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!SPrinter
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SPrinter
========
Porpoise
========
The idea is a printer driver which when printed to produces a sprite. This
is an easy way of getting anything which can be printed into the form of a
bit map. The process is similar to faxing, and you may notice the parallels
with e.g. ArcFax. Unlike ArcFax the results can be of any resolution and in
colour.
Installation
============
Firstly the Dumper Module 'PDumperSP' should be installed inside !Printers
in the PDumpers directory. If you have a new machine with !Printers in ROM.
The correct location will be something like;
ADFS::HardDisc4.$.!Boot.Choices.Printers.PDumpers
If this directory does not exist, you should create it.
Secondly the Printer Definition File (PDF) 'SPrinter' should be installed in
!Printers in the usual way (drag to the printer control window). Or, little
known fact, by double clicking.
After that you should click with menu on 'SPrinter' in the Printer control
window and use the connections entry. Select printing to 'File' and enter a
path of 'SPrinter:Printout'.
Use 'Configure' on the printer control window menu, and set the sort of
output you want from the printer driver. This can be colour or grey scale
and various resolutions. 90dpi is the usual screen resolution. Beware - A4
size printed at 720dpi will produce massive files.
Finally, the !SPrinter application should be run. Sprites can only
be saved whilst this is on the icon bar.
Use
===
Select the 'Sprite' printer driver on the icon bar by clicking with 'Select',
print in the usual way. When printing has finished, a save box will appear,
and you can drag this to the desired destination for the sprite.
Hints and Tips
==============
Sprinter is a printer driver, and although it is producing sprites it has to
inherit some attributes of a physical printer. So it has a paper size, and
if you attempt to print beyond this output will be clipped. When you install
the PDF you can choose a suitably large paper size. A good choice is "A4
paper size" which will give a printing area of the full size of A4.
By the same token, options on the printer configuration window for half
toning etc. appear but have no effect.
If you want antialiased output, for example if you want to convert a Draw
file into a sprite for use on a web page, then the trick is to use SPrinter
at 180 dpi (for example) and then use a program like ImageMaster to scale
the results down to 90dpi.
Programs like ImageMaster will allow you to get output in other desirable
formats like small colour depths, or to save as JPEG's etc.
If you print more than one page at a time, each page will appear
as an image in the resulting sprite file.
By default the quality options provided by Printers are
Grey, halftoned (fine)
Colour, halftoned (fine)
Colour, halftoned
If you set the system variable Printers$DPLJfullQ like this;
Set Printers$DPLJfullQ Full
Perhaps in a boot file or !Printers !Run file, then the options can be extended to;
Mono, small halftone
Grey, small halftone
256 colours, small halftone
256 colours, large halftone
16 million, small halftone
16 million, large halftone
This allows you to produce 256 colour sprites direct, and half toned black
and white sprites. Unlike the other options, half toning does work for Mono.
This feature only works with Printers 1.52 and 1.53.
Technical Details
=================
I have used Acorns Sprite dumper number (i.e. 0) for PDumperSP. Although
Acorns dumper exists, it has never been finished or released, as far
as I know.
You can create new graphics modes using PrintEdit on the PDF, typically
these will have different resolutions.
Note that all sprites produced will have a resolution of 90 dpi. But
printing at 180 dpi will produce a 90 dpi sprite with twice the number of X
and Y pixels that printing at 90 dpi will. You can easily tell your image
processing software the correct resolution of the final bitmap.
If !Printers complains about not being able to find the SPrinter path on
running, a simple fix is to select another printer as the current one,
and then click on save choices on !Printers.
A more complex fix is to set up SPrinter$Path as part of the boot sequence
or to enter an absolute path when installing the PDF.
Credits
=======
My thanks to John Ferguson for designing the sprites, suggesting the
name 'SPrinter', and discussions about extended quality options.
Release 1.01 17th. November 1998
Fixed problems with free space pointer in sprite files being 4 bytes too small
Release 1.02 5th. February 1999
(c) Copyright David Pilling November 1998.
--
email: david@pilling.demon.co.uk
web: http://www.netlink.co.uk/users/pilling
web: http://www.pilling.demon.co.uk
post: David Pilling, P.O. Box 22, Thornton Cleveleys, Blackpool. FY5 1LR. UK.