel to select your wallpaper file as you normally would... the only difference is that you will have to type in the name of the RLE file you wish to use, as the file selector in the control panel only looks for BMP files. Technically, RLE files used as wallpaper should take a little longer to load. In practice, this is rarely noticeable. Using an RLE file to change the startup Windows logo is a bit tricky, but it's arguably worth the effort if you're tired of looking at the Microsoft ad. You will need a sixteen-colour RLE image of the dimensions 640 by 480... 640 by 350 if you use an EGA card. The RLE file should be no larger than 40 or 50 kilobytes, and smaller if possible. For this example, we'll allow that the file is called NEWLOGO.RLE, located in the \WINDOWS subdirectory. Go to the \WINDOWS\SYSTEM subdirectory and issue the following command at the DOS prompt. COPY /B WIN.CNF+VGALOGO.LGO+C:\WINDOWS\NEWLOGO.RLE C:\WINDOWS\WIN2.COM This will create a new program called WIN2.COM. If you start Windows by typing WIN2, rather than WIN, you will see your logo rather than Microsoft's. This will not affect your normal WIN.COM program. There are several things to be aware of in this procedure. The most important is that the resulting WIN2.COM cannot be bigger than 65535 bytes, which is why you must keep your RLE file down to a modest size. If it exceeds these limits, WIN2.COM will refuse to run. Secondly, if your RLE file is of dimensions other than those of your screen, it will appear incorrectly placed. Thirdly, if you will be using an EGA card, replace the VGALOGO.LGO file, above, with EGALOGO.LGO. Note that when a file is converted to the sixteen-colour RLE format by Graphic Workshop, it is permanently remapped to the Windows default palette. This may result in a noticeable colour shift for some images. Graphic Workshop will read most RLE files from other sources. One known exception is the VGALOGO.RLE file provided with Windows 3.1. PFS ART FILES - MAXIMUM BITS - 1 ─────────────────────────────────────── These are files used by Spinnaker's PFS applications. They store graphics as uncompressed monochrome images. Graphic Workshop will only read and write uncompressed ART files. The F4 function will tell you if you have a compressed ART file. SUN RASTER RAS FILES - MAXIMUM BITS - 24 ─────────────────────────────────────────────── Sun raster files are native to the Sun unix environment. They can be uncompressed or run length compressed. There are also a number of obscure compression standards which Graphic Workshop does not support at present. These rarely turn up... the Get Info function will tell you if you've encountered one. Sun raster files appear with a variety of file extensions. Graphic Workshop uses the extension RAS. You might have to rename your files to use this extension if they're named something else. Extensions for Sun raster files on a unix system can include ras, rast, im1, im8, im24 and im32. Note that some 24-bit Sun raster files were created with their red and blue colour values erroneously interchanged. JPEG (JOINT PICTURE EXPERTS GROUP) JPG - MAXIMUM BITS - 24 ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── The JPEG format is actually a combination of several elements, and it's important that you understand what it does before you use it. The JPEG algorithm reduces the amount of space a compressed image will occupy on disk by selectively removing details from the image. Pictures with fewer details compress more effectively. The amount of detail removal is defined by the JPEG quality item of the Setup dialog box. At the default value of 75, relatively little picture degradation will take place, but a significant amount of compression will be obtained. At lower values you'll experience still better compression, but with a marked loss of image quality. The Independent JPEG Group, from whom this JPEG algorithm was obtained, have also defined a file format to hold JPEG files in, called JFIF. It's typically stored with the extension JPG. Note that several other programs, such as Lead Tools and Image Alchemy have defined their own formats with the extension JPG. They are not compatible with the JPEG functions in Graphic Workshop. If you encounter an error reading a JPG file, you probably have a file from one of these sources. Once an image has been converted to JPEG, its lost details are lost for good. Note also that repeatedly reading and writing the same image in the JPG format will successively degrade it. If you convert an image from another format, such as GIF, to JPG and then from JPG back to GIF, the final GIF file will usually be smaller than the original. At present all images converted into the JPG format will have a minimum of 256 colours. The legal requirement for using IJG's code is that we state: This software is based in part on the work of the Independent JPEG Group. (Thanks, lads... it was a fine bit of work.) HRZ SLOW SCAN TELEVISION - MAXIMUM BITS - 24 ─────────────────────────────────────────────────── Images in the HRZ format always have 24 bits of colour and the fixed dimensions 256 by 240 pixels. Images with differing dimensions will be padded or cropped to fit in this space when they're translated to HRZ. Images with fewer colours will be promoted to 24 bits. This is a fairly specialized format... if you aren't using slow scan television, you probably don't need it. You might well ask what slow scan television is... damned if we know. Conventional television seems slow enough. Graphic Workshop only reads uncompressed HRZ files. UUE UUENCODED INTERNET GRAPHICS ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ The UUE format isn't a graphic file format at all. Rather, it's a way of encoding binary files, such as graphics, so they can be sent over text-only electronic mail systems, such as Internet e- mail and Usenet newsgroups. The process of uuencoding a graphic turns it into text... albeit fairly mysterious-looking text... which can be mailed. The received uuencoded file would be uudecoded to return it to its former state. If this means almost nothing to you, you're probably not involved with the Internet, and can safely ignore this section. Graphic Workshop will read the images from uuencoded text. The file extension for your uuencoded text must be UUE. The text itself can contain multiple sections if you like... the software will attempt to figure out where the breaks are and assemble the original graphic into a correct file. Graphic Workshop's UUE decoder can work in strict or relaxed mode. This has to do with how it works with UUE files with multiple sections. In strict mode, the standard begin mode filename fields must precede the first uuencoded block in your source text file. Each subsequent section for multiple section uuencoded files must start with a BEGIN line of some sort and end with an END line. A uuencoded graphic that appears as multiple sections must have all the sections concatenated into a single UUE file. Note that Graphic Workshop does very little validity checking for uuencoded data... damaged source data, sections out of sequence or incorrectly formed uuencoded headers or trailers may cause Graphic Workshop's uudecoder to create an incorrect final binary file, and hence a mangled graphic. In relaxed mode, Graphic Workshop will decode any line which checks out as valid uuencoded data, ignoring all the BEGIN and END markers save for the first one. The strict mode guarentees you a correct decode if you UUE files have the currect section markers, but not all uuencoded data has these. The relaxed mode can usually handle files without headers properly, but some pathological cases will crop up in which spurious data is decoded. The UUE decoder mode can be set using the Relaxed UUE Decoding item in the Graphic Workshop Override dialog, and through page F2 of GWSINSTL. If you encounter a UUE file that doesn't display properly, try toggling this switch. In most cases you'll want to leave it in relaxed mode. Keep in mind when you're using the uudecoder in Graphic Workshop that whereas human beings can easily distinguish between the header and other flotsam which often appears before and after uuencoded graphics in e-mail, software is much less adept at this sort of thing. If you encounter uuencoded files that won't read, look at them with a text editor to see if there's something obviously peculiar about them. Should one of your images appear incomplete or obviously damaged, your UUE source file probably hasn't been created to the above specification... and perhaps the relaxed mode of the decoder can't quite figure out what's happening to it. In this case, you'll have to open it with a text editor and do a bit of hand massaginging between the section breaks. Specifically, just delete all the intermediate text and leave the uuencoded data as one long block. If you use a news reader that will append multiple messages to the same file, you should be able to create suitable source UUE files for Graphic Workshop to read with no difficulty. Note that when it decodes a UUE file, Graphic Workshop will ascertain the file type for the internal file name stored in the begin header of the first section, but it will form the body of the destination file name for translation or other processes from the body of the UUE file name. You can treat UUE files like any other graphic file format so long as they contain graphics in a format that Graphic Workshop recognizes. PNG FILES - MAXIMUM BITS: 24 ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ The PNG, or Portable Network Graphics, format was created as a successor to GIF. It features lossless compression for images with up to twenty-four bits of colour, and most of the other features of GIF. In most cases it will provide at least slightly letter compression than GIF. PNG files can be interlaced or non-interlaced. This won't affect how PNG images look in Graphic Workshop, but interlaced PNG files will cause Graphic Workshop to pause momentarily before its status bar begins to indicate that something's happening. The PNG Compression control in the Graphic Workshop Overrrides dialog and on page F2 of GWSINSTL defines how hard Graphic Workshop will try to compress PNG files. It can range between one and nine. If it's set to one, PNG files written with Graphic Workshop will not be all that well compressed, but they'll write quickly. If it's set to nine, Graphic Workshop will usually manage to create smaller PNG files, but it will take a lot longer to do so. Intermediate settings will represent a tradeoff between these two extremes. Note that this setting will not affect the quality of an image stored in a PNG file -- it only deals with the compression effectiveness and the time it takes to write a PNG file. By default, Graphic Workshop will add a TEXT chunk to any PNG files it writes specifiying the compression fact it has used. You can disable this feature by setting the PNG Comments item on page F2 of GWSINSTL to OFF. SCREEN CAPTURE ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ Registered users of Graphic Workshop will receive the Graphic Workshop screen capture utility, GWSCAP. This will capture graphic screens from most of the VGA and super VGA graphic screen modes to PCX files. It will also capture text screens to sixteen- colour PCX files, effectively making a picture out of your text. It's very small... occupying about eight kilobytes of memory... and dead easy to use. Please read GWSCAP.DOC for more information about configuring and using the screen capture. 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 true colour, 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 can present Graphic Workshop with something of a problem. Such an image can have up to sixteen million different colours in it, while many VGA cards can support only 256 different colours at a time. In order to deal with 24-bit images, Graphic Workshop may have to "dither" them. Dithering involves creating a simplified... albeit slightly coarser... version of the source image. Dithered images in the view mode of Graphic Workshop will give you an idea of what you 24-bit picture looks like, but they're always an approximation. 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 the Bayer colour dithering option Note that the Bayer colour screen dither has been designed to be reasonably fast, rather than accurate. When you create an error- diffused colour dither, as discussed next, 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 error-diffused 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. 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 attempt to allocate space in your extended or expanded memory pool, or use DOS memory if there isn't enough extra memory. If your extra memory type is set to virtual, it will try to allocate DOS memory first. 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 '286 and better 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: GWSTEMP=D:\ or TEMP=D:\ In this case, any virtual memory temporary files which Graphic Workshop wants to create will be written to the root of drive D:. 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. Note that if both TEMP and GWSTEMP environment variables exist on your system, GWSTEMP will be used. Graphic Workshop might 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. 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. To help you better understand how Graphic Workshop is using the memory in your system, have a look at the Wait box that appears when a file is being processed. If extra memory of some type is being used, the word "Wait" will be printed in the same colour as the text below the status bar. If conventional DOS memory is being used, the word "Wait" will be printed in a different colour. A WORD ABOUT MICE ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ You can use a mouse to operate Graphic Workshop, as well as the conventional keyboard interface. Because Graphic Workshop is primarily a text mode application, there are limits to what the mouse support can provide. We've tried to apply mouse functions where they made sense and to ignore the mouse where having it available would have really meant stretching a point. You must have a Microsoft-compatible mouse driver loaded for the mouse to work under Graphic Workshop. This will be handled by running MOUSE.COM... usually a fixture of your AUTOEXEC.BAT file... or by having MOUSE.SYS included in your CONFIG.SYS file. If no mouse functions are available under Graphic Workshop, you don't have a mouse driver loaded or your mouse is not Microsoft compatible. The mouse cursor will appear as a white diamond. Note that there are two other mouse options available... no mouse support at all or the conventional text mode block cursor. Alternate drivers to handle these are available on the Graphic Workshop accessory disk, discussed elsewhere in this document. Here's a quick overview of what the mouse does under Graphic Workshop. - You can select a file from the main menu by clicking on it. - You can toggle a file's tagged status by double clicking with the left mouse button. - You can view a file by double clicking with the right mouse button. - You can select "Yes" for any dialog that prompts you for a decision by clicking inside the box and "No" by clicking outside it. - You can banish a message box by clicking anywhere on the screen. - You can invoke the function of any key with a prompt by clicking on the prompt. - You can page up in the main menu by clicking at the right side of the screen and page down by clicking at the left side of the screen. - You can exit the View mode by clicking with the right mouse button. 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. 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. You can also ZIP up your problem files and upload them to our bulletin board. 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. You can also select a new directory by hitting Alt L. A directory and drive selection dialog will appear. Navigate to the drive and directory you wish to work in and then select the [ OK ] entry. 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. Clicking at the right and left sides of the main menu screen will also invoke the paging functions. Here are the keys which Graphic Workshop recognizes for basic file handling and session functions. Clicking in the appropriate prompts if you have a mouse will perform the same functions. Hitting the question mark or clicking in the "? for Help" message at the top of the screen 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 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 later in this document will work with multiple files if you have some of them tagged. If you hit "C", all the tags will be cleared, and if you hit "A" all the files will be tagged. Clicking on a file name with the left mouse button will toggle its tagged status. 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 it Alt L, a more complex dialog will appear allowing you to select a new drive and directory. This will be useful, among other things, for users of Novell networks. 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. If you hit "O", a list of configuration overrides will appear. These pertain only to your current session, and will not change the default configuration settings as chosen through GWSINSTL. See the section of this document which deals with configuration for help with the overrides. The alphabetic control keys can be upper or lower case. Other keys will be ignored. HELP ─────────── If you get lost, hit ? for help, or click in the help prompt in the upper right corner of the screen. Hit ? again or click in the quick help screen for detailed topical help. When the detailed help window opens, select a topic by using the cursor mover keys to position the highlighted item selector or just click on one of the dimmed topic names with the left button of your mouse. Clicking with the right button of the mouse or hitting Esc will move backward through help topics. Clicking with the left mouse button outside the help window will close the help and return to the main menu of Graphic Workshop. Clicking in the prompts at the bottom of the help window will invoke their functions. 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. Double clicking on a file name with your right mouse button will also invoke the View function. 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 the left 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, as will clicking with your right mouse button. 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. 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. 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. Bayer dither colour ------------------------- This option will display your image as a fixed eight-colour or a 256-colour dither, the latter for viewing 24-bit pictures on eight-bit displays. It's a pretty reasonable representation of a colour image for a quick 'n nasty preview. 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 'c' and 'C' keys will adjust the contrast. 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. You can zoom in on a graphic in view mode by hitting the Z key. This will cause it to be scaled to fill your screen. In fact, the scale factor will be fiddled a bit such that it will usually fill your screen in one dimension only, such that it isn't distorted. Hitting Z again will unzoom it back to its normal perspective. The zoom mode will allow you to see an overview large graphics without a lot of panning around. Note that there is usually a loss of displayed resolution when you zoom in on graphics, especially if your image has been dithered. None of the colour adjustments or panning functions will work while an image is zoomed in. If you hit Shift Esc to save a file while in zoomed mode, the un-zoomed image will be saved. To create a permanently zoomed file, use the scale function. 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, III and IV series printers. You only need an external print driver if you wish to print to a dot matrix or inkjet printer. Having said this, if you will be printing colour or grey scale pictures to a LaserJet-compatible printer you might want to experiment with the external Laserjet III/4 driver supplied with Graphic Workshop... it will, in fact, drive any series of LaserJet-compatible printer. It's typically slower than the internal drivers and prints larger images, but you might find you like its results better. See the section on configuration later in this document. Graphic Workshop allows you to print a picture in four resolution modes to laser printers. These will 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. Graphic Workshop will drive several colour ink jet printers though external drivers, as loaded through GWSINSTL, notably the Hewlett Packard Desktjet 500C and PaintJet printers. Note that these work a bit differently than monochrome printing does. They run at the maximum resolution of the printer, and dither the images printed to them. If you select a higher expansion factor, each pixel of the source image will be presented by a larger dither block, and as such will come closer to the source colour. This means that printing pictures larger will not only result in output that looks sharper, but it will also print with more accurate colours. The inkjet drivers will also handle monochrome graphics, although the results aren't usually all that good. You can do substancially better using the Hewlett Packard inkjet printers if you use the black ink cartridge and select one of the internal LaserJet drivers. 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 some external printer drivers. All of the standard dot matrix drivers included with Graphic Workshop print to LPT1. The inkjet drivers will print to the printer port selected through GWSINSTL. 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. In order to print correctly to most black and white laser printers, colour and grey scale images must be "expanded", that is, their grey scales must be adjusted to compensate for the non- linear grey scale of the output device. The amount of compensation varies among different laser printers. The compensation values for Graphic Workshop have been chosen to suit an average PostScript laser printer. However, you can fine tune these by adjusting the Print halftone brightness and Print halftone contrast values in GWSINSTL. There's a more complete discussion of these fields in the configuration section elsewhere in this document. If you liked the older fixed contrast expansion curve from previous versions of Graphic Workshop, change both these fields to 65535. 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 a monochrome TIFF preview image, 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. The dithering function also includes a thresholding option. This will reduce a colour or grey scale image to a high contrast black and white graphic. If you select this option, you will see a menu allowing you to select the threshold level. This is the source pixel intensity above which destination pixels will be white. Setting it higher will make your destination image darker. In dithering an image, the original brightness levels of the source graphic will be expanded a bit to improve the quality of the dither. The amount by which the grey levels are expanded is set by the Dither brightness and Dither contrast items of GWSINSTL. This will be discussed in detail later in this document. You might want to experiment with these values if you aren't happy with the quality of the dithered images Graphic Workshop is producing. Note that you can use the old expansion map by setting both these values to 65535. 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. If the Details option is available, hit F4 to invoke the details option too. Once the details appear, clicking in the upper half of the box will scroll up and clicking in the lower half will scroll down. 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. The Crop function does not have mouse support. 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 or to a specific dimensions. 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. There are three scaling modes available... proportional, anamorphic and by size. Proportional scaling will scale files by a percentage in both directions. Anamorphic will scale them by different percentages in each direction. Scaling by size will scale files by whatever percentages are necessary to make them fit in a defined number of pixels. The scaling values you enter will be rounded to the nearest lower integral value. Thus, 42.5 percent will really be 42 percent. You can scale by size to any dimensions in the range of 16 though 32767 pixels. 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. Hit F8 again and you will be able to enter the actual dimensions you want your destination image scaled to. 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. The palette used in colour reduction can be either quantized or fixed. A quantized palette is derived from the source image, while a fixed palette is predefined. In theory a quantized palette should be preferable, but in fact this is not always the case. A picture with a wide range of colour or small details which are markedly different from the rest of the image can fool the quantization algorithm into assigning too few colours to parts of your image you're interest in. In some pathological cases you'll find that the "256 colour orthogonal" palette choice will produce the most attractive results. Note that you can change the fixed palette to one of your own devising using the NEWCMAP function of the Graphic Workshop accessory disk, discussed elsewhere in this document. The "Windows 16 colours" choice will use a palette identical to the one used by a sixteen-colour Windows screen driver. This is useful if you're creating files to be used as Windows wallpaper, or in other applications wherein they'll be displayed by Windows in sixteen colours. 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. CATALOG - F10 ──────────────────── This function will create pictures of your pictures. Tag a number of images and hit F10. One or more files will be generated containing thumbnails of the selected images. These can be very helpful in keeping track of a lot of picture files. Files created by the catalog function will be named CAT00000, CAT00001, CAT00002 and so on. The catalog function will not overwrite existing files... if the file CAT00000 exists, for example, it will begin with CAT00001. When you create a catalog you can select one of a number of sizes for the final catalog files, in eight or twenty-four bit colour, with the individual thumbnails set in either portrait or landscape frames. Choosing twenty-four bit colour will create nicer catalog images, but they'll be sort of huge. If you create eight-bit catalogs you can choose to either remap or dither the thumbnail images. As a rule, remapped images won't represent the colours of your source graphics all that well and dithered images will lose a bit of resolution. Of the two dithering options, Bayer dithering is faster and somewhat less attractive. Diffused dithering takes longer but arguably looks better. Catalog files can be created with with a three-dimensional appearance or with a flat black background. You can define all the catalog parameters through GWSINSTL or through the session overrides. 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. Display gamma ------------------- The display gamma field can be used to adjust the gamma compensation for images displayed by Graphic Workshop. File name underbars ------------------------- The file name underbars option determines whether new files created by the dither, crop, adjust, transform, scale and special effects functions of Graphic Workshop will use underbars, as discussed elsewhere in this document. If you turn this feature off, the original base names of your images will be used. Be careful... doing so may cause Graphic Workshop to overwrite your source files. Prompt for destination ---------------------------- If this option is enabled, a dialog will appear prompting your for a destination directory each time you perform an action under Graphic Workshop which will cause it to write files. If this option isn't enabled, your destination files will be written to the same directory as your source files reside in. View resolution limit --------------------------- This field will allow you to define the maximum resolution Graphic Workshop can switch your monitor into. This is useful if the Graphic Workshop display driver for your card can select modes which your card or monitor can't support. Set this field to UNLIMITED to disable this feature. Drive map --------------- The drive map field should contain the letter of every accessible drive on your system. Application 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. This field will initially default to the current directory when you run GWSINSTL for the first time. This will be correct in most situations. Registration name ----------------------- When you have registered Graphic Workshop, type your name into this field. This, in conjunction with the registration number provided when you registered the software will disable the closing beg notice. Note that you must enter your name exactly as it is written on the page with your registration number. Case, spaces and punctuation matter. Registration number ------------------------- Enter your registration number in this field. EDIT FORMATS - F2 ──────────────────────── This page will let you fine tune the way Graphic Workshop writes some types of files. 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 the compression types to be used to create TIFF files. The options are: - NONE -- No compression. - PBITS -- PackBits run-length compression. - GRP4 -- CCITT group four compression. - LZW -- LZW compression. The three sections of this entry define the compression for two colour images, images having between four and 256 colours and 24- bit images respectively. 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. GIF file type ------------------- This item allows you to determine whether Graphic Workshop should write old-style GIF87a files or the newer GIF89a files. Targa true colour bits ---------------------------- This item allows you to determine whether 24 bit images written to Targa files should be written with 24 or 16 bits of colour. See the discussion of Targa files elsewhere in this document for more information. Dither brightness ----------------------- Dither contrast --------------------- In dithering an image, the original brightness levels of the source graphic will be expanded a bit to improve the quality of the dither. The amount by which the grey levels are expanded is set by the Dither brightness and Dither contrast items. You should experiment with these items if you aren't happy with the quality of the dithered images Graphic Workshop is producing. Note that you can use the original expansion map by setting both these values to 65535. Printed halftone brightness --------------------------------- Printed halftone contrast ------------------------------- In order to print correctly to most black and white laser printers, colour and grey scale images must be "expanded", that is, their grey scales must be adjusted to compensate for the non- linear grey scale of the output device. The amount of compensation varies among different laser printers. The compensation values for Graphic Workshop have been chosen to suit an average PostScript laser printer. However, you can fine tune these if you like. These values should range from zero to about sixty-four, with twenty or thirty being about right for most output devices. If you liked the older fixed contrast expansion curve from previous versions of Graphic Workshop, change both these fields to 65535. JPEG quality ------------------ This item allows you to set the quality factor used when writing JPEG files. Set to 100, JPEG files will exhibit modest compression and no loss of detail. Reduced below 100 the compression will improve and the detail loss in your compressed images will become more noticeable. JPEG read RGB ------------------- If you have the JPEG read RGB switch turned off, JPEG files will be read as eight-bit images. If it's turned on, they'll be read as true-colour 24-bit images. JPEG dither on read ------------------------- If you have the JPEG read RGB switch turned off, enable this feature to produce attractive 256-colour dithered images from JPEG files. Turn it off to generate fairly ugly remapped images. Catalog landscape width ----------------------------- Catalog landscape depth ----------------------------- Catalog portrait width ---------------------------- Catalog portrait depth ---------------------------- These items define the dimensions in pixels of the thumbnail frames in catalog images. They can range from 96 to 192 pixels. Dither catalogs --------------------- If this item is enabled, the thumbnail images in 256-colour catalogs will be dithered. This usually looks best. If it's off, they'll be remapped. Three-dimensional catalogs -------------------------------- If this item is enabled, catalogs will be created with a grey background and a three-dimensional appearance. If it's off they'll be created with a black background and red key lines around the thumbnails. Relaxed UUE decoding -------------------------- If this item is enabled, the internal UUE decoder in Graphic Workshop will attempt to decode all lines that look like they could be uuencoded. If it's not enabled, it will parse through blocks with begin and end fields, rejecting any data which isn't enclosed in such blocks. The former case will handle almost all uuencoded data, although pathological cases may turn up which will cause it to unpack files incorrectly. The latter case should always create properly decoded image files, but it will reject UUE files which don't have the correct block structure. PNG Compression --------------------- Set this value to one for fast PNG writing with the poorest compression or to nine for the best compression with longer write times. Intermediate values offer a tradeoff between these extremes. PNG Comments ------------------ If this item is disabled, no comment chunks will be added to PNG files witten by Graphic Workshop. EDIT SCREEN DRIVER - F3 ────────────────────────────── 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 will 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. IMPORTANT: If you don't know what kind of display card is in your system, and hence which driver to choose, run the VGACARD program which comes with Graphic Workshop. It will tell you what's in your system. Note that the cropping and scanning functions require revision 2.0 screen drivers or better. The F3 screen display will show you the revision numbers of drivers with revision two or better. Finally, 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. 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. Ahead B ------------- This is a driver for the Ahead B super VGA cards by David Mikelson of Solvang, California. This is a fairly basic driver... it does not support cropping, but it does handle the Ahead B super VGA modes. The author notes: This driver is for the SVGA card commonly referred to as an "AHEAD B" card. The card might also be referred to as a "Standard Technologies VGA800C", an "Ahead Systems VGA V-5000B", or a "Standard Technologies VGA CARD, REV B". The card must have at least 512K memory on board. Note that an "AHEAD B" card is NOT the same as an "AHEAD A". An Ahead A card uses different video modes, so this driver won't work for an AHEAD A card. Thanks to all these authors for their drivers. VESA super VGA -------------------- VESA 32k colours ---------------------- VESA 64k colours ---------------------- VESA 16m colours ---------------------- The VESA standard is supported by a number of super VGA cards in addition to their own proprietary standards. If your card supports VESA, either directly or through the use of a TSR, you can use one of these driver. This is especially handy if your card is not supported by a dedicated driver as yet. Note that these drivers will only attempt to select display modes which your card actually supports... if you call for a mode which does not exist on your card, the nearest available mode will be used. Use VGACARD to determine the extent of VESA support available for your display card. You can use the 16m, 64k or 32k drivers if VGACARD says your VESA BIOS can handle display modes with 16,777,216, 65,535 or 32,768 colours respectively. If the highest colour depth VGACARD reports is 256 colours, select the VESA super VGA driver. These drivers may not work with some fairly flaky VESA implementations, such as the one on the early Orchid Fahrenheit 1280 cards. Orchid Fahrenheit 1280 ---------------------------- This is a driver to support most Orchid Technologies Fahrenheit 1280 cards... some of the really early ones with very funky VESA implementations may not behave themselves. This driver assumes that your card has one megabyte of memory and a Sierra DAC for the high colour modes. We've only been able to test it on a limited number of Orchid cards, and we know that there have been a lot of revisions to this hardware. Let us know if you have difficulties with it. Also, note that Orchid Technologies was providing free BIOS upgrades as of this writing for the older cards... this cures a multitude of problems. Users of other cards with VESA BIOSs should note that the Orchid driver is a VESA driver at heart, with some modifications to make it behave itself in this implementation. IBM XGA ------------- This driver supports IBM XGA cards. It can display true-colour pictures at a resolution of 640 by 480 pixels, 256-colour pictures at resolutions up to 1024 by 768 pixels, sixteen-colour pictures at resolutions of up to 800 by 600 pixels and monochrome pictures at a resolution of 640 by 480 pixels. We had to actually buy a PS/2 to write this driver, and if you use it for an extended period of time with an unregistered copy of Graphic Workshop we will most certainly send our leather winged demon of the night after you, as outlined else where in this document. Oak Tech 640 by 480 ------------------------- Oak Tech 800 by 600 ------------------------- These drivers support cards which use the Oak Technologies chip set. The higher resolution drivers also support the lower resolution modes, and will select the appropriate mode automatically. Tseng 4000 640 by 480 --------------------------- Tseng 4000 800 by 600 --------------------------- Tseng 4000 1024 by 768 ---------------------------- Tseng 4000X 1024 by 768 ----------------------------- These drivers support cards which use the Tseng Labs chip set. The higher resolution drivers also support the lower resolution modes, and will select the appropriate mode automatically. The Tseng 4000X driver will support 1024 by 768 pixels at 256 colours, and 640 by 480 or 800 by 600 pixels of 24-bit colour. You'll need a Tseng 4000 board with the Sierra DAC on it to use this driver. It will allow you to view 24-bit images directly. 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. 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. 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. 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 driver for the old Western Digital Paradise Plus card. Paradise Pro Card ----------------------- This is a driver for the old Paradise Professional card (and clones thereof). It supports both the 640 by 400 and 640 by 480 pixel, 256 colour modes. Dell Super VGA 256K ------------------------- This is a version of the Paradise Plus driver for older Dell systems. 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 for older Dell systems, that is, a Paradise driver with the 800 by 600 pixel monochrome mode disabled. ATI VGA Wonder -------------------- Drivers are included to drive ATI VGA Wonder series cards to 1024 by 768 pixels in 256 colours and 800 by 600 in sixteen colours and monochrome, as well as to various lesser resolutions. 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 - F4 ──────────────────────────────────────── 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. The LaserJet III/4 driver is an alternate way to print halftones from colour and grey scale images to a LaserJet-compatible printer. You might find that you like it better than the internal LaserJet drivers. You should experiment with this one to see if it suits your needs. 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. Note that you can override many of the Graphic Workshop options with the O command from the main screen. 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 /PRBn - set print brightness to n /PRCn - set print contrast to n 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 /TXP - Expand TIFF grey scale /TXN - Do not expand TIFF grey scale /EXC - Compress EXE pictures /EXN - Do not compress EXE pictures /G87 - Write GIF files as GIF 87a /G89 - Write GIF files as GIF 89a /T16 - Write true colour Targa files with 16 bits of colour /T24 - Write true colour Targa files with 24 bits of colour /JQLn - Set the JPEG write quality level to n /TWMn - Set the TIFF write mode to n, where n is: - 0: NONE - NONE - NONE - 1: PBITS - PBITS - NONE - 2: LZW - LZW - NONE - 3: LZW - LZW - LZW - 4: GRP4 - LZW - LZW See the section on configuration elsewhere in this document for more about the TIFF write options. RUNTIME SWITCHES ─────────────────────── /DRBn - set dither brightness to n /DRCn - set dither contrast to n /NCH - Disable the checks for limited memory and Windows /CPW - Displays the current legal notices and third part copyright information for Graphic Workshop. DESQVIEW, QEMM AND OTHER ENVIRONMENTS ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ Graphic Workshop has not been written to run under DesqView, and in some cases may not do so reliably. It gets into trouble when it switches into a super-VGA graphics mode, which DesqView is unable to detect. Quarterdeck maintains that it does behave itself under recent releases of their package in other circumstances... we have not had the opportunity to test it as of this writing. Because of the way Graphic Workshop uses memory, we don't recommend running it under multi-tasking or task switching environments. Things like Double-DOS, GeoWorks and such may cause it to misbehave. If you want to run Graphic Workshop under Windows, we recommend that you get Graphic Workshop for Windows. 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 3", published by Sybex Books, or "Corel Draw It 4", published by Addison Wesley, both by Steven William Rimmer, 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. - Manipulate the resource files of Graphic Workshop. - Fix problems with PCX files generated by some FAX boards. - Change the way Graphic Workshop uses your mouse. - Use the NEWCMAP function to change the default orthogonal palette for colour dithering and remapping to one of your own devising. 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 to write drivers. Complete instructions for using the script language interface are also included. The Graphic Workshop accessories disk is included with all registered versions of Graphic Workshop CONTACTING ALCHEMY MINDWORKS INC. ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ We hope you'll contact us to register Graphic Workshop... see the section about registering your software elsewhere in this document. You can contact us by mail by writing to us at: Alchemy Mindworks Inc. P.O. Box 500 Beeton, Ontario L0G 1A0 Canada Our CompuServe account is 70451,2734. Our Internet address is alchemy@accesspt.north.net -- we do not recommend that you leave credit card information on the Internet. You can register Graphic Workshop with an American Express, Mastercard or Visa card by calling 1-800-263-1138 from the United States and Canada or 1-905-936-9500 from other places. Please note that this number is for ordering only... no one at it can answer technical questions. We will attempt to answer questions from unregistered users who write to us to the extent that their answers are needed for you to fully determine whether this software will suit your requirements. We can also be reached through the Alchemy Mindworks bulletin board. It's available twenty-four hours a day at 1-905-936-9501. 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 call back later. We ask that in contacting us you appreciate that we are a small company with limited resources. If you have not registered this software we will not tell you to go to hell, but please don't ask us for half an hour of free technical support. REGISTRATION ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ If you like Graphic Workshop and find it useful, you are requested to support it by sending us $40.00. This will entitle you to telephone support, notification of updates, a free copy of the latest version of this software and other worthwhile things. It will also avail you of a registration number to shut off the closing beg notice. More to the point, though, it'll make you feel good. We've not infested Graphic Workshop with excessive beg notices, crippled it or had it verbally insult you after ten days. We trust you to support this software if you like it. If you want to see additional features in Graphic Workshop, register it. If we had an Arcturian mega-dollar for everyone who has said they'd most certainly register their copy if we'd add just one more thing to it, we could buy ourselves a universe and retire. Oh yes, should you fail to support this program and continue to use it, a leather winged demon of the night will tear itself, shrieking blood and fury, from the endless caverns of the nether world, hurl itself into the darkness with a thirst for blood on its slavering fangs and search the very threads of time for the throbbing of your heartbeat. Just thought you'd want to know that. Our address is: Alchemy Mindworks Inc. P.O. Box 500 Beeton, Ontario L0G 1A0 Canada You can register Graphic Workshop with an American Express, Mastercard or Visa card by calling 1-800-263-1138 from the United States and Canada or 1-905-936-9500 from other places. If you have previously registered Graphic Workshop, you can update your copy to the current release for $20.00. If you have a FAX number, please include it in your registration. We're hoping to be able to handle notification of future updates of this software by FAX where we can. This is both considerably faster and a lot cheaper than mail. You can FAX your order to us at 1-905-936-9502. You'll find an order form in this ZIP to make this easier. When you register Graphic Workshop, please specify the disk size you require. Please note that we are not able to accept purchase orders. We cannot ship software COD. CANADIAN USERS ───────────────────── The registration fee for Graphic Workshop is $40.00 (CDN) plus seven percent GST, or $42.80. Please add $5.00 for shipping and handling. 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 and perhaps annihilate a few more political parties by voting in the next federal and provincial elections. AMERICAN USERS ───────────────────── The registration fee for Graphic Workshop is $40.00 (US). Please add $5.00 for shipping and handling. Please note that when you send us your order... and then when we send you your update back... two distinct post offices get to deal with the ensuing mail. It can take a few weeks for things to get through this system... we ask that you be patient. We don't fully understand why it takes less time for a package to get to Australia than it does to send one to Cleveland... some things are best left as mysteries. OTHER USERS ────────────────── The registration fee for Graphic Workshop is $40.00 (US). Please add $5.00 for shipping and handling. 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. It must have the address of a North American clearing office printed on the cheque. If there's no bank clearance number along the bottom of the cheque, it will not clear. We cannot accept payment by Eurocheques... they are not negotiable outside Europe. Payment from countries outside Canada must be in US dollars. PAYING BY CREDIT CARD ──────────────────────────── We can accept payment by American Express, Mastercard and Visa only. We need your card number and expiry date and the name which appears on your card. UPDATE POLICY ──────────────────── Having registered Graphic Workshop, you're welcome to download the current shareware version whenever you like and install it. It will pick up your registration number and become a registered copy. If you find new features in a downloaded copy which are genuinely useful to your application of Graphic Workshop, we'd like to ask you for $20.00. If none of the new features are specifically applicable to what you're doing, or if you just downloaded a newer version to fix bugs, please treat it as a free maintenace release. TECHNICAL SUPPORT ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ Technical support is available at 1-905-936-9501, 10:00am to 5:00pm EST most business days. If you encounter our answering machine... it does happen occasionally... please try back later. One of the considerations in offering very low cost software is that we are unable to return calls for technical support. If you are an unregistered user of Graphic Workshop, we will at our discretion assist you to the extent required for you to ascertain whether this software is suitable for your application. Callers who are rude, abusive or pig-headed with our technical support staff will wind up as demon-chow. See the section on Registration earlier in this document. Please do not call our 800 number for technical support. The people who answer our sales line can put a credit card machine into warp drive, but they know less about software than most cats know about quantum mechanics. BOOKS ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ Steven William Rimmer's new novel The Order is available directly though Alchemy Mindworks. Please see the order form which accompanies this package. If you use Alchemy Mindworks software, you might find the following books by Steven William Rimmer useful as well. Constructing Windows Dialogs, published by Windcrest/McGraw Hill, will provide you with the techniques, secrets and dirty tricks to make the user interface of your Windows applications state of the art. Included are discussions of the standard Windows constrols, the BWCC and CTL3D custom control libraries, multimedia, using graphics and creating your own custom control libraries. Available in mid-1994. Canned Code, published by Windcrest/McGraw Hill, is a collection of DOS and Windows programming tricks accumulated through years of real world application design. Included are bits of code to do high speed screen access, display a PCX file, access a dBASE DBF database, draw recursive graphics, play music, draw a maze, create fireworks, display a WordPerfect document, implement a text filter and many more useful and otherwise badly documentated functions. Windows Multimedia Programming, published by Windcrest/McGraw Hill, includes complete C language source code for Windows applications to play wave and MIDI files, display and animate bitmaps, read Kodak Photo-CD images through the Kodak PCD libraries, play compact disc audio tracks from a CD-ROM drive and display Video for Windows AVI files. The source code for the applications in the book, along with about a hundred megabytes worth of example graphics, sounds, scores and movies, plus six compact disc audio tracks of celtic music, are included on a CD- ROM. If you're interested in writing programs which use graphics, you'll find everything you need to know in Bitmapped Graphics, second edition. It's published by Windcrest/McGraw Hill, (TAB book 4266). It features code to pack and unpack MacPaint, IMG, PCX, GIF and TIFF files, as well as chapters on screen drivers, dithering and printing. An additional book on this subject, Supercharged Bitmapped Graphics, (TAB Book 4102), discusses the GIF 89a, WordPerfect, BMP, IFF/LBM, TGA, MSP, 24-bit PCX and colour TIFF file formats, as well as such subjects as colour dithering and colour printing. Super VGA Graphics, published by Windcrest/McGraw Hill, includes source code to read and write GIF and PCX files, and to do extensive graphics in the sixteen, 256 and 32,768 colour screen modes of popular super VGA cards. There is a chapter about printing graphics to a variety of printers... ranging from simple dot matrix printers though laser printers to colour ink jet printers. The book also includes a chapter about writing animated super-VGA arcade games. 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 Windcrest/McGraw Hill (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. Windows Bitmapped Graphics, published by Windcrest/McGraw Hill, deals with the most popular image file formats in a Windows environment. It also discusses printing, viewing and dithering images in Windows applications. A complete discussion of graphic file formats for use in word processing documents and desktop publishing chapters can be found in The Graphic File Toolkit, published by Addison-Wesley. This is an invaluable reference for anyone who wants to use graphic files but does not want to become a programmer in the process. Corel Draw It, Published by Addison Wesley, is the essential guide to Corel Draw 4.0. Streamlined to take you from a standing start to complete mastery of Corel Draw in as short a time as possible, Corel Draw It offers a lucid explanation of lines and fills, colour, type and typography, bitmaps, importing and exporting, special effects and numerous other areas of Corel Draw. 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 1-705-458-1562. 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 our software and we won't have to set our leather winged demon of the night on 'em. SHAREWARE DISTRIBUTORS ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ We will, at our discretion, send out disks of our shareware applications to shareware distributors. Alternately, you can download the current versions of our applications from CompuServe in the PICS forum or from our bulletin board at 1-905-936-9501. We encourage you to use our bulletin board, as it will allow you to keep your copies of our applications up to date. If you obtain current copies of our shareware, you have our permission to distribute them under the following terms. No written permission from us is required if you abide by these terms. - That nothing be added to, deleted from or changed in the archive files which contain our packages. This includes adding ZIP file comments to them. The SETUP installer function must remain as it's provided with this package. - That our shareware is not included in or bundled with other hardware or software without our written permission. - That no printed documentation regarding our shareware is included with the package without our written permission. - That hard copy explaining that our packages are shareware is included with the disks. - That no more than $10.00 (US) be charged for the distribution of whatever package our applications are part of. If you will be charging more than this, please get in touch with us for bundling rates. You do have our permission to copy the ZIP files from our quad density disk to multiple lower density disks for distribution. Please note that if you would like to distribute Graphic Workshop in "rack" packaging, that is, in a store rather than directly from a shareware distributor, we request that you contact us for permission to do so. We will require a proof copy of the packaging you intend to use prior to giving our consent for rack packaging. OTHER ALCHEMY MINDWORKS SHAREWARE ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ The following are the other shareware packages we have available as of this writing. Our newsletter, available for the asking, will list all the current ones. GRAPHIC WORKSHOP (RELEASE SEVEN) ─────────────────────────────────────── This is the last word in image programs. It converts, prints, views, dithers, thresholds, transforms, flips, rotates, scales, crops, colour adjusts, scans, quantizes, catalogs and wreaks special effects on MacPaint, GEM/Ventura IMG, PCX, GIF, JPG, TIFF, WPG, MSP, IFF/LBM, BMP, RLE, Halo CUT, Targa, PIC, HRZ, ART, EXE, RAS, TXT and EPS files. It drives CGA, Hercules, EGA, VGA and pretty well all super VGA cards. It will drive PostScript and LaserJet Plus laser printers, colour PostScript printers, colour inkjets and most dot matrix printers. It features batch processing, extended and expanded memory support, an intuitive user interface and easy to follow menus. It allows you to convert colour image files into superb black and white clip art for desktop publishing, among other things. The registered version comes with GWSCAP, our powerful VGA and super-VGA screen capture utility and a complete set of accessories. GRAPHIC WORKSHOP FOR WINDOWS (RELEASE 1.1) ───────────────────────────────────────────────── Offering the same functionality as Graphic Workshop for DOS, the Windows implementation of this package offers a traditional Windows interface, multitasking and lots of things to click on. It converts, prints, views, dithers, thresholds, transforms, flips, rotates, scales, crops, colour adjusts, quantizes and wreaks special effects on MacPaint, GEM/Ventura IMG, PCX, GIF, TIFF, JPG, WPG, PIC, HRZ, MSP, IFF/LBM, BMP, RLE, Halo CUT, Targa, ART, RAS, rasterized WMF and CLP, Kodak Photo-CD, ICO, FLI, FLC, AVI, text and EXE picture files. Graphic Workshop for Windows will display and print on any card and printer respectively that can be driven by Windows. It features batch processing, an intuitive user interface and easy to follow menus. The 1.1 release adds a thumbnail preview mode, context sensitive help, easier installation and all sorts of new features. Includes several unicorns. QUICKSHOW LIGHT FOR WINDOWS ────────────────────────────────── A powerful, easy to use slide show package for Windows, QuickShow will allow you to create multimedia presentations which are as simple or as complex as you require them. It will work with images in the following formats: MacPaint, GEM/Ventura IMG, PCX, GIF, TIFF, JPG, WPG, PIC, HRZ, MSP, IFF/LBM, BMP, RLE, Halo CUT, Targa, ART, RAS and Kodak Photo-CD. Each image can include special effects as WAV, MIDI and AVI Video for Windows files. QuickShow Light is being offered as bookware... the cost of registration is to buy Steven William Rimmer's new novel The Order. PAGAN DAYBOOK FOR WINDOWS ──────────────────────────────── This is a small Windows application which will help you keep track of the pagan calendar. Never again be at a loss to know when the summer solstice occurs, or when to celebrate the festival of Fortunalia. It's considerably more interesting than a calendar that tells you when the bank holidays and long weekends fall. The Pagan Daybook is being offered as bookware... the cost of registration is to buy Steven William Rimmer's new novel The Order. PAGAN DAYBOOK FOR DOS ──────────────────────────── This is a DOS text-mode implementation of the Pagan Daybook for Windows. The applications are more or less identical, save that this one has no graphics. MULTIMEDIA WORKSHOP FOR WINDOWS -- LIGHT ─────────────────────────────────────────────── Multimedia Workshop for Windows Light is an easy to use Windows WAV, MIDI and AVI file manager. It allows you to audition, queue, rename, delete and investigate multimedia files. Multimedia Workshop for Windows Light is being distributed as bookware... the cost of registration is to buy Steven William Rimmer's new novel The Order. See VIEW-ME.GIF. IMAGE GALLERY (RELEASE 1.1) ────────────────────────────────── Image Gallery is a visual database to help you keep track of a large number of image files quickly and effectively. It will create database files... galleries... of any combination of bitmapped image files, displaying them as small ``thumbnail'' images. It works with all the file formats supported by Graphic Workshop, with the exceptions of EPS, EXE and TXT. You can search a gallery visually or by key words. Each entry in a gallery supports key word and comment fields, as well as the dimensions, location and other specifics of each image. You can also print all or part of a gallery, producing hard copy catalogs of your images when you need them. Image Gallery will run with any VGA card. It uses a Microsoft compatible mouse and will drive any PostScript or LaserJet Plus compatible laser printer, and most dot matrix printers. Release 1.1 includes a full colour view function, colour thumbnails, exporting and multiple selection. DESKTOP PAINT 256 (RELEASE TWO) ────────────────────────────────────── This is a complete rewrite of our popular super VGA paint package. Desktop Paint 256 is a powerful painting application. It will let you create and edit pictures stored in the MacPaint, GEM/Ventura IMG, PCX, GIF, TIFF, WPG, MSP, IFF/LBM, BMP, Halo CUT, and Targa formats. It features a rich selection of drawing and image manipulation tools, XMS and EMS support to work on large images and a user friendly interface. Looking very much like monochrome Desktop Paint in colour, it's a powerful application which will be equally useful for picture collectors, artists and desktop publishing users. It supports Paradise (and compatibles), Headland Video 7, Tseng Labs 4000 series cards, Trident cards which use 8900 series chips, Oak Technologies cards, ATI VGA Wonder cards and all cards with VESA capabilities. Note that you must have one of these super-VGA cards to use Desktop Paint 256... it does not run in the standard 320 by 200 pixel "standard" VGA mode. Desktop Paint 256 requires a Microsoft-compatible mouse. DESKTOP PAINT 16 ─────────────────────── Desktop Paint 16 is a VGA paint package for use with images having up to sixteen colours. As with the monochrome implementation of Desktop Paint, it will read and write image files in the MacPaint, GEM/IMG, PCX files, GIF, TIFF, WPG, MSP, IFF/LBM, BMP and PIC formats. It has EMS and XMS support to handle images of virtually any size, an intuitive user interface and a wide selection of image creation and manipulation tools. Desktop Paint 16 can utilize fonts from many other sources, including Ventura Publisher, Macintosh FONT and NFNT resources and Windows FNT files. It requires a VGA card and a Microsoft- compatible mouse. DESKTOP PAINT (RELEASE THREE) ──────────────────────────────────── Desktop Paint is a powerful monochrome paint package fine tuned for use with desktop publishing applications. It will read and write image files in all the formats Graphic Workshop supports with the exceptions of EPS and RLE. It has EMS and XMS support to handle images of virtually any size, an intuitive user interface and a wide selection of image creation and manipulation tools. Desktop Paint can utilize fonts from many other sources, including Ventura Publisher, Macintosh FONT and NFNT resources and Windows FNT files. Desktop Paint requires a Microsoft- compatible mouse. GRAFCAT (RELEASE 3.1) ──────────────────────────── 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. It will also generate catalog images... arrays of full colour thumbnails... and has in internal image viewing function. 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 1-905-936-9501. REVISION HISTORY ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ For them what cares... Version 7.0f - Added PNG support. Improved the colour reduction and dithering in the Effects function. Improved the memory management a lot. Version 7.0e - Mostly a maintenance release. Modified the TIFF reader to handle CMYK TIFF files. Added a uudecoder to read graphics from Internet newsgroups directly... a singular convenience if you want to look at weather maps, erotica, fine art, erotica, animation cells, erotica or erotica. See the section on UUE files for more about how this feature works. Added a dedicated environment variable for Graphic Workshop's temporary files. Fixed a bug in the scaling function. Fixed a bug in the JPEG read function. Added a function to limit the display resolution. Version 7.0d - Maintenance release... fixed a problem with the monochrome cropping function. Fine tuned the PCX writing resource somewhat. Fixed the Sun Raster resource to deal with grey scale RAS files correctly. Fixed a bug in the scaling function. Version 7.0c - Maintenance release... fixed a problem with the true colour VESA driver when it confronts an ATI card with the ATI VESA TSR loaded. Fixed a problem with converting sixteen- colour images to JPEG. Fixed a problem with displaying odd-size sixteen-colour EXE pictures. Fixed a problem which caused some GIF files to display as solid black. Fixed a problem with te TIFF reader to deal with files having no BitsPerSample tag. Version 7.0b - Maintenance release... fixed a bug in the true colour VESA driver. Improved the catalog funtion and added error diffused dithering. Improved on a few minor memory management issues. Fixed a bug in the JPEG code that manged some grey scale JPEG files. Added start-up warnings for restricted memory and operation from within Windows. Fixed a bug that caused Windows to reboot after using Graphic Workshop in some cases. Added masking to clean up odd-length lines. Fixed a bug in the true colour dithering. Version 7.0a - Major rewrite and restructuring... added JPEG and complete TIFF support, HRZ support, XGA and high-colour VESA support. We fixed a bug in the EXE pictures which affected how they displayed on some VESA adapters. We've deleted the scanner support and added cataloging, improved the memory management to manage what memory is left and added high colour PIC support. The package now includes a SETUP function for installation. Pretty well all the static data objects in Graphic Workshop have been shifted to GWS.RES to free up system memory. The new release includes countless minor enhancements. Version 6.1w - Fixed a bug in the sixteen-colour PCX read function. Added Sun Raster support. Added 256-colour dithering for viewing 24-bit files. Fixed a bug that omitted the last format resource in the resource, usually ART. Added super-VGA detection for the EXE pictures. Added a StripByteCounts tag to the TIFF format, which keeps some TIFF readers happy. Version 6.1v - Added VESA support to the EXE format. Added printer driver to do halftones on LaserJet-compatible printers. Added contrast expansion adjustments for halftone printing and dithering. Sped up the function that builds the file list in the main window and allowed it to find directories with extensions. Improved the image buffer allocation strategy. Added a DOS screen capture function. Version 6.1u - Added drivers for the Diamond Speedstar 24X cards and improved the VESA support. The VESA drivers now handle high colour, and work with even the most unusual VESA implementations... we hope. Added zooming to the view mode. Improved the error trapping in most of the functions. Added support for the PFS ART format. Improved the Targa colour handling for Targa 16 files. Added orthogonal and Windows palette options to the colour reduction function. Added a thresholding option to the monochrome dithering function. Moves the help resources out of the main GWS.RES file to speed up the boot. Improved the EXE format video card detection... it should behave itself with PS/2s now. Added the VGACARD utility to help select a super VGA driver. Version 6.1t - Added Deskjet 500C printer support, and considerably improved the handling of non-laser printers in general. Graphic Workshop can now handle external drivers with multiple modes. Fixed another inconsistency in the WPG format... this one caused some WPG files to be read with several lines missing from the bottom of the image. Fixed the PCX format to write sixteen-colour files that get along with more recent versions of PC Paintbrush. Added screen drivers for the Orchid Fahrenheit 1280 and Ahead B cards. Version 6.1s - Fixed a problem with converting eight-bit files and modified the F9 colour reduction function to use sorted palettes. This sets up the reduced palette such that the darkest colours appear first in the palette, and hence the border will be dark when the file is displayed. Improved the PIC resource to write VGA-format PIC files. Added an option to write true-colour images to the Targa format with either 16 or 24 bits of colour. Added detailed on-line topical help. Version 6.1r - Added mouse support. Fixed a problem with the WPG format that caused it to abort on WPG files created by the WordPerfect screen capture utility. Added fades and Oak Technologies to the EXE format. Fixed a bug in the script language that caused the scale function to choose the wrong destination file format. Fixed a bug in the extended memory support, and one in the BMP resource that caused problems in writing some 24-bit files. Version 6.1q - Added drivers for Oak Technologies VGA cards. Largely rewrote the GIF format resource to make it a bit more bulletproof. Added a GIF 89a write option. Added contrast adjustment to the view mode. Simplified the view mode options menu a lot, deleted some of the obsolete options and replaced the error diffused dither with eight-colour Bayer dithering, which is much faster for a quick preview image. Version 6.1p - Added Windows RLE support, allowing Graphic Workshop to create compressed Windows wallpaper and to change the initial Window logo. Added a scale to size option in the F8 scaling function. Added a time delay option for EXE pictures... make your own slide shows. Added new tags to the TIFF format to create TIFF files which will import correctly into CorelDRAW 3.0. Modified GWSINSTL to make the GWS.RES path in the F1 page default to the current directory. Version 6.1o - Implemented registration numbers to disable the closing beg notice for registered users, fixed a bug in the EXE resource and added super-VGA support to it. Fixed several bugs in the LBM resource. Version 6.1n - Improved the TIFF support for certain fairly obtuse types of colour TIFF files. Fixed an irregularity in the Stucki dithers. Version 6.1m - Fixed an inconsistency in the way WPG files were being written. Added 24-bit IMG capability. Added a VESA screen driver. Fixed a bug which made sixteen-colour EXE files convert oddly now and again. Fixed a bug in the printing function of the script language. History lurches erratically forward... 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. LEGAL DOGMA ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ Neither the author nor Alchemy Mindworks Inc. assumes responsibility for any damage or loss caused by the use of these programs, however it comes down. If you can think of a way a program like this one can cause you damage or loss you've a sneakier mind than any of us. All the registered trademarks used herein are registered to whoever it is that owns them. This notification is given in lieu of any specific list of trademarks and their owners, which would not be as inclusive and would probably take a lot longer to type. If you register Graphic Workshop, we will assume that you are doing so having tested the shareware version and ascertained that it's suitable for your hardware and requirements. We cannot provide refunds for shareware registration if you subsequently change your mind. Graphic Workshop, Desktop Paint, Image Gallery, QuickShow, GrafCat, GWSCAP and Pagan Daybook, Multimedia Workshop for Windows and Storyteller are trademarks of Alchemy Mindworks Inc. Graphic Workshop's JPEG functions include portions of the image compression code created by the Independent JPEG Group. Parts of the TIFF library were derived from TIFFLIB, by Sam Leffler. GIF is a trademark of CompuServe, an H&R Block Company. LZW licenced under U.S. patent 4,558,302 and foreign counterparts. That's it...