Magnum One/Magnum One (Mid-American Digital) (Disc Manufacturing).iso/d11/grfwk60d.arc/GWS.DOC

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GRAPHIC WORKSHOP 6.0
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If you like this program, please:

Send us $40.00, the normal user fee for this software.

Registered users of this software are entitled to phone support,
notification of upgrades and good karma. When you register
Graphic Workshop we'll send you a copy of the latest version, as
well as several other graphic related programs we do. Please tell
us the version number of your copy of Graphic Workshop when you
register. Our address can be found at the end of this file.

Complete details of registration can be found later in this
document in the section on registration.

NOTE: Release six of Graphic Workshop represents a complete re-
write of the package. Numerous things have changed... if you're
familiar with Graphic Workshop from previous releases you're urged
to read this file all the way through.

NOTE: German users of Graphic Workshop should contact our German
distributor, PD-SERVICE-LAGE, Postfach 1743, D-4937 Lage, West
Germany. A German language version of the package is available
from them as well.

NOTE: Australian users of Graphic Workshop should contact our
Australian distributor, Budgetware, P.O. Box 496 Newtown NSW
2042. Phone [phone] FAX [phone].

NOTE: French users of Graphic Workshop should contact our Swiss
distributor Edi-Inter S.A., Les Combasses, CH 1885 Chesieres,
Switzerland. Phone [phone], FAX [phone]. They can
provide you with a French language version of Graphic Workshop
and most of the other Alchemy Mindworks shareware.

NOTE: We now have a bulletin board system. See the section on
contacting Alchemy Mindworks for more information.


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CONTENTS
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Introduction

Hardware and software

New features of the level six release

File formats
   Macpaint
   GEM/IMG
   PC Paintbrush PCX
   CompuServe GIF
   TIFF
   WordPerfect Graphics WPG
   Deluxe Paint/Amiga IFF/LBM
   PC Paint Pictor PIC
   Truevision Targa
   Windows 3 BMP
   Microsoft Paint MSP
   Encapsulated PostScript EPS
   Self-displaying EXE pictures
   Text files

24-bit files

Using the main menu
   Control keys
   Viewing
   Printing
   Conversion
   Dithering
   Getting file information
   DOS shell
   Reversing
   Transforming
   Special effects

Configuration
   Runtime editing
   Screen driver selection
   Printer driver selection

Script language

Ventura tricks

Corel Draw tricks

A word about memory

A word about resources

If you encounter a problem

Installing Graphic Workshop in Windows 3

Contacting Alchemy Mindworks Inc.

Shareware registration

Bundling Graphic Workshop

Source code

Graphic Workshop accessory disk

Shareware distributors

Revision history

Legal dogma


INTRODUCTION
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Graphic Workshop is a program for working with computer bitmapped
graphic files. It will handle most of the popular formats, as
listed in the contents section of this file.

Graphic workshop is a simple, menu driven environment which will
let you perform the following operations on the aforementioned
files.

- View them.
- Convert between any two formats (with a few restrictions).
- Print them to any LaserJet Plus compatible or PostScript laser
  and many dot matrix printers. Graphic Workshop can print colour
  pictures to colour PostScript and inkjet printers.
- Dither the colour ones to black and white.
- Reverse them.
- Rotate and flip them.
- Scale them.
- Reduce the number of colours in them and do colour dithering.
- Sharpen, soften and otherwise wreak special effects on them.

Using Graphic Workshop, you can have your image files in the
formats that your software recognizes, all without keeping track
of numerous funky utilities. In addition, using the halftoning
and dithering facilities of Graphic Workshop, you can convert
full colour digitized photographs for use as superb black and
white clip art, suitable for inclusion in your documents.

Graphic Workshop will handle image files of any size. It will use
extended or expanded memory if you have some, and disk space if
you don't. It has a fast and easily understood user interface.
Hopefully, it lacks even the merest vestiges of bugs... a likely
story, but we hope so.

Graphic Workshop will drive all of the popular display cards. A
complete discussion of display cards can be found later in this
document.

As it comes out of the box... or out of the ZIP... Graphic
Workshop is configured like as follows. If you want to change
some of these parameters, see the installation section of this
document.

- It attempts to autodetect the display card type.
- It uses virtual memory.
- It uses colour text.
- It prints titles on its hard copy.
- It uses the commonly required file format defaults.


HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE
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Graphic Workshop will run on any PC compatible system with at
least 384 kilobytes of memory. We strongly recommend that you
have at least 640 kilobytes. A few megabytes of extended or
expanded memory will make Graphic Workshop a lot faster and more
useful if you'll be working with large files.

In the absence of extra memory, a lot of free hard drive space
will help.

Graphic Workshop can drive most graphics cards. A more complete
discussion of graphics cards can be found later in this document.
If you have a CGA, EGA, stock VGA or Hercules card in your
system, Graphic Workshop will probably be able to detect it and
set itself up accordingly. If you have a super-VGA card in your
system, Graphic Workshop must be configured to use it. If you do
not do this, it will default to treating it as a stock VGA card.

Configuration is discussed in detail later in this document.

Graphic Workshop will run under DOS 2.0 or better. We recommend
that you use at least DOS 3.3. You will need a suitable expanded
or extended memory driver in your system for Graphic Workshop to
recognize your extra memory.

You should have received the following files in the Graphic
Workshop package:

- GWS.EXE - The Graphic Workshop program itself.
- GWS.RES - The Graphic Workshop resource file.
- GWS.DOC - Yes, you're reading it now.
- GWSDRV.RES - All the super-VGA screen drivers.
- GWSPDR.RES - All the dot matrix printer drivers.
- GWSINSTL.EXE - The Graphic Workshop configuration utility.
- RMOVER.EXE - A general resource manager.
- EXAMPLE1.IMG - A monochrome picture file.
- EXAMPLE2.GIF - A sixteen-colour picture file.
- EXAMPLE3.GIF - A 256-colour picture file.

There is no EXAMPLE4, a 24-bit picture file, as the smallest one
we could find was over 400 kilobytes long. There are several 24-
bit files on our bulletin board, should you want one to look at.

Note that EXAMPLE3.GIF has a comment block. You can use the
Details function of the F4 key to look at it.


NEW FEATURES OF THE LEVEL SIX RELEASE
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Graphic Workshop began life handling five file formats and doing
relatively little. Now it handles over a dozen. As it grew, it
started to get too big to be useful. Its former architecture also
made handling things like 24-bit files very nearly impossible.

This new release of Graphic Workshop has been re-written to use
"resources". A resource is a data or code structure which lives
in a disk file and is only called into memory when it's used.
This is similar to the concept of overlays. The resources for
Graphic Workshop live in a file called GWS.RES. There is a
discussion of the management of the resources used by Graphic
Workshop later in this document.

You can ignore the details of Graphic Workshop's resources unless
you're curious about these things.

The code which is specific to the file formats which Graphic
Workshop supports, its screen and printer drivers, many function-
specific data structures and the message text for non-English
language versions of Graphic Workshop are all stored as resources
in this file. They're only called for when they're needed, which
means that the amount of memory which is tied up by the code of
Graphic Workshop itself is greatly reduced.

This also means that new file formats can be added to Graphic
Workshop fairly effortlessly, and without making the program
itself any bigger.

In addition, this has meant that all the file handling code has
been re-written in assembly language. While something of an
undertaking for us, this has resulted in Graphic Workshop doing
almost everything a great deal faster.

The new structure of Graphic Workshop has allowed it to acquire a
lot of new features. Among these are:

- Support for twenty-four bit Targa, BMP and TIFF files.
- Support for colour printers.
- Special effects.
- More conversion and viewing options.

It seems worth noting that in rewriting Graphic Workshop this
way, we were forced to abandon a lot of proven C code for brand
new assembler code. While we've tested the software thoroughly,
please watch for bugs.

It's also worth noting that the new architecture of Graphic
Workshop has meant the abandonment of several features formerly
available in the package. We hope these turn out to be ones which
weren't really being used very much... please get in touch with
us if you really miss 'em.

Specifically, the following things have changed:

- A few IFF/LBM options have been removed. Graphic Workshop no
  longer creates Deluxe Paint preview images when it writes an
  LBM file, and images can no longer be padded out to fixed Amiga
  screen sizes. We're told that the current version of Deluxe
  Paint no longer complains when confronted by odd size files.

- The mechanical halftoning features have been deleted.

- You can no longer dither to the screen using the F3 dithering
  function. You can achieve the same result by holding down the
  left shift key when you view a file and then selecting the
  appropriate dither. The use of the left shift key while viewing
  will be discussed at greater length later in this document.

- Graphic Workshop now supports a script language interface. This
  allows other applications which require some of the facilities
  of Graphic Workshop to invoke it without any of its menus
  appearing on the screen.

- You can now reverse colour images, producing negatives.

- You can dither, transform and scale all the formats Graphic
  Workshop supports, not just GIF files, as was previously the
  case.

- Graphic Workshop is now a lot easier to configure.

- You can now define custom screen colours.

Note that in dealing with minor bugs in Graphic Workshop, we'll
be releasing versions with new revision letters. You can see the
current revision letter in the closing beg notice. It will not
appear anywhere else in the program.


FILE FORMATS
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Graphic Workshop works exclusively with bitmapped image files.
This is as opposed to vector or line art files. Vector files
include DXF, GEM, CDR, Harvard Graphics, Lotus PIC and CGM files,
among others. Graphic Workshop does not support vector files, nor
is it likely to in the immediate future.

In most cases, the specifications for image files are pretty
standardized, and Graphic Workshop will reliably import image
files in its supported formats without difficulty. There are a
few exceptions to this, as will be discussed in detail throughout
this section.

Each of the formats listed here also includes the maximum number
of bits of colour the format will support. You can work out the
number of colours this represents as 2 to the power of the number
of bits. Hence, an eight-bit file has 2^^8 possible colours, or
256. Twenty-four bit files have essentially an infinite number of
possible colours.


MACPAINT FILES - MAXIMUM BITS: 1
───────────────────────────────────────
These can come in two flavours. The most common one is straight
ported MacPaint files, that is, files having the "MacBinary"
header. The other is "headerless" files, these being the ones
used with PFS:First Publisher. Graphic Workshop reads both types,
but if you convert a file from a different format to MacPaint
format the file will be written in accordance with the setting of
the MacBinary header field in GWSINSTL. You can override this
with the appropriate command line switches.

Files converted to the MacPaint format from other formats will be
cropped or padded out as necessary to fit in the MacPaint
format's 576 by 720 format. Only monochrome files can be
converted to MacPaint files, since MacPaint in a monochrome-only
format.


GEM/IMG FILES - MAXIMUM BITS: 8
──────────────────────────────────────
There are actually quite a few variations on IMG files... they
handle monochrome and grey level images. The primary application
for IMG files is as the bitmapped image file format of Ventura
Publisher. Graphic Workshop supports files with up to 256 levels
of grey.


PCX FILES - MAXIMUM BITS: 24
───────────────────────────────────
These are the files used to hold images for Z-Soft's PC
Paintbrush package. These can range from monochrome to 24-bit
images. All the various formats are supported by Graphic
Workshop.


GIF FILES - MAXIMUM BITS: 8
──────────────────────────────────
These can range from monochrome to 256-colour images in any size
you can find 'em. Graphic Workshop supports both the 87a and 89a
versions of the GIF standard. It will read the first image of GIF
files having multiple images.

The Details function of the Get Info box will display the entire
structure of a GIF file. Many newer GIF files contain text
information along with their images.


TIFF FILES - MAXIMUM BITS: 24
────────────────────────────────────
The TIFF options in Graphic Workshop can get a bit involved. The
TIFF format offers lots of options to make it applicable to a
wide variety of applications... which entails a certain amount of
confusion, as well. Registered users of Graphic Workshop are
welcome to contact us for help in unraveling the TIFF options if
needs be.

Graphic workshop supports monochrome, colour and grey scale TIFF
files. Grey scale TIFF files can be created by converting any
colour format into TIFF with Graphic Workshop set up to produce
grey scale TIFF files, either through GWSINSTL or by using the
/TCG switch. These import into desktop publishing packages such
as Ventura for sharp looking PostScript halftones.

Note that as of this writing Ventura will read grey scale TIFF
files correctly. It seems to invert colour TIFF files.

Colour TIFF files are useful in Corel Draw, among other places.
Corel Draw 2.0 will import colour TIFF files for inclusion in
CDR graphics. This is preferable to importing colour PCX files,
as the size of a TIFF file in Corel Draw is preserved.

Some applications have trouble reading grey scale TIFF files
which have been compressed... Gray F/X chokes on them as of this
writing, for example. Others read 'em fine. For this reason,
Graphic Workshop defaults to creating compressed grey scale TIFF
files but you can tell it not to compress them if you're not sure
that whatever you'll be importing them into will read them. There
are command line switches to set up these options.

Note that due to the wide variations among the programs which
produce TIFF files, Graphic Workshop would be lying rather badly
if it claimed to be able to read all TIFF files. Specifically,
it does not read Huffman or LZW compressed TIFF files as yet, as
we haven't devised code to do this in a reasonable amount of
space. Colour TIFF files are another area in which Graphic
Workshop only handles files from some sources.

When you're creating TIFF files which will be used as desktop
publishing art or in other situations wherein they'll be printed
to a PostScript printer, you should create them with greyscale
expansion enabled. If they will be displayed on a monitor or
edited in a paint program, you may want to create them with
greyscale expansion disabled.

Whether you create colour or grey scale TIFF files will be
largely dependant on the application you want your TIFF files to
be read by. Here are a few guidelines:

- If you want to import TIFF files into Ventura or PageMaker so
  they'll output as halftones to a PostScript printer, use grey
  scale TIFF files with grey scale expansion enabled.

- If you want to import colour TIFF files into Corel Draw to
  print to a colour output device, use colour TIFF files... the
  grey scale expansion doesn't matter.

- If you want to import colour TIFF files into Corel Draw to
  print to a monochrome output device, use grey scale TIFF files
  with the grey scale expansion enabled.

- If you want to import grey scale TIFF files into a paint or
  image editing package, such as ImageIn or Desktop Paint 256,
  use grey scale TIFF files with the grey scale expansion
  disabled.

Note also that Graphic Workshop packs TIFF files with an eye to
maximum unpacking speed, rather than for optimum compression. As
such, pictures with between 32 and 256 colours will be promoted
to 256 colours. Pictures with between four and sixteen colours
will be promoted to sixteen colours.

We have found a very small number of applications which will
read colour TIFF files, and hence have not had much opportunity
to test the colour TIFF facility of Graphic Workshop with real
world software. The TIFF files it works with are correct
according to the TIFF specifications... but this rarely means a
lot. We will be most grateful for any feedback in this area.


WPG FILES - MAXIMUM BITS: 8 (OR MAYBE 4)
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These are the native import graphic files for WordPerfect. These
files can contain both bitmaps and line art, or vector graphics.
Graphic Workshop can only deal with the bitmapped parts of them.
If you view, print or convert a WPG file containing both
bitmapped and vector elements, the vector elements will be
discarded.

WPG files which refuse to read with Graphic Workshop are usually
those which contain only vector elements and no bitmaps. If you
use the F4 function on a WPG file which does not read, the
comments field of the file information box will say "Vector file"
if this is the case.

Graphic Workshop will deal with WPG files having one, four or
eight bits of colour information, that is, monochrome files,
sixteen-colour files and 256-colour files.

The WPG specification allows for 256-colour files. As of this
writing, WordPerfect itself would not read them. If you wish to
use 256-colour images in a WordPerfect document, you might want
to either reduce them to sixteen colours or dither them to
monochrome, depending upon what you'll be outputting them to.


MSP FILES - MAXIMUM BITS: 1
──────────────────────────────────
These are the image files used by the paint program which came
with Microsoft Windows version 2. Don't confuse these with PCX
files... some versions of Windows 2 came with a Windows
implementation of PC Paintbrush from ZSoft as well. The two
programs... and the two file formats... are not compatible. MSP
files are monochrome only.


IFF/LBM FILES - MAXIMUM BITS: 8
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These started out on the Amiga. The IFF file standard is
extremely flexible, and allows all sorts of things besides
images to be stored in IFF files. IFF files are found on the PC
having been ported from Amiga systems. They are also created on
the PC by several applications such as Electronic Arts' Deluxe
Paint package and Digital Vision's Computer Eyes video scanner
board. In the first case they are given the extension LBM. In
the second they are given the extension CE. The basic file
structure is the same, however.

Deluxe Paint is a bit of a problem in the way it deals
with IFF files, actually. This affects 256 colour files. Its
native format is a subclass of IFF called PBM, and compresses its
images as bytes. It's somewhat unique to Deluxe Paint, and
Electronic Arts won't tell anyone quite how it works. You can
actually work it out to a large degree, but every so often a file
created in this format in the way it seems like it should be done
refuses to load into Deluxe Paint.

The standard form for IFF image files is called ILBM,
compressing all images as planes. This is much slower, but it
means that files thus compressed will be readable by pretty well
all IFF readers... even if you port 'em back to the Amiga. This
is how Graphic Workshop creates IFF files. Unfortunately, there's
a problem with old versions of Deluxe Paint which will
occasionally cause them to stop reading one of these files part way
through the image. This happens to IFF files from sources other
than Graphic Workshop, so it's probably a bug in these versions
of Deluxe Paint. It appears to have been rectified in more recent
releases.

If you encounter an image which, when converted into an
IFF file will not read into Deluxe Paint, use the /IFN command
line switch when you run Graphic Workshop. This will disable the
IFF compression. Uncompressed files read into Deluxe Paint with
no difficulty.

You can permanently set IFF compression off when you install
Graphic Workshop if you like.

Note that Graphic Workshop only reads "pure" IFF files, and will
not handle the countless variations on the format which have
appeared on the Amiga. Specifically, it does not read hold and
modify, or HAM, files.


BMP FILES - MAXIMUM BITS: 24
───────────────────────────────────
These are the files which are used as "wallpaper" under Windows
3. They can be created using the version of PC Paintbrush
supplied with Windows.

BMP files use no image compression, as the intention appears to
be to make them fast to load. Plan on your BMP files being very
large.

There is a very important aspect of colour BMP files which you
should bear in mind when you use this format. Windows uses a
fixed palette which Windows Paint cannot go about changing, as
doing so would make the screen and border colours change too.

This means that transferring an image to the BMP format will
generally result in some colour shifts when BMP files are
imported into Windows applications.

The BMP format can support 24-bit files, which Graphic Workshop
does generate. However, as of this writing importing a 24-bit
BMP image into Windows Paint results in a noticeable colour
shift. This appears to be a peculiarity of Windows Paint.


PIC FILES - MAXIMUM BITS: 8
──────────────────────────────────
These should not be confused with Lotus 1-2-3 PIC drawing files.

PIC files are created by PC Paint (not PC Paintbrush) and are
used by Grasp, among other things. They come in many flavours.
Graphic Workshop has been tested with the most common ones. In
theory it should support them all, but that's only a theory.

PIC files are structured exceedingly weirdly, especially in their
sixteen-colour manifestations. For this reason, it's necessary
for Graphic Workshop to create a temporary scratch file while
it's packing or unpacking a sixteen-colour PIC file. You will
note that upon beginning to read or write one, the bar graph will
appear to pause for a few seconds before it starts to move.

By default, the temporary file will be written to the current
directory. However, you can direct it to somewhere else by
including the following line in your environment, for example:

        SET TEMP=H:\

This will cause the temporary file to be written to the root
directory of drive H:. You can, of course, specify any path you
like. If drive H: is a RAM drive, this will speed up the packing
and unpacking of sixteen-colour PIC files considerably.


TGA FILES - MAXIMUM BITS: 24
───────────────────────────────────
The Truevision Targa format is used by several high end paint
programs and things like ray tracing packages. It can handle
images with up to sixteen million unique colours. You might want
to read the discussion of images with 24-bit colour elsewhere in
this document.

There are a lot of variations on TGA files, and Graphic Workshop
does not handle them all as yet. Specifically, it only handles
uncompressed and run length compressed files. It ignores all
alpha channel information.


EPS FILES - MAXIMUM BITS: 8
──────────────────────────────────
The EPS format... encapsulated PostScript... isn't really a
bitmapped format at all. However, it may contain bitmapped data.

PostScript cannot be interpreted directly by most PC
applications. As such, an EPS file which is to be imported into
an application such as Ventura Publisher or PageMaker also
includes a "preview". A preview is a small black and white TIFF
image which will show you a rough idea of what the EPS file will
look like.

If you import an EPS file into Ventura, for example, the screen
image you see will be the preview but the data printed to your
printer will be the PostScript data itself.

Graphic Workshop can transform other file formats with between
one and eight bits of colour information... between two and 256
colours... into EPS files. Images with more than two colours will
be turned into PostScript halftones.

If you attempt to view or otherwise read an EPS file from within
Graphic Workshop, you will see the preview image, not the actual
PostScript data. This will look the same as the source data if
you have translated a monochrome file to EPS, and it will look
like a very coarse Bayer dither of the source otherwise.

Please note that the EPS files which Graphic Workshop creates are
only intended to be printed. You cannot read them into
applications such as Corel Draw or Adobe Illustrator. These
applications will not accept the large mounts of bitmapped data
which a Graphic Workshop EPS file contains.

For the most part, using EPS files in this way is no longer
necessary. Applications which import EPS files will usually allow
you to import TIFF files as well, which will provide you with
much better halftoning and screen control.

If you tell Graphic Workshop to include a preview image in the
EPS files it creates, it will write a temporary file to your disk
while it's writing the actual PostScript data. You will
note that the bar graph will pause for a while at the end of its
travel during the write process.

By default, the temporary file will be written to the current
directory. However, you can direct it to somewhere else by
including the following line in your environment, for example:

        SET TEMP=H:\

This will cause the temporary file to be written to the root
directory of drive H:. You can, of course, specify any path you
like. If drive H: is a RAM drive, this will speed up the packing
and EPS files with preview images considerably.

Note that if you attempt to convert or print an EPS file under
Graphic Workshop, the TIFF preview image will be read, not the
actual EPS information.

Note also that if you attempt to read an EPS file without a
preview, Graphic Workshop will tell you that it has encountered a
file read error. The EPS file itself may be fine... Graphic
Workshop, however, can only read previews.


EXE FILES (SELF DISPLAYING PICTURES) - MAXIMUM BITS: 8
─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
You can convert images with between two and 256 colours to files
with the extension EXE. Such files are self displaying pictures.
For example, if you have a file called PICTURE.GIF and you use
Graphic Workshop to translate it to PICTURE.EXE, typing PICTURE
from the command line will cause the picture to display on your
screen.

Pictures written into the EXE format can subsequently be read
back into any other format. However, note that Graphic Workshop
can only read EXE files which it has created. Use the F4 key to
check out EXE files if you aren't sure whether they're pictures
or programs.

Graphic Workshop will not read self displaying pictures written
by other applications.

In order for an EXE picture to display, the system which you
attempt to run it on must have a card which supports enough
colours to show the picture under Graphic Workshop. Specifically,
you will need a VGA card to display an EXE picture with 256
colours, at least an EGA card to display one with 16 colours and
so on.

EXE picture files support CGA, EGA, VGA and Hercules cards only.

Pictures displayed by converting them to EXE files and running
them can't be panned around, even if they're larger than your
screen. Hitting any key will return you to DOS.

Note that EXE pictures will not support your super VGA card. The
best resolution you'll see them in is 320 by 200 pixels in the
256-colour mode.

You can create EXE picture files either compressed or
uncompressed. This can be selected either permanently through
GWSINSTL or by using the appropriate command line switches when
you run GWS.EXE. Uncompressed files display quickly but take up a
lot of disk space. Compressed files usually save space but
display a bit slower. Note that especially in complex scanned or
dithered images, you might find that compression actually results
in a larger file than leaving an image uncompressed.

If you don't have need of self booting pictures, you might wish
to remove the EXE resource from Graphic Workshop's resource file,
as it will cause the main file finder screen to become cluttered
with other, unrelated EXE files which may be lying around your
directories. One EXE file looks pretty much like another until
Graphic Workshop attempts to unpack it. See the section on
resources for help in doing this.


TXT FILES (TEXT FILES) - MAXIMUM BITS: 1
───────────────────────────────────────────────
Graphic Workshop will create a 640 by 400 pixel, two colour image
from any ASCII text file. The text will by truncated at 80
columns and 25 lines if exceeds either dimension. It can contain
both alphabetic characters and high order IBM block graphic
characters. Tabs are expanded and all other control characters
except for carriage returns are ignored.

Note that a suitable text file must be in pure ASCII, not a
proprietary word processor format. It must have the extension
TXT.

Note that the TXT format is only capable of reading files. You
cannot write a TXT file from Graphic Workshop... there's no
sensible way for Graphic Workshop to create a text file from a
graphic.

Note that as long as you're attempting to read files, you can
treat text files just like other monochrome graphic files from
within Graphic Workshop. As such, you can view them, convert from
TXT and so on.

As with the EXE file format, you might wish to remove the TXT
resource from Graphic Workshop if you don't need it and find it's
causing a lot of spurious TXT files to be displayed in the
Graphic Workshop file finder screen... assuming you use the TXT
extension for something. See the section about resources for help
in doing this.


24-BIT FILES
▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀
Most of the image file formats commonly found in use on a PC
which support colour do so using a palette structure, as this is
the way most PC full colour display cards work. An image stored
in a palette structure file will have a maximum of 256 unique
colours, drawn from a potential palette of 16 million. In fact, a
VGA card can only support a potential palette of about a quarter
of a million colours. There is some theoretical loss in colour
resolution in displaying, say, a GIF file on a VGA card.

For practical purposes this colour arrangement is sufficient to
reproduce pretty convincing colour photographs. However, for a
number of reasons, high end photographic manipulation software,
colour separation software and so on works better with a non-
palette image, one in which every pixel is represented as a
distinct colour. In these images, every pixel consists of three
bytes of colour information, one each for the red, green and blue
components of the pixel's colour. Such pictures are referred to
as RGB or 24-bit pictures.

Among the formats which currently support 24-bit images are
Targa, PCX, BMP and TIFF.

Viewing a 24-bit image on a PC equipped with a VGA or super-VGA
card presents Graphic Workshop with something of a problem. Such
an image can have up to sixteen million different colours in it,
while a VGA card can support only 256 different colours at a
time.

In order to deal with 24-bit images, Graphic Workshop must
"quantize" and then "dither" them. Quantizing a 24-bit image
involves finding the 256 most unique colours in the image.
Dithering involves replacing each RGB pixel in the image with a
palette value which is more or less the same colour, allowing for
the limitations of a 256 colour format. In addition, dithering
adjusts the colours of surrounding pixels to make the image as a
whole look as much like the original 24-bit image as possible.

If you attempt to view a 24-bit image on a system equipped with
an EGA or VGA card, a menu will appear to ask you how you'd like
the 24-bit file to be handled. You can display it as a grey scale
image if you just want to see what the picture looks like. This
is the fastest way to view such a picture. Alternately, you can
choose one of the three colour dithering options... the Floyd
dither is the fastest of them. This will actually dither the
picture down to eight colours, but the results are quite
respectable for previewing.

Note, however, that the eight colour screen dither has been
designed to be reasonably fast, rather than accurate. When you
create a 256-colour dither, as discussed in the next paragraph,
the results will be a whole lot nicer to look at.

In order to convert a 24-bit image into a palette based format...
for example, to convert a 24-bit PCX file into a GIF file... you
must use the colour reduction function of the F9 special effects
key. This will perform a full 256-colour dither, which will
usually result in a 256-colour image which is almost as good as
the original 24-bit image was.

The colour reduction function also contains options to allow you
to reduce a 24-bit file to lesser numbers of colours. Choosing
fewer than 256 colours will produce a smaller file in some cases,
but it will also leave you with a less faithful representation of
your original colour image.

The fixed eight colour option will produce a destination image
file dithered the same way as the eight colour screen preview.
These files have a fixed eight colour palette with the colours
black, cyan, magenta, yellow, red, green, blue and white.

It's also worth noting that this is the same dither used to print
files to impact and inkjet colour printers, such as the Hewlett-
Packard PaintJet. A fixed eight colour dither will look more or
less like the colour hard copy from one of these printers.


A WORD ABOUT MEMORY
▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀
Graphic Workshop will use whatever memory you have going. If you
ask it to do something which needs a large amount of memory, it
will try to use your normal DOS memory, which is fastest. If
there isn't enough DOS memory, it will use extra memory.

There are three sorts of "extra" memory which Graphic Workshop
can use, to wit, extended, expanded and virtual. Extended memory
is also called XMS memory, and is only available on AT and 386
systems. Expanded memory, also called EMS or LIM memory, is
available if you have a LIM board and driver in your machine.
Virtual memory means using a big disk file and making believe
it's memory. Virtual memory is very slow compared to real
memory.

You must tell Graphic Workshop what to do about extra memory
when you install it. See the section on installation.

In addition to the three foregoing types of extra memory, Graphic
Workshop can be configured to use "extended or virtual" or
"expanded or virtual" memory. If one of these options is chosen,
Graphic Workshop will attempt to allocate a buffer from extended
or expanded memory if it can't do so with DOS memory. If it's
unable to allocate a buffer in extra memory, it will switch to
virtual memory and see if its luck improves. If there's no room
for a virtual memory buffer, it will give up and return an error
saying that it can't allocate memory.

By default, Graphic Workshop configured to use virtual memory
will use the current drive and directory to write its temporary
files. You can change this by adding a line to your environment
with the SET command such as:

        TEMP=H:\

In this case, any virtual memory temporary files which Graphic
Workshop wants to create will be written to the root of drive H:.
If you have a RAM disk, you should use the TEMP environment
variable to tell Graphic Workshop to use it for virtual memory
operations, as this will speed things up considerably.

Graphic Workshop can run in restricted memory, such as that
which is found on a really old PC or when running "shelled out"
of another program. However, it can do nasty things when it's
really starved for memory. Some virtual memory operations will
not work in this condition, and if it's really stuck for RAM...
if there's only a few tens of kilobytes free... it may manage to
crash. Try not to run it when there's almost no room left for it
to store things. The help menu will tell you how much memory is
free.

As is discussed elsewhere in this document in the section on
resources, Graphic Workshop frequently swaps blocks of code and
data in and out of memory. In addition to the memory required for
your pictures, Graphic Workshop must have memory to manage its
resources and to allocate small scratch buffers. This is called
memory "overhead". It's possible for Graphic Workshop to allocate
a lot of DOS memory for a picture file and subsequently be unable
to allocate enough memory for the resource which will manipulate
the picture.

To avoid this situation, Graphic Workshop reserves a fixed amount
of memory for its own use before it attempts to allocate an image
buffer. The amount of this fixed memory is adjustable through the
GWSINSTL program, as is discussed in the section on installation.
As it's set in the distribution version of the software, it
should be adequate for all the operations the package can
perform. There are a few hypothetical cases in which this might
not prove true, for example, in unpacking enormously wide GIF
files. If you run into problems with allocating scratch buffers or
resource buffers, try increasing the memory overhead.

Note that Graphic Workshop comes configured to use virtual memory.
Use GWSINSTL to change this when you're sure what sort of extra
memory is in your system.

Finally, note that in order to access the extended or expanded
memory in your system, Graphic Workshop must be able to locate a
suitable extended or expanded memory driver. Simply having
several megabytes of chips on your motherboard will not make that
memory accessible unless you have the appropriate driver in place
and working.


A WORD ABOUT RESOURCES
▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀
The GWS.RES file is a list of resources. Resources are unrelated
bits of data and code which Graphic Workshop might need. These
could have been kept as separate files, but keeping them all in
GWS.RES makes them easier to manage, requires less space on your
hard drive and allows Graphic Workshop to get at them more
rapidly.

Among the things in GWS.RES are all the code to handle specific
file formats, screen and printer drivers, the PostScript code to
print pictures and numerous small code and data objects which
Graphic Workshop uses.

In order to work with resources you'll need RMOVER.EXE, which is
included with the package. RMOVER allows you to add resource
files together, to extract resources from a file, to delete
resources from a file and to list all the resources in a file.

Ordinarily you will not require RMOVER, and you probably will
never want to modify GWS.RES. If you do, please make sure that
you keep a copy of the original GWS.RES file somewhere. It's not
hard to make mistakes with RMOVER, and once a resource has been
deleted, it can't be brought back to life.

The primary use of RMOVER, if you use it at all, will be to
delete the EXE and TXT file format handlers from GWS.RES if you
don't want them, and possibly to install patches into Graphic
Workshop, should any prove necessary in the future.

You can safely skip this section if you like.


LISTING RESOURCES
────────────────────────
Let's begin with the simplest function of RMOVER, listing the
resources in a resource file. GWS.RES is a resource file. To see
what was in it, you would do this.

RMOVER GWS /L

You would see something like the following list for the GWS.RES
file which comes with the distribution version of Graphic
Workshop.

Resource mover version 1.1 - copyright (c) 1990 Alchemy Mindworks Inc.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Description: Resource file created by RMOVER
30 resource(s)
_____________________
Rsrc 0000 - type:INIT - nmbr:000000000 - 00743 bytes
Rsrc 0001 - type:IFMT - nmbr:000000000 - 03252 bytes MAC (MacPaint)
Rsrc 0002 - type:IFMT - nmbr:000000001 - 04213 bytes GEM/IMG (Ventura)
Rsrc 0003 - type:IFMT - nmbr:000000002 - 06195 bytes PCX (PC Paintbrush)
Rsrc 0004 - type:IFMT - nmbr:000000003 - 26342 bytes GIF (CompuServe)
Rsrc 0005 - type:IFMT - nmbr:000000004 - 05198 bytes BMP (Windows 3)
Rsrc 0006 - type:IFMT - nmbr:000000005 - 07433 bytes IFF/LBM (Amiga)
Rsrc 0007 - type:IFMT - nmbr:000000006 - 04548 bytes TGA (Truevision Targa)
Rsrc 0008 - type:IFMT - nmbr:000000007 - 02870 bytes MSP (Microsoft Paint)
Rsrc 0009 - type:IFMT - nmbr:000000008 - 05897 bytes WPG (WordPerfect)
Rsrc 0010 - type:IFMT - nmbr:000000009 - 06915 bytes PIC (PC Paint/Pictor)
Rsrc 0011 - type:IFMT - nmbr:000000010 - 15560 bytes TIFF
Rsrc 0012 - type:IFMT - nmbr:000000011 - 10158 bytes EXE (Self displaying)
Rsrc 0013 - type:IFMT - nmbr:000000012 - 06195 bytes TXT (Text files)
Rsrc 0014 - type:IFMT - nmbr:000000013 - 12466 bytes EPS (PostScript)
Rsrc 0015 - type:SCRD - nmbr:000000000 - 00672 bytes
Rsrc 0016 - type:GRAF - nmbr:000000001 - 00342 bytes Colour Graphics
Rsrc 0017 - type:GRAF - nmbr:000000003 - 01236 bytes Enhanced Graphics
Rsrc 0018 - type:GRAF - nmbr:000000002 - 01705 bytes Standard VGA 320 x 200
Rsrc 0019 - type:GRAF - nmbr:000000007 - 01169 bytes Hercules Graphics
Rsrc 0022 - type:RMAP - nmbr:000000001 - 00256 bytes
Rsrc 0023 - type:RMAP - nmbr:000000002 - 00256 bytes
Rsrc 0024 - type:PSHD - nmbr:000000001 - 00380 bytes
Rsrc 0025 - type:PSHD - nmbr:000000002 - 00565 bytes
Rsrc 0026 - type:PSHD - nmbr:000000003 - 00585 bytes
Rsrc 0027 - type:PSHD - nmbr:000000004 - 00404 bytes
Rsrc 0028 - type:PSHD - nmbr:000000005 - 00589 bytes
Rsrc 0029 - type:PSHD - nmbr:000000006 - 00608 bytes
Rsrc 0030 - type:SCPT - nmbr:000000001 - 01050 bytes
Rsrc 0031 - type:REGN - nmbr:000000001 - 00967 bytes


DELETING RESOURCES
─────────────────────────
This is how you would delete a resource from GWS.RES with RMOVER.
Let's delete the IFMT resource for EXE files. This resource is
used for reading and writing self displaying pictures. You might
want to delete it from your copy of GWS.RES if you don't want to
work with self displaying pictures and find that having all sorts
of other EXE files turn up in Graphic Workshop's file list is
inconvenient. This has resource number 11.

RMOVER GWS /D /TIFMT /N11

The /D switch tells RMOVER to delete a resource, /T switch tells
it the type of the resource to delete and the /N switch tells it
the number of the resource to delete.


EXTRACTING RESOURCES
───────────────────────────
This is how you would extract a resource from GWS.RES, that is,
to copy it from GWS.RES to a separate resource file of its own.
Extracted resources live in resource files having one resource.
You could later add such a resource to another resource file. In
this example, we'll extract the GRAF resource for Hercules cards.
Note that this will not delete it from GWS.RES.

RMOVER GWS /E /TGRAF /N7 /FHERCULES.RES

The /T and /N switches work as before. The /E switch tells RMOVER
to extract a resource. The /F switch tells it the name of the
file to put the extracted resource in. This file...
HERCULES.RES... will be deleted if it exists and a new one
created.


ADDING RESOURCES
───────────────────────
This is how you would add a resource to GWS.RES. In this example
we'll add IFMT_XXX.RES to GWS.RES. This is the handler resource
for a hypothetical new file format, presumably having the
extension XXX.

RMOVER GWS /A /FIFMT_XXX.RES

The /A switch tells RMOVER to add a resource. Note that all the
resources in the file indicated by the /F switch will be added to
GWS.RES.


IF YOU ENCOUNTER A PROBLEM
▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀
While we have tested Graphic Workshop thoroughly, it's possible
that you may encounter a situation we hadn't anticipated, and
perhaps a file which will not read. If this happens, we would be
interested in knowing about it so we can deal with it in the next
release of Graphic Workshop. Here's how to report a problem to
us.

Problems should be reported using a 5 1/4 inch disk. We can't
accept 3 1/2 inch microfloppies for problem reports. Alternately,
upload the relevant files to our bulletin board. The bulletin
board is discussed in the section on contacting Alchemy
Mindworks.

Copy your CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files onto a floppy.
Include a screen dump of each page of GWSINSTL as it was set up
when the problem occurred. Alternately, write down the settings.

Copy the image files which resulted in the problem and provide a
description of what you did and what happened.

If we can't recreate it, we probably won't be able to fix it.

Before you contact us with a problem in Graphic Workshop, please
make sure you've read this document thoroughly and that you
understand how the software should work. Many problem reports
which receive aren't problems with the software at all.


USING THE MAIN MENU
▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀
Graphic Workshop always shows you all the names of the image
files it knows how to deal with in the current directory, along
with all the visible subdirectory names, if any are present. If
you are in a subdirectory, you will also see a subdirectory entry
which is two periods.

The cursor mover keys will move the file selector bar around. If
you move it to a directory entry... shown in dim text... and hit
Enter, you will move into that directory. If you select the two
period entry, you will move back up your directory tree by one
step.

If there are too many files in your current directory to see all
at once, Graphic Workshop will organize them into pages. The PgUp
and PgDn keys will step you through the pages.

Here are the keys which Graphic Workshop recognizes for basic
file handling and session functions:

Hitting the question mark will cause Graphic Workshop to display
a menu of the keys which control the main file screen of Graphic
Workshop. This box also tells you how much free DOS memory is
available, the display card you have Graphic Workshop configured
to use and the type of extra memory it's set up for.

The Esc key will allow you to quit Graphic Workshop and return to
DOS.

If you hit "T" the currently selected file name will be
"tagged". The "U" key will untag it. The batch operations
described below will work with multiple files if you have some of
them tagged. If you hit "C", all the tags will be cleared.

Note that for the graphic functions of Graphic Workshop... the
ones accessed by the function keys... the currently selected file
will be processed if there are no tagged files. Otherwise, each
of the tagged files will be processed in turn.

If you hit "L" Graphic Workshop will allow you to log in a new
disk drive. A box will appear prompting you for the drive letter
you want to log into.

If you hit "D" you will be prompted to delete the current file.
Note that this is not a batch command... it only works on one
file at a time.

If you hit "R" you can rename the current file. Note that it the
renamed file will have the same extension as the old one, no
matter what extension you give it.

The alphabetic control keys can be upper or lower case. Other
keys will be ignored.


VIEWING FILES
────────────────────
If you place the selector bar on a file name and hit Enter,
Graphic Workshop will attempt to show you the file. It will start
by showing you a wait box, which has a bar graph in it to show
you the status of what you've asked Graphic Workshop to do. When
the picture is fully unpacked, Graphic Workshop will switch to
your display card's graphic mode and show you the picture.

You can always abort 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.

Esc will return you to the main screen.

Several things can go wrong here. If you have installed Graphic
Workshop for the wrong kind of display card, you might see random
characters rather than a picture. In this case, check your
installation.

If Graphic Workshop could not find enough memory to unpack your
picture into, it will abort the process and say so.

Finally, if your picture requires more colours than your card can
display, Graphic Workshop will tell you this. Specifically, it
will pop up a menu which will ask you how you want it to deal
with the colour problem. The available options will vary with the
type of display adapter you're using and the number of colours in
your source image.

You can force this menu to appear when you view an image by
holding down the left Shift key when you hit the Enter key. You
might wish to do this to view some pictures in ways other than a
normal displayed. For example, you can preview an image dithered
this way.

This is what the menu options do:


Display normally
----------------------
This will display the picture as if you hadn't reached this menu.
This option will always be disabled if the menu pops up by
itself.


Display as grey
---------------------
This is the fastest way to see what a picture with too many
colours looks like. It will show you the image in grey scale.


Remap fixed
-----------------
This will remap an image down to a fixed sixteen colour palette.
It's very crude but fairly fast.


Remap quantized
---------------------
This will remap an image down to the best sixteen colour palette.
It's also pretty crude but fairly fast.


Bayer dither mono
-----------------------

Floyd dither mono
-----------------------

Burkes dither mono
------------------------

Stucki dither mono
------------------------
These four options will dither your image down to monochrome. You
might want to see the discussion on dithering later in this
document to better understand them.


Threshold
---------------
This will display your image as a high contrast black and white
picture.


Floyd dither colour
-------------------------

Burkes dither colour
--------------------------

Stucki dither colour
--------------------------
These three options will display your image as a fixed eight-
colour dither. It's a pretty reasonable representation of a
colour image for a quick 'n nasty preview. Dithering a 24-bit
file down 256 colours will result in a much better display, but
it will take considerably longer. It's worth noting that this
dither is the same as the one used to print colour images to
colour inkjet and colour dot matrix printers... you can use it to
see what hard copy sent to these devices will look like.


Display reversed
----------------------
This option will display your image reversed. Colour images will
appear as negatives.

In the 256 colour display modes, you can make small adjustments
to the VGA colour palette while a picture is being displayed. The
'r' and 'R' keys will increase and decrease the amount of red in
a picture, the 'g' and 'G' keys will adjust the amount of green,
the 'b' and 'B' keys will adjust the amount of blue. The 'i' and
'I' keys will adjust the overall intensity of the picture. The
'=' key will return the picture to its normal state. Note that
these adjustments only affect the picture that you're viewing...
they do not alter the palette in the file on your disk.

If you hear a beep while you're playing with these keys, you've
gone to the limit of whichever of the adjustments you're using.
Graphic Workshop will not allow you to adjust the palette to the
point where the picture would start looking weird.

Because Graphic Workshop will not allow you to actually distort
the colour balance of the palette, there will be some files which
will not be adjustable using this feature.


PRINTING - F1
────────────────────
You can print to any sort of LaserJet Plus compatible printer
with one megabyte of memory or more or any sort of PostScript
printer. You can print to any dot matrix or inkjet printer which
is supported by a Graphic Workshop external printer driver. Note
that if you attempt to print PostScript data to a LaserJet or a
dot matrix printer you'll get reams of meaningless ASCII text.

Graphic Workshop comes with built in PostScript and LaserJet
print drivers. This includes colour PostScript and LaserJet II
and III series printers. You only need an external print driver
if you wish to print to a dot matrix or inkjet printer.

Graphic Workshop allows you to print a picture in four
resolution modes to laser printers. These allow you to print your
pictures in four possible sizes. You might want to experiment
with them to see what they can do.

Colour and grey scale pictures printed to black and white
PostScript printers will be reproduced as halftones. If you
attempt to print a colour or grey scale picture to a LaserJet or
dot matrix printer, the image will be dithered for you. The
dither type is set using GWSINSTL. You might want to consult the
section on dithering elsewhere in this document to help you
choose a suitable dither.

Colour images can be printed in colour to a colour PostScript
device and to a colour inkjet or dot matrix printer with a
suitable driver. Colour PostScript printing can be enabled
through GWSINSTL or with the appropriate command line switches.

As of this writing, the only colour non-PostScript driver
available is for the Hewlett-Packard PaintJet and Kodak Diconix
inkjet printers.

PostScript 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 LaserJet and dot matrix
printing.

You can print to ports LPT1, LPT2 or LPT3. The default printer
port can be set up using GWSINSTL or the appropriate command line
switches. Note that the printer port settings are ignored by
external printer drivers. All of the standard dot matrix and
inkjet drivers included with Graphic Workshop print to LPT1.

You can cause Graphic Workshop to print to a file, rather than
directly to the disk, by using the appropriate command line
switch. The command line switches are discussed elsewhere in this
document. Print files are named using the name of your source
image file and the extension PRN. Note that you can only print to
a file for laser printer output. Dot matrix and inkjet drivers
will ignore the print to file switch.

Each page of Graphic Workshop output can include any combination
of data about the picture on it you like. See the installation
section for more information about enabling this feature.

The size and resolution of dot matrix printing is determined by
the driver being used.

Note that if you have a printer for which there is no driver
available, one of the Epson FX-80 drivers will probably work, as
most dot matrix printers support the Epson FX-80 standard. The
print might not be as good as your printer can manage, but it'll
be better than a blank sheet of paper.

Printing is a batch function. If you tag multiple files and then
hit F1, each will be printed.


CONVERTING - F2
──────────────────────
Graphic Workshop allows you to convert a file of any format into
a file of any other format... with a few restrictions. The new
file will have the same name as the original but a new extension.
Converting PICTURE.MAC into an IMG file will create PICTURE.IMG.
PICTURE.MAC will not be affected.

You can batch convert any mixture of file types using Graphic
Workshop. Any files which are inappropriate for the conversion
you've requested will simply be ignored. The ongoing status will
appear at the bottom of the screen.

You cannot convert pictures having more bits of colour than the
destination format can handle. For example, you cannot convert a
24-bit Targa file directly to an 8-bit GIF file. You would have
to use the F9 colour reduction facility to do this. Likewise, to
convert a colour file to a monochrome one, you'd have to use the
F3 dithering function.

There are a few other useful things to note about conversion. You
can't convert to TXT files. You can convert from EXE files,
provided they were created by Graphic Workshop. You can convert
from EPS files, but the resulting image will be the monochrome
TIFF preview, and probably won't look very good. You can't
convert from files which Graphic Workshop won't read. For
example, you can't convert from a vector WPG file.


DITHERING - F3
─────────────────────
Dithering is a sort of magical process by which colour images can
be converted into pretty attractive black and white versions for
reproduction on a monochrome screen or a black and white laser
printer.

Note that source files for dithering must have more than one bit
of colour information.

Dithering often works a lot better if you scale the original
image up. Graphic Workshop lets you dither with images of
anywhere from "size as" up to 500 percent expansion if you have
enough memory.

You can see what an image will look like dithered by using the
view options menu in the view mode.

Note that the F3 function only dithers to monochrome. Colour
dithering is handled by one of the functions of the F9 key.

Dithering is a fairly slow process, and the better the dithering
algorithm, the slower it gets. Big files and really good
dithering can take half an hour or more on a slower computer,
although the results are usually worth it.

At its best, dithering can look better than halftoning, and a
dithered file can be printed on both PostScript and LaserJet
printers. Dithered files sent to a PostScript printer will print
faster than halftoned files.

If you have Graphic Workshop dither a file, it will create a new
file for you of the type selected and with "D_" before the name.
Thus PICTURE.GIF could be dithered to D_PICTUR.IMG, for example.
PICTURE.GIF would be left untouched.

The simplest... and fastest... form of dithering is a Bayer
dither. This does not produce great results, but it's extremely
quick.

The remaining three dithering algorithms use what is called
"error diffusion". These produce really nice looking dithers, but
they're quite slow. The fastest... and least attractive... is
Floyd-Steinberg. The best... and by far the slowest... is Stucki.
The Burkes dither is somewhere in the middle.

All three of these dithers come in two flavours, UD...
unidirectional... and BD... bidirectional. These options will
produce slightly different results.

You should plan to experiment with the dithering options of
Graphic Workshop a bit to see what it's capable of.

Dithering scans an image line by line, starting in the upper left
corner and working down to the lower right corner. For this
reason, you will find that if you rotate an image by ninety
degrees, dither it and then rotate the dithered version by a
further two hundred and seventy degrees, you'll get different
results than you would have had you dithered the original image.

Dithering is a batch function. You can tag a number of files and
then set them up to dither unattended.


GET INFO - F4
────────────────────
This box will show you some basic information about one or more
selected files. Among other things, it will tell you how much
memory the file needs to unpack into. You can use this number to
figure out whether the file in question will fit in your
available DOS memory or whether extra memory will be required, as
was discussed previously. The amount of available DOS memory is
available by hitting the "?" key from within the main screen.

Having said this, it's worth mentioning that this number actually
represents the lowest memory requirement for the image in
question. Some functions will require significantly more memory.

The last field in the Get Info box displays the file comments if
there were any. The comments vary from format to format. In some
cases, having nothing better to say, they'll tell you what
software created the file.

Some file formats actually contain a lot more information than
can be displayed in the normal Get Info box. TIFF files, for
example, can contain the name of the artist responsible for them,
the type of software used to create them and so on. You can get
at this sort of optional information for formats which support it
by using the "details" option of the F4 box when it's available.
The arrow keys will scroll you through the detail window. Details
are available, for example, if you get information about GIF,
TIFF or IFF/LBM files.

Note that the Get Info and details information for EPS files
actually pertain to the TIFF preview.

You may need some external assistance in fully interpreting the
details.


SHELLING TO DOS - F5
───────────────────────────
If you hit F5, 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.


REVERSE - F6
───────────────────
This function will create a reversed version of any image file.
The new file will have the same name as the original file, with
"R_" appended to the front of it. Thus, reversing PICTURE.MAC
will leave you with R_PICTUR.MAC. If you reverse a colour image,
you'll get a colour negative. These look weird... we haven't
found a use for them as yet.

Reversing is a batch function.


TRANSFORM - F7
─────────────────────
This key will pop up a menu offering you five image
transformations. You can rotate an image in ninety degree
increments and you can flip it horizontally or vertically. These
functions work on images of any number of colours.

Note that the ninety and two hundred and seventy degree rotation
functions will take a very long time if your images are large and
require the use of virtual memory... this assumes that you lack
extended or expanded memory. Them's the breaks.

Transformed images will be stored in files with "T_" in front of
the names. Thus PICTURE.GIF will become T_PICTUR.GIF after any of
the five transformations have been wrought upon it. If you rotate
it and then flip the rotated image, for example, it will become
T_T_PICT.GIF, and so on, with intermediate files along the way.

Transforming is a batch function.


SCALE - F8
─────────────────
This key will allow you to scale files from 25 to 500 percent.

Your original files will not be altered when you scale them. New
files with the prefix "S_" will be created. Thus, PICTURE.GIF
will produce S_PICTUR.GIF after scaling.

Scaling a picture can produce some really ugly results, depending
on what you scale. Bear in mind that scaling by integral
values... down to seventy five or fifty percent, up to two
hundred percent and so on... will produce less ugly results than
scaling by arbitrary values.

The scaling values you enter will be rounded to the nearest lower
integral value. Thus, 42.5 percent will really be 42 percent.

Scaling is fairly time consuming.

You should probably avoid scaling dithered monochrome pictures
down. Nothing terribly bad will happen, but for reasons which
will become obvious if you think about it, the results will
almost always be really ugly.

Note that the scaling percentage you enter determines the size of
the destination image relative to the source image, not the
actual percentage of scaling. Thus, entering 25 will produce a
destination image which is one quarter... 25 percent... of the
original image. Entering 200 will create a destination image
twice as big... 200 percent of... the original. Entering 100 will
produce a destination image identical to the source image.

By default, scaling will be the same in both dimensions. If you
hit F8 while the scaling box is visible, you will be able to
enter independent horizontal and vertical values.

Scaling is a batch function.


SPECIAL EFFECTS - F9
───────────────────────────
This function has a submenu which will allow you to access a
number of special tools for working with colour image files under
Graphic Workshop.

All of these are batch functions. The destination files will have
"X_" in front of their names. Note that some of these functions
are exceedingly time consuming, and all 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.

Colour reduction can take a very long time.


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.


SCRIPT LANGUAGE AND COMMAND LINE MODE
▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀
In addition to being run through its menus, Graphic Workshop can
handle script files. A script file is a list of Graphic Workshop
commands. Having been given a script file to work with, Graphic
Workshop can perform a number of functions and then return to DOS
or to the program which called it.

The Graphic Workshop script language facility is primarily for
use in situations in which another application wishes to call
Graphic Workshop, have it convert, print, view or otherwise
manipulate some files in the background and then return control
to the program which called it.

The Graphic Workshop script language and command line mode are
discussed in detail in the documentation for the Graphic Workshop
accessory disk, as found elsewhere in this document.


CONFIGURATION
▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀
Making permanent changes to the modifiable features of Graphic
Workshop involves using the installer, GWSINSTL.EXE. The
configuration of Graphic Workshop is handled by a separate
program in order to keep GWS.EXE as small as possible, leaving
lots of memory for putting graphics in.

The GWSINSTL program actually modifies GWS.EXE. In order for it
to work, GWS.EXE and GWSINSTL.EXE must be in the same directory
and must be so named. Both programs must be of the same version.
Be aware that as it directly modifies GWS.EXE, there is the
outside chance that a bug in the installer might crop up and kill
GWS.EXE beyond repair. Make sure you have a virgin copy of
GWS.EXE somewhere before you use the installer.

Place GWSINSTL.EXE and GWS.EXE in the same directory and type
GWSINSTL. A menu will appear which will let you edit the runtime
settings, add or change your screen driver and add or change your
dot matrix printer driver.

Note that the screen drivers are contained in a file called
GWSDRV.RES. The printer drivers are contained in a file called
GWSPDR.RES. These files must be in the same directory as GWSINSTL
for it to be able to find them. If one or both of them is
missing, the corresponding options in the main screen of GWSINSTL
will not be available.


EDIT RUNTIME - F1
────────────────────────
If you select this option, you'll see a screen which will allow
you to fine tune Graphic Workshop's performance to suit your
requirements and hardware. You can use the up and down arrow keys
and the Home and End keys to move through the items of this
screen. Hitting Enter when the cursor is over an item which toggles
will change its state. Hitting Enter when the cursor is over an
editable field will allow you to type in a new data.

Note that you can run GWSINSTL and select this screen as often as
you want to adjust the settings of its various parameters.

When you're done changing things, hit F10 to get back to the main
GWSINSTL menu.

Note that these items can be overridden by using command line
switches when you run GWS.EXE, should you need them set
differently from time to time.


Screen colours
--------------------
This item allows you to set the screen colours. By default, there
are two sets of screen colours, to wit, a colour set which is
predominantly blue and a monochrome set. If you don't like either
of these, hit F1 when the cursor is on this item to create a
custom set.


Memory type
-----------------
Hit Enter when the cursor is on this item to move through the
available extra memory options. See the section dealing with
memory elsewhere in this document for more information about
selecting the correct memory type.


Display type
------------------
This item allows you to select the type of video card your system
will be using. It defaults to AUTODETECT, which will cause
Graphic Workshop to attempt to figure out what sort of card is in
your system. You may have to change this if you have a multiple
mode card which causes it to guess incorrectly. You will have to
change it if you have a super VGA card wish to use it in its
higher resolution modes.

If you have a super VGA card, set this field to SUPER VGA &
OTHER and use the screen driver setup screen, discussed later in
this section, to select a suitable driver.


Printer port
------------------
This item selects which parallel printer port to print images to.
Note that you can only select LP1, LPT2 or LPT3. Note also that
this selection only affects laser printers. See the section on
printing elsewhere in this document for more information.


Memory overhead (Kbytes)
------------------------------
This is an editable item. It selects the number of kilobytes of
memory overhead which Graphic Workshop will reserve. See the
section on memory elsewhere in this document for more
information.


Colour PostScript printing
--------------------------------
This item selects whether to assume that your PostScript printer
can print in colour.


Default print dither
--------------------------
This item selects the type of dithering to use if you attempt to
print a colour or grey scale picture to a LaserJet or dot matrix
printer. This defaults to BAYER, which is fast but ugly. Select
one of the other options if you'd like better results.


PostScript orientation
----------------------------
This item selects the default orientation for printing graphics
to a PostScript printer.


Print filenames
---------------------

Print dates
-----------------

Print image size
----------------------

Print image colours
-------------------------

Print output resolution
-----------------------------
These items allow you to determine what, if anything, will be
printed at the bottoms of pages which Graphic Workshop prints.


MacPaint header
---------------------
This item allows you to determine whether MacPaint files
generated by Graphic Workshop will have MacBinary headers in
them. Leave this on if you don't know what these are. Note that
this does not affect how Graphic Workshop reads MacPaint files...
it will handle both types no matter you set this item.


IFF/LBM compression
-------------------------
This item determines whether IFF/LBM files will be compressed.
Some old versions of Deluxe Paint choked on compressed files.


EPS preview
-----------------
This item determines whether EPS files will be created with TIFF
previews.


TIFF compression
----------------------
This item determines whether TIFF files will be created
compressed. Some applications, such as Gray F/X, don't like
compressed files.


TIFF grey scale expansion
-------------------------------
This item determines whether TIFF grey scale files should be
created with their grey scales expanded. This should be set ON if
you'll be importing grey scale files into a desktop publishing
package or otherwise using them to print with and to OFF if
you'll be editing them.


TIFF colour/grey scale
----------------------------
This item determines whether TIFF files with more than one bit of
colour will be created as colour or grey scale images. The grey
scale expansion item will be ignored if this item is set to
COLOUR.


EXE file compression
--------------------------
This item determines whether self-displaying EXE pictures will be
compressed. See the section on EXE pictures elsewhere in this
document for more information.


Graphic Workshop path
---------------------------
This should be a complete path to the subdirectory and drive
where GWS.EXE and GWS.RES live. For example:

        C:\GRAPHICS\

When this item is set correctly, you will be able to run Graphic
Workshop from anywhere on your hard drive if its location is in
your DOS path.


EDIT SCREEN DRIVER - F2
──────────────────────────────
This page will allow you to select a super-VGA screen driver. You
must select a driver which is in keeping with the super VGA card
you have in your system. If you attempt to display a large
graphic in Graphic Workshop and the display misbehaves, chances
are you have the wrong super-VGA screen driver installed.

Note that some drivers are intended for use with cards having a
half megabyte or more of memory. If you have a 256 kilobytes VGA
card, choose a suitable 256 kilobyte driver.

Note that not all the drivers support higher resolution modes. If
you have a card which can display pictures in 1024 by 768 pixel
resolution, you also need a driver which can drive it in that
mode. As a rule, all the super VGA drivers will handle 640 by 480
pixels. Some can do better than this, but not all of them. We're
working on improving the high end drivers.

The following are some notes 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 col 640x200
----------------------------
This driver was developed by Marcel Ward in Aberystwyth, Wales.
It allows owners of Amstrad PCs having the custom sixteen-colour
display cards supplied with these systems to look at colour
images. We haven't tested this driver, lacking an Amstrad, but
the source code looks right.


VGA in pseudo 640x480
---------------------------
This is a very clever driver by Gregory Weeks which displays 640
pixel wide 256-colour files on a 320 pixel wide screen by leaving
out every alternate pixel. As the author notes, nothing is free
and some detail is lost. However, if you have a VGA card with no
640 pixel wide, 256-colour mode... or one which there is no
driver for as yet... you'll find that this driver is often
preferable to the stock 320 by 200 pixel MCGA mode.

Thanks to all these authors for their drivers.


Tseng 4000 640 by 480
---------------------------

Tseng 4000 800 by 600
---------------------------
These drivers support cards which use the Tseng Labs chip set.
The 800 by 600 driver will display 256-colour pictures in up to
800 by 600 pixels... it will automatically select the most
suitable mode. If you hardware cannot support 800 by 600 pixels
at 256 colours, use the 640 by 480 pixel driver.


Hercules TIGA 31.5k
-------------------------
This driver supports the Hercules Graphic Station card. Note that
unlike a Graphic Station card, a VGA card only actually does 18-
bit colour. The 24-bit colour mode of the Graphic Station card
has a resolution of 512 by 480 pixels. Its aspect ratio isn't all
that good, but you can fiddle the monitor controls... for most
monitors... to get pretty reasonable pictures. This driver should
work on other cards supporting the Texas Instrument TIGA chip,
but no promises. Note that this is a VGA level driver only... it
does not do 24 bits directly.


Trident VGA Card
----------------------
This is a driver for the Trident VGA graphic cards. It drives the
card in its 640 by 400, 256 colour mode, and will work with cards
having 256 kilobytes or more of on board memory.


Trident 512K VGA
----------------------
This will drive Trident cards with 512 kilobytes of memory on
board to 480 lines in 256 colour mode.


Video Seven 1024i
-----------------------
This is a driver for the Headland Technologies Video Seven VRAM
and Video Seven 1024i cards. It supports the 640 by 480 line 256-
colour mode.


Paradise Plus Card
------------------------
This is a full featured driver for the Western Digital Paradise
Plus card. This driver also works with the Dell super-VGA card,
which is actually a Paradise sixteen-bit card.


Paradise Pro Card
-----------------------
This is a driver for the Paradise Professional card (and clones
thereof). It supports both the 640 by 400 and 640 by 480 pixel,
256 colour modes.


Dell Super VGA
--------------------
This is a version of the Paradise Plus driver, above. It has been
modified so as not to use the 800 by 600 pixel EGA and monochrome
modes of the Paradise card, as this causes the super-VGA monitor
on a Dell to click a (loud) internal relay every time it changes
modes. If you don't mind the relay, or you want the 800 by 600
modes, use the Paradise Plus driver.


Dell Super VGA 512K
-------------------------
This is a 512K version of the Dell Super VGA driver, that is, a
Paradise driver with the 800 by 600 pixel monochrome mode
disabled.

Note: rumour has it that some Dell systems have been shipped with
Headland Video 7 cards rather than Paradise cards. If your Dell
system is so equipped... or if you can't get GWS to work in the
super-VGA modes with one of the above two drivers... try
VIDEO7.DRV.


ATI Wonder 256K
---------------------
This is a driver for the ATI VGA Wonder and ATI VGA Edge cards.
It drives the 256-colour screen in the 400 line mode, and will
work with cards having 256 kilobytes on them. Note that the ATI
drivers will not work with ATI Basic 16 boards, which have no
super-VGA modes.


ATI Wonder 512K
---------------------
This is a driver for ATI Wonder cards having 512 kilobytes of
memory on board. It will display pictures in up to 800 by 600
pixel resolution, selecting among the three available 256-colour
display modes based on the dimensions of the image to be viewed.


Standard VGA 320 x 400
----------------------------
This is a "gadget" driver for a stock VGA card which reprograms
the beast into an undocumented 320 by 400 line mode. It should
work on any VGA card, but being undocumented one cannot be sure.
In any case, while interesting, this mode has such a squashed
aspect ratio that it's not really useful for anything. In
addition, having heavily interlaced memory, it's painfully slow
to update.


Standard VGA 360 x 480
----------------------------
This is another undocumented mode. It gets still more on the
screen, with still more distortion.


EDIT EXTERNAL PRINTER DRIVER - F3
────────────────────────────────────────
This page will allow you to select an external printer driver.
You do not need an external printer driver if you will be
printing to a PostScript printer or any sort of LaserJet or
LaserJet compatible printer.

For the most part, external printer drivers are used to drive
black and white dot matrix printers. Graphic Workshop does
support external colour printers. At present, the only colour
driver available is for the Hewlett-Packard PaintJet and Kodak
Diconix inkjet printers.

If you don't find a driver for your printer in the available list
of drivers, you can probably use the Epson FX-80 driver. Most dot
matrix printers emulate this standard. If you'd like to write a
driver, see the section on the Graphic Workshop accessory disk
elsewhere in this document.

Note that the Epson LQ and LX drivers, the IBM ProPrinter drivers
and the Panasonic and Roland drivers were all written by Chris
Rogers of Ashtree Software. They're particularly slick, in that
they will ask you what resolution you want to print at. We have
not tested these, but they look to be well written.


INSTALLING GRAPHIC WORKSHOP IN WINDOWS 3
▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀
You can install Graphic Workshop in Windows 3 as a non-Windows
application. It gets along well with Windows. Use the PIF
provided, open a new application and fill in the blanks. You'll
probably have to use the Windows PIF editor to change things like
where your copy of GWS.EXE lives, the default directories and
perhaps the memory settings.

Use the Properties item of the program manager file menu to
change the default DOS icon initially assigned to Graphic
Workshop to GWS-1.ICO, provided with the software.


COMMAND LINE SWITCHES
▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀
When you run Graphic Workshop by typing GWS at the command line,
it will run using the default settings, as configured by
GWSINSTL. There may be times when you'll want to override these
settings temporarily, and rather than running the installer, you
can use the command line switches. These only change the
configuration of Graphic Workshop when they're used. The next
time you run Graphic Workshop, it will return to its default
configuration.

As a rule, command line switches should only be required in
special circumstances.

You can always see a complete list of the command line switches
by running Graphic Workshop as

     GWS ?

In using the command line switches, make sure that each one is
separated on the command line by a space. Note that they are not
case-sensitive. For example, this is a legal invocation of
Graphic Workshop with some command line switches.

     GWS /SVG /vir /Psc

This has told Graphic Workshop to work with a super VGA card,
virtual memory and a colour PostScript printer.

If you're using Graphic Workshop both under DOS and under
Windows, you can add command line switches to the command line
field of the Windows PIF file for Graphic Workshop to adjust its
configuration if needs be.

The following are the command line switches which Graphic
Workshop recognizes. Most of these options correspond to
installation options in GWSINSTL.


MEMORY SWITCHES
──────────────────────
/VIR - use virtual memory
/EMS - use expanded memory
/XMS - use extended memory
/XMV - use extended or virtual memory
/EMV - use expanded or virtual memory


VIDEO DRIVER SWITCHES
────────────────────────────
/CGA - use the CGA card driver
/EGA - use the EGA card driver
/VGA - use the VGA card driver
/HER - use the Hercules card driver
/SVG - use the currently installed super VGA driver (if any)


PRINTER SWITCHES
───────────────────────
/PFN - enable printing filenames
/PDT - enable printing dates
/PPS - enable printing image size
/PCL - enable printing number of colours
/PRS - enable printing resolution
/PRD - disable all the foregoing print options
/POR - print in portrait orientation on PostScript printers
/LAN - print in landscape orientation on PostScript printers
/PFN - print to a file, rather than to the printer
/PSM - assume a monochrome PostScript printer
/PSC - assume a colour PostScript printer
/PHn - set print dither (n=B:Bayer, F:Floyd-Steinberg, U:Burkes, S:Stucki)
/LPn - set printer port (n=1,2 or 3)
/Snn - set Postscript screen size (n=10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 or 80)
/SDF - set PostScript halftone screen to the printer's default


FILE FORMAT SWITCHES
───────────────────────────
/EPP - enable EPS preview creation
/EPN - disable EPS preview creation
/IFN - No compression on IFF files
/IFC - RL compression on IFF files
/MBH - MacPaint MacBinary header on
/MBN - MacPaint MacBinary header off
/TCL - Create colour TIFF files
/TCG - Create grey TIFF files
/TGN - TIFF files no compression
/TGC - TIFF files RL compression
/TXP - Expand TIFF grey scale
/TXN - Do not expand TIFF grey scale
/EXC - Compress EXE pictures
/EXN - Do not compress EXE pictures


VENTURA PUBLISHER TRICKS
▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀
Graphic Workshop is great for getting images into Ventura
Publisher documents. Here are a few tips for getting the most out
of it.

Monochrome bitmapped images should be converted into IMG files
for use with Ventura. Note that while Ventura will import colour
PCX files with up to 16 colours, the results are rarely pretty.
You'll do much better to halftone or dither colour PCX files for
use with Ventura.

Having poured an image into a frame, use the Sizing and Scaling
box in the Frames menu to select "By Scale Factors." Set the
scale width to the natural size of the image... as it defaults
to... or to some integral multiple of it. This will eliminate
distortion or plaiding of the image.

You can create halftones from colour images by converting them to
grey scale TIFF files. Ventura allows you a great deal of control
over the way the grey scale and screening information is handled
in a TIFF file.

You can also create halftones in Ventura by converting colour and
grey scale files to IMG files and importing these. The only
drawback to this over using grey scale TIFF files is that the
grey scale and screening information will not be adjustable. Note
that as of this writing the Windows and Macintosh implementations
of Ventura did not seem to like IMG files with more than one bit
of colour.

If you use the Define Colours option of the Frame menu to display
colours as shades of grey rather than as colours... and if you're
using an EGA or VGA monitor... grey scale TIFF files will appear
in your chapters as pretty slick little photographs.

Note that if you will be creating grey scale TIFF files for use
with Ventura, you should enable grey scale TIFF and grey scale
expansion.


CORELDRAW TRICKS
▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀
If you import bitmapped images into Corel Draw, you can decide
how they'll be handled once they get there by choosing the image
type you use. Imported PCX files will be scaled to an arbitrary
size upon entering Corel Draw, with the result that it's almost
impossible to adjust them to get a one to one relationship
between the image pixels and the printer pixels. This will make
many PCX files print badly.

TIFF files, on the other hand, import initially with one to one
scaling. If you use TIFF files and leave them at their initial
size, or stretch them to integral multiples of their original
sizes, they'll print without distortion or plaiding.

Grey scale TIFF files imported into Corel Draw come up as
PostScript halftones... these can look very slick as part of a
line drawing. Colour TIFF files are useful if you'll be
outputting your Corel Draw files to a colour output device or if
you'll be getting them separated.

You might want to check out "Mastering Corel Draw 2" by Steven
William Rimmer, published by Sybex Books (Sybex book 814).


GRAPHIC WORKSHOP ACCESSORY DISK
▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀
The Graphic Workshop accessory disk provides you with tools to:

- Write a custom super-VGA screen driver for Graphic Workshop
- Write a custom external printer driver for Graphic Workshop
- Use the command line and script language of Graphic Workshop.
- Better manipulate the resource files of Graphic Workshop.

Most users will not need this disk. It's primarily useful for
programmers, and anyone wishing to integrate Graphic Workshop
with their applications.

The disk includes the source code for a skeletal super-VGA
driver, the source code for a printer driver and a script
resource, among other things. You will need MASM and LINK or
TLINK to create drivers in addition to the tools provided with
this disk. You'll also need a moderate level of ability in 8088-
series assembly language programming.

Complete instructions for using the script language interface are
also included.

The Graphic Workshop accessories disk is available to registered
users of Graphic Workshop for $10.00 if it's ordered at the time
you register, or for $20.00 afterwards.


CONTACTING ALCHEMY MINDWORKS INC.
▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀
We hope you'll contact us to register Graphic Workshop... see the
section about registering Graphic Workshop elsewhere in this
document.

You can contact us by mail by writing to us at:

Alchemy Mindworks Inc.
P.O. Box 500
Beeton, Ontario
L0G 1A0
Canada

We will attempt to answer questions from unregistered users who
write to us to the extent that their answers are needed for you
to fully determine whether Graphic Workshop will suit your
requirements.

We can also be reached through the Alchemy Mindworks bulletin
board. It's available twenty-four hours a day at [phone].
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 and
FAX numbers for immediate technical support. The voice number is
only available for use from 10:00am to 5:00pm EST. If you call
and get our answering machine... it does happen... please leave
us a message or call back later. We are only able to return long
distance calls if we can call you collect. In this regard, please
note that as of this writing Canada has a very peculiar
electronic voice mail collect call system... if the phone
company's computer starts talking when you pick up the phone,
it's probably us returning your call.

We ask that in contacting us you appreciate that we are a small
company with limited resources. If you have not registered
Graphic Workshop we will not tell you to go to hell, but please
don't ask us for half an hour of free technical support.


REGISTRATION
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If you like this program and find it useful, you are requested to
support it by sending us $40.00. This will entitle you to
telephone support, notification of updates, a free copy of the
latest version of Graphic Workshop and other worthwhile things.
More to the point, though, it'll make you feel good. We've not
infested the program with excessive beg notices, crippled it or
had it verbally insult you after ten days. We trust you to
support Graphic Workshop if you like it.

Oh yes, should you fail to support this program and continue to
use it, a leather winged demon of the night will tear itself,
shrieking blood and fury, from the endless caverns of the nether
world, hurl itself into the darkness with a thirst for blood on
its slavering fangs and search the very threads of time for the
throbbing of your heartbeat. Just thought you'd want to know
that.

Our address is:

Alchemy Mindworks Inc.
P.O. Box 500
Beeton, Ontario
L0G 1A0
Canada

If you have previously registered Graphic Workshop, you can
update your copy to revision six for $20.


CANADIAN USERS
─────────────────────
The registration fee for Graphic Workshop is $40.00 (CDN) plus
seven percent GST, or $42.80. If you live in Ontario, please add
eight percent PST to this, for a total of $45.80. We sincerely
regret collecting this tax on behalf of several levels of
government which will only squander it. If you sincerely regret
having to pay it, we urge you to express your regret by voting in
the next federal and provincial elections.


AMERICAN USERS
─────────────────────
The registration fee for Graphic Workshop is $40.00 (US). The
exchange on US funds pretty well covers the extra postage to the
States.


OTHER USERS
──────────────────
The registration fee for Graphic Workshop is $40.00 (US). If you
pay us by cheque, please make sure that it's a cheque drawn on an
international bank, and that it will be negotiable in Canada. If
there's no bank clearance number along the bottom of the cheque,
it will not clear. Please don't send us Eurocheques... they are
not accepted outside Europe.


PAYING BY CREDIT CARD
────────────────────────────
We can accept payment by Visa only. We need your Visa card number
and expiry date and the name which appears on your card. We also
need written authorization to debit your Visa account for the
specific amount you're sending us.

We cannot accept MasterCard, American Express or other credit
cards.


SOURCE CODE AVAILABILITY
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It isn't.

After considerable meditation and several bad experiences, we
have decided not to release the source code for Graphic Workshop.
We do license parts of it for specific applications... if you
want more information about using some of the functions of
Graphic Workshop in your software, please contact us.

If you're interested in writing programs which use graphics,
you'll find everything you need to know in "Bitmapped Graphics",
by Steven William Rimmer. It's published by TAB Books, (TAB book
3558). It features code to pack and unpack MacPaint, IMG, PCX,
GIF and TIFF files, as well as chapters on screen drivers,
dithering and printing.

An additional book on this subject, "Extended Bitmapped
Graphics", (TAB Book 4102), will be available in mid-1992. It
discusses the GIF 89a, WordPerfect, BMP, IFF/LBM, TGA, MSP, 24-
bit PCX and colour TIFF file formats, as well as such subjects as
colour dithering and colour printing.

If you'd like to write applications which use menus, icons,
windows and all the other paraphernalia of a graphical user
interface, you might find the "PC Graphical User Interface" book
handy. It's published by TAB Books (TAB Book 3875). It includes
the C source for a complete graphical user interface library,
related code to manage fonts and bitmaps and a tiny paint
program. It's due on the streets in October 1991.

If your local bookstore doesn't have these books, they can be
mail or phone ordered from Christies of Cookstown, P.O. Box 392,
Cookstown, Ontario L0L 1L0, Canada. Their phone number is (705)
458-1562. It has a FAX machine on it after hours. As of this
writing, they're open seven days a week.


BUNDLING GRAPHIC WORKSHOP
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If you'd like to include Graphic Workshop with your product,
please get in touch with us. We have several ways to help you do
this so your users get the most out of Graphic Workshop and we
don't have to set our leather winged demon of the night on 'em.


SHAREWARE DISTRIBUTORS
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We receive numerous requests for copies of Graphic Workshop from
shareware distributors and we don't have the facilities to send
out disks in response to all of them.

If you're a fairly large shareware distributor, we can provide
you with a quad density, 5 1/4 inch floppy disk having most of
our popular shareware applications on it. This will include the
current versions of such packages as Graphic Workshop, GrafCat,
Desktop Paint, Desktop Paint 256 and several others. We will also
include a copy of our current newsletter, which will outline the
functions of these packages.

Note that this is the only format in which we are able to provide
this disk.

If you'd like to request a copy of this disk, please send us a
copy of your current catalog. Your catalog must satisfy the
following requirements:

- It must be commercially printed. We are unable to accept
  catalogs on disk, catalogs which have been duplicated with a
  photocopier or mimeograph machine or catalogs which have been
  created using a dot matrix printer.

- It must be comprised of descriptive listings for the shareware
  it offers. Such a listing should be at least four or five lines
  describing the software in question. We don't feel that a
  single line of six point type which says something like
     ``Graphc Wrkshop 6.0 (Img fle cnvrtr)...........$2.00''
  really does anything meaningful toward distributing our
  shareware.

- It must explain in a clear and prominent way that the software
  being offered in the catalog is user supported software, that
  paying your company for it does not constitute registering it
  and that users who buy your disks and use the programs on them
  are expected to register their software if they continue to use
  it.

If you don't have a catalog which meets the above description,
you can obtain a copy of our shareware disk for $10.00 (US).
Alternately, you can download the current versions of our
shareware applications from CompuServe in the GRAPHSUPPORT forum
or from our bulletin board at [phone]. You can also order
them from one of the larger distributors we use, such as Public
Brand Software, 3750 Kentucky Avenue, Indianapolis, IN 46241.
They always have the current versions of our programs.

If you obtain current copies of our shareware, you have our
permission to distribute it under the following terms.

- That nothing be added to, deleted from or changed in the
  archive files which contain our packages. This includes adding
  ZIP file comments to them.

- That our shareware is not included in or bundled with other
  hardware or software without our written permission.

- That no printed documentation regarding our shareware is
  included with the package without our written permission.

- That hard copy explaining that our packages are shareware is
  included with the disks.

You do have our permission to copy the ZIP files from our quad
density disk to multiple lower density disks for distribution.

Please note that we will send you one disk. We'll send you
updates of our software if you're able to provide us with an
account of how many copies of our packages you have distributed.

We regret that we've imposed this additional paperwork on you. We
realize that most of the shareware distributors who contact us
have good intentions and that many will actually distribute our
disks and get us registered users. We hope you will appreciate
that supplying our disks to everyone who asked for them in the
past has frequently meant that things like updates to our users,
software support, software enhancement and other things which
represent the paying part of our involvement with shareware have
been delayed. This isn't a situation we feel can continue.


OTHER ALCHEMY MINDWORKS SHAREWARE
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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.


DESKTOP PAINT 256
────────────────────────
Desktop Paint 256 is a powerful super-VGA paint program. Desktop
Paint 256 will let you create and edit pictures stored as PCX,
GIF, TIFF and IFF/LBM files. It features a rich selection of
drawing and image manipulation tools, XMS and EMS support to work
on large images and a user friendly interface. Looking very much
like monochrome Desktop Paint in colour, it's a powerful
application which will be equally useful for picture collectors,
artists and desktop publishing users... it makes a quick and easy
to use editor for grey scale TIFF files, too. It supports
Paradise (and compatibles), Headland Video 7, Tseng Labs 4000
series cards, Trident cards which use 8900 series chips and ATI
VGA Wonder cards. Note that you must have one of these super-VGA
cards to use Desktop Paint 256... it does not run in the standard
320 by 200 pixel "standard" VGA mode. Desktop Paint 256 requires
a Microsoft-compatible mouse.


DESKTOP PAINT
─────────────────────
Desktop Paint is a powerful monochrome paint package fine tuned
for use with desktop publishing applications. It will read and
write MacPaint, Ventura IMG, PCX, WordPerfect WPG and TIFF image
files. It has EMS and XMS support to handle images of virtually
any size, an intuitive user interface and a wide selection of
image creation and manipulation tools. Desktop Paint can utilize
fonts from many other sources, including Ventura Publisher,
Macintosh FONT and NFNT resources and Windows FNT files. Desktop
Paint 256 requires a Microsoft-compatible mouse.


GRAFCAT
──────────────
GrafCat prints a visual catalog of your image files, with
sixteen pictures to a page. It drives all LaserJet and PostScript
laser printers, and works with any mixture of GIF, PCX, MacPaint,
TIFF, WPG, MSP, IFF/LBM, EPS, BMP, PIC and IMG files.


CROPGIF
──────────────
CrogGIF allows you to crop smaller fragments from your GIF files.
Use Graphic Workshop, above, to convert other formats into GIF
files for cropping. This program uses a simple mouse interface to
make cropping image fragments no more complicated than using a
paint program. It requires a Microsoft compatible mouse. It
supports EMS memory to handle really huge files.


CINEMA
─────────────
Cinema display a continuous "slide show" of image files. You can
set up the images to be displayed using a simple script language.
Cinema works with most super VGA cards, using the same drivers as
Graphic Workshop, and with CGA, EGA and Hercules cards. It works
with any mixture of GIF, PCX, MacPaint, TIFF, WPG, MSP, IFF/LBM,
EPS and IMG files.


FI
─────────
File Information is a small utility which will examine mystery
image files and tell you what they are and some details of what's
inside them.


GIFINFO
──────────────
GifInfo creates catalog files from your GIF collection, allowing
you to store fifty or more miniature full colour representations
of GIF files on a single quad floppy.


STORYTELLER
──────────────────
Storyteller is a hypertext program with a mouse driven graphical
user interface which will allow you to create reports, manuals
and interactive fiction, among other things, which has a tree
structure. Each page of a Storyteller document can lead to
related sub-pages, which can in turn have their own sub-sub
pages, and so on. It looks slick and is exceedingly user
friendly. Storyteller requires a Microsoft-compatible mouse.

If you can't obtain them from the usual sources of shareware,
they're available from us for $35.00 each preregisterd. They're
also all available for downloading from our bulletin board at
[phone].


REVISION HISTORY
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For them what cares...

Version 6.0d - Fixed several PostScript printing bugs and
improved the file format resource memory management.

Version 6.0c - Fixed a bug in the GIF format resource which
caused GIF files to be written with bad screen descriptors. This
bothered some other applications which read them. Also, replaced
the Tseng Labs drivers... these seem to get along better with
some of the newer cards.

Version 6.0b - Added details to the GIF format. Fixed a bug in
GWSINSTL that caused an "Error loading GRAF" message if the
display type was set to VGA.

Version 6.0a - Fixed a bug which causes 16 x 16 pixel spatial
posterization to hang or crash back to DOS and one which caused
the view function to omit the last line in 256-colour images.

Version 6.0 - A complete rewrite with countless new and improved
features (a likely story, this.)

Version 5.2 - Improved the GIF decoding... interlaced monochrome
files are now handled properly. Also, sixteen colour PCX files
from some previously unsupported screen capture programs are now
decoded properly. Fixed a potential bug in the GIF decoder.
Improved the handling of colour and grey scale TIFF files, such
that they should be more readily digestible by a larger number
of applications.

Version 5.1 - Added GIF89a support and anamorphic scaling. Fixed
some bugs in the GIF and PCX file handling.

Version 5.0 - Fixed a bug which prevented 256 colour PCX files
from printing. Added several new screen drivers.

Version 4.9 - Added colour TIFF support. Fixed a cosmetic bug in
the file delete function. Added LPT2 and LPT3 printer support.

Version 4.8 - Fixed an IFF bug that caused some odd sized 16
colour IFF files to be incorrectly saved. Added selectable TIFF
grey scale expansion. Added two Tseng Labs super VGA card
drivers... see DRIVERS.DOC.

Version 4.7 - Fixed another obscure TIFF bug and a MacPaint bug.

Version 4.6 - Fixed an obscure TIFF bug.

Version 4.5 - Added PIC file support.

Version 4.4 - Several bug fixes.

Version 4.3 - Fixed a bug in the EPS file conversion routine.

Version 4.2 - Tidied up the file finder functions. The rename and
delete commands don't reset the cursor position and the program
can survive attempting to log onto an empty floppy drive with its
dignity intact. Tidied up the TIFF details. The TIFF functions
can now read files with Macbinary headers, and can generate
Motorola format TIFF files.

Version 4.1 - Fixed a bug which prevented BMP files from printing
or being converted into other formats.

Version 4.0 - Added Windows 3 BMP support.

Version 3.9 - Allowed for optional IFF file compression and fixed
some IFF bugs. All IFF files generated by Graphic Workshop are
now ILBM compressed... ignore this if it doesn't mean anything to
you... and all files with colours in them get Deluxe Paint
previews.

Version 3.8 - Fixed several TIFF bugs.

Version 3.7 - Fixed a few cosmetic bugs and one persistent one
which would cause error messages and deletion of incomplete files
to use the previous file name, rather than the current one in
some cases. This tended to delete good files in conditions when
one's disk was full and such.

Version 3.6 - Got the IFF/LBM compression working properly,
improved the IFF details, allowed for optional TIFF grey scale
file compression. Added Deluxe Paint preview images for 256
colour files.

Version 3.5 - Added scaling, perhaps against our better
judgment. Changed the TIFF compression routine so the version of
Graphic Workshop used to create files is included as a tag. You
can see it in the TIFF details. Improved a few cosmetic things.

Version 3.4 - Fixed a bug in the monochrome EPS previews. There
aren't many uses for monochrome EPS files. Improved the
monochrome IMG file reader considerably... it now loads pretty
well any two colour IMG file, even the weird ones which Ventura
creates when it imports EPS files.

Version 3.3 - Added halftoning to the dither... now the
dither/halftone... functions.

Version 3.2 - Added detailed tag analysis for tag based formats.
Also added drop shadows to the menus and such... this adds four
bytes of code to the program. Fixed a bug of sorts in the TIFF
display code which made it a bit finicky.

Version 3.1 - Improved several of the image compression
functions... they're a lot more effective now. Also fixed a
cosmetic bug in the wait box which caused it to completely close
on files longer than about 1600 lines.

Version 3.0 - Added descriptive comments to some of the F4 Get
Info functions. Added IFF/LBM/CE support.

Version 2.9 - Fixed a potential bug in the PCX palette code,
added file renaming in the finder. Also, one of our users pointed
out that the compiler was adding a debug table to the final EXE
file without being asked to do so. Eliminating this has made the
code about twenty kilobytes smaller. Thanks, Don... things you
learn...

Version 2.8 - Added loadable drivers for dot matrix support,
fixed a few obscure bugs in the printing and display code. Added
image rotation and flipping.

Version 2.7 - Added VGA colour adjustment in the view mode. Added
Microsoft Windows Paint (MSP) file support. One might ask why...
Microsoft Windows Paint is not one of the leading lights in
digital artistry. It was mostly in the interest of completeness.
We had the format details and it was a hot Saturday afternoon
with nothing better to do.

Version 2.6 - Added WordPerfect Graphics support, fixed a bug
which kept some EGA cards from autodetecting properly, made the
TIFF and IMG packing code tighter still for large images. Fixed a
bug in the grey scale TIFF printing function.

Version 2.5 - Fixed a bug in the monochrome GIF file decoder
which caused files with horizontal dimensions not an even
multiple of eight to display incorrectly... but only on Tuesdays.

Version 2.4 - Fixed some bugs in the external super VGA graphics
drivers. Be sure to read DRIVERS.WS if you use and external
driver.

Version 2.3 - Added grey scale TIFF support (at last). Removed
the built in Paradise Plus and ATI VGA Wonder card drivers in
favour of the external ones, which frees up a bit of memory and
makes maintaining these drivers much simpler. Improved the TIFF
file creation routines, such that they now conform to TIFF 5.0,
and will import into most applications which accept TIFF,
including Corel Draw... which is a bit particular about the sorts
of TIFF files it want to deal with. Fixed a bug in the expanded
memory manager which caused a few hangs on really immense files.

Version 2.2 - Fixed a bug in the dithering code. This would cause
some machines to hang if an attempt was made to dither colour GIF
files to the screen with an external VGA driver loaded. Nasty but
obscure.

Version 2.1 - Added Macintosh GIF file reading. Macintosh GIF
files ported to a PC have a 128 byte "Macbinary" header before
the GIF file proper. Graphic Workshop now detects this, gets
around it and reads the GIF information normally. Also added a
comment field to the F4 file information box. This will display
the Macintosh file names of GIF and MacPaint files with Macbinary
headers. Fixed some very obscure bugs in the IMG and TIFF file
compression routines. These would occasionally cause very large
dithered files to compress incorrectly.

Version 2.0 - Fixed a fairly obscure bug in the 16 colour PCX
file compression code.

Version 1.9 - Added image reversal for monochrome files. The
menus got larger.

Version 1.8 - Added monochrome GIF file packing... monochrome
files in other formats can now be converted into GIF files. Added
an external driver for Headland Technologies Video Seven VGA
cards. Fixed (or rather sidestepped) a weird bug in the EPS
preview code which very occasionally generated unreadable preview
images.

Version 1.7 - Added loadable custom drivers for super VGA cards
other than the ones supported by the built in drivers.

Version 1.6 - Fixed a bug in the TIFF decoder and another really
tiny one in the file finder. Gettin' down to the aphids and fleas
now.

Version 1.5 - Added file deletion and fixed an obscure bug in the
dithering code. Added EGA palette reduction for GIF files.

Version 1.4 - Fixed a bug in the file finder that kept batch
processes from working across multiple pages. Also, a cosmetic
bug the in the wait bar graph that happened on files longer than
about two thousand lines.

Version 1.3 - Fixed a few persistent bugs in the ATI VGA Wonder
card driver. ATI cards were put in this dimension to vex us.

Version 1.2 - Fixed several bugs which prohibited PCX to GIF
conversion for 32 colour files, kept some extremely large
monochrome PCX files from converting and so on.

Version 1.1 - Added an ATI VGA Wonder card driver.

Version 1.0 - Sprung GWS on an unsuspecting universe.


LEGAL DOGMA
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The author assumes no responsibility for any damage or loss
caused by the use of these programs, however it comes down. If
you can think of a way a picture program can cause you damage
or loss you've a sneakier mind than mine.

All the registered trademarks used herein are registered to
whoever it is that owns them. This notification is given in lieu
of any specific list of trademarks and their owners, which would
not be as inclusive and would probably take a lot longer to type.

Graphic Workshop is a trademark of Alchemy Mindworks Inc.

That's it...