>Craig Bruce has mentioned that he might add the ability to print his .bm format pictures with the next release of ACE. I have used this format a lot to view many megs worth of pictures and have been simply amazed with the outcome. I use the pbm utilities available for UNIX, amiga, and VMS to convert my gif images to xbm, then use Bruce's xbm to bm converter on my unix host. The quality here is on par with geogif, just that you do not have to load up geos to do the conversions, and on a 128 with 64k VDC, you get a nice 640x480 display. ACE's vbm (the viewer) can also handle larger images than 640x480 giving you the ability to scroll through the image. Once again, if you can load the image off the REU, the scrolling is very nice =)
The deed is done. I hacked together an ACE utility program to print out VBM images to Epson-compatible dot-matrix printers last night. The program "vbmpr" in included below, in bcoded form. Its usage is as follows:
vbmpr [-help] filename ...
The indicated file will be printed, and if there are multiple files, they will be printed one directly after the other. All images are printed from the left margin, and the program uses the 640 dots-per-line graphic mode of the printer. This will produce an image that does not have a perfect aspect ratio (which would be 576 dpl), but I figured that it would be more important to be able to print 640xN images. The height of an image is, of course, limited only by the amount of paper that you have.
This program is separate from the "vbm" viewer program to make it easier to build. When run, the program will open a channel to your printer through device "q:" of your configuration. This device should be set up as a transparent-mode non-auto-linefeed connection to your printer/printer interface.
The source code is also included below, in case you want to make minor custom modifications to the program. The source is written for the ACE assembler. The code is a little messy, since it is just a quick hack.
I tested the speed of the program on a 640x480 image, and it took ten seconds to input the image from the ramdisk and output the printer data to the null device, so the bottleneck in the system will definitely be the speed of the connection to your printer or your printer itself, and not this printing program.
;*** VBM Bitmap Printer 1.00 - by Craig Bruce - 08-Feb-1995