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Text File | 1990-09-22 | 14KB | 337 lines

GRAFCAT 2.3

Graphics cataloging program deluxe:
    Requires a laser printer... LaserJet Plus compatible or
    a Postcript printer... and some graphics to catalog. Works
    with any mixture of MacPaint, GEM/IMG, PC Paintbrush PCX,
    TIFF, Microsoft Paint MSP, Deluxe Paint IFF/LBM, EPS
    files with previews and GIF files.
__________________________________________________________________

If you like this program, please do one of the following:

    Go down to your local bookstore and buy a copy of "Coven:
        A Novel", by Steven William Rimmer, published by
        Ballantine Books. Read the book and tell your friends
        about it if you like it. Send us some comments about the
        book or a photocopy of the cover and we'll consider you a
        registered user of this program.

        If your local bookstore doesn't have Coven, ask them to
        order it for you.

        Alternately, send us $35.00, the normal user fee for this
        software. (The book is $3.95 or $5.50 in Canada:
        considerably cheaper than cash.)

        Registered users of this software are entitled to phone
        support, notification of upgrades and good karma. Please
        tell us the version number of your copy of Grafcat when
        you register... we'll send you the most recent one
        immediately if it's newer than yours. Our address can be
        found at the end of this file.

NOTE: If you're searching for Coven and having trouble finding
it, you can mail order it from the following book store:
Christies of Cookstown, P.O. Box 392, Cookstown, Ontario L0L 1L0,
Canada, [phone]. The cost is $6.50, which includes
the postage. The author would like to thank everyone who's thus
far chased it down (or tried).
__________________________________________________________________

New features as of version 2.3
______________________________

-    Added PIC support

-    Added image scaling and BMP support

-    Largely rewrote the beast using the file handling code
    from Graphic Workshop. It now works with virtually all
    the popular PC based image files, handles all 256 colour
    files correctly and so on.


What it Does and Why
____________________

We have seven hundred and sixteen image files in a subdirectory
called \GEMART. They occupy almost twenty megabytes. We use 'em a
lot... they're all public domain graphics and we can pop them
into desktop publishing documents when we want to dress up a page
quickly or just throw in a nude for effect.

You know, it's damn hard to remember what three hundred and
seventy five picture files contain. In addition, I think that
late at night after we've gone away the little mothers breed in
there.

In order to help figure out what all those file names are, we
wrote GRAFCAT. It creates a visual catalog of picture files which
makes it easy to check out a whole collection of pictures and
find the one you want. The pictures can be any mixture of image
files you like.

The program prints sixteen files to a page. Said pages come out
of a laser printer... you'll need one of these or GRAFCAT won't
be much use. The pictures are printed at three hundred dots to
the inch, so they come out readable but pretty small... which is
how so many make it onto a page.

The printer must be connected to LPT1 on your computer. You'll
need at least a megabyte of memory in the printer.

GRAFCAT will print pictures up to 576 by 720 pixels in their
entirety. This is the size of a MacPaint file. Confronted with
files bigger than this, it will print the middle part of the
image.

GRAFCAT can print a mixture of image types at once. Thus, if you
just tell it to print *.*, it will sort out the file types it
knows how to handle and print them, ignoring anything else.
It assumes that the file extensions reflect the file types
properly. The default extensions are as follows.

    - MAC: MacPaint files
    - IMG: GEM/IMG files
    - PCX: PC Paintbrush files
    - GIF: GIF files
    - TIF: TIFF files
    - EPS: EPS files
    - WPG: WordPerfect graphic files
    - MSP: Microsoft Windows Paint files.
    - LBM: IFF files (Deluxe Paint and others)
    - BMP: Windows 3 wallpaper files
    - PIC: PC Paint/Pictor/Grasp PIC files.

You can change any of them if you like.


How to use GRAFCAT
__________________

Well, it's pretty heavy stuff. Type GRAFCAT followed by any wild
card file specification that points to some image files of the
types discussed. Examples are:

    GRAFCAT D:\*.PCX
    GRAFCAT \GEMART\*.IMG
    GRAFCAT *.MAC
    GRAFCAT *.*
    GRAFCAT A*.GIF
    GRAFCAT @LISTFILE

Make sure there's lots of paper in your printer and that you have
some time to kill. GRAFCAT takes a while, especially on slower
laser printers.

If you want to print selected pages of a large collection of
images, you can use GRAFCAT's command line options, to wit,

/Sn for the page to start printing with
/En for the page to stop printing after

To print pages 10, 11 and 12 of a catalog of images, you would do
this:

    GRAFCAT *.IMG /S10 /E12

If you want to work out which images these would be, you can do
so as follows. First off, use a sorted directory utility to look
at the image file names. GRAFCAT prints them in alphabetical
order. Page 10 would start 160 files from the beginning of the
directory, as there are sixteen images to a page.

If you create a text file with the names of all the files you
want cataloged, to you can make GRAFCAT print those files by
passing the name of the text file as the file parameter with an
"@" in front of it, for example:

    GRAFCAT @LISTFILE

Where LISTFILE is the name of a plain text file with one file
name per line. LISTFILE must be in the subdirectory where the
files you want to print reside.

Files which are too large for GrafCat to print in their entirety
are usually cropped so you see the centre of the image. You can
optionally have GrafCat scale files which are too big so the
whole image will fit in its frame. This means that you'll lose
some detail, but you'll see the whole pictures.

Scaling also takes longer than loading and cropping.

To enable the scaling option, add /F... fit to frame... to your
GrafCat command line. For example

    GRAFCAT *.IMG /F

Black and white images which have been dithered from colour
images do not scale well... very often you will not be able to
make any sense of an image which is first dithered and the
scaled. In these cases, it's probably better to have the pictures
cropped and not see the whole thing.

If you use Graphic Workshop to dither files, the names of the
dithered files will always start with "D_" if you add /D to your
GrafCat command line when /F is also optional, GrafCat will scale
all oversize files except for those which are monochrome and have
file names starting with "D_". In effect, this combination of
switches will scale everything which is too big to print except
large dithered monochrome files.

It's all so simple a politician could use it... probably.


Printer Selection

GRAFCAT defaults to printing to a PostScript printer, but you can
use it with a LaserJet printer if that's what you have. If you
have a printer which can do both emulations, be advised that
LaserJet printing is a great deal faster than PostScript printing
is... at least so far as GrafCat is concerned.

You can set the default printer GrafCat will print to with the
installer, as discussed below. You can override the default
printer by using the command line switches:

    /P - PostScript printer
    /H - Hewlett Packard LaserJet Plus compatible printer

Note that if you print PostScript data to a LaserJet you'll get
many pages of fairly meaningless PostScript code and if you print
LaserJet data to a PostScript printer you'll probably hang it,
necessitating a reboot.


Installing GrafCat
__________________

The GCTINSTL program allows you to configure GrafCat if you don't
like the defaults as they stand. To use it, GrafCat must be named
GRAFCAT.EXE and reside in the same subdirectory as GCTINSTL. Run
GCTINSTL and a screen should appear with the configurable
options.

The things you might want to change are the default printer and
perhaps the file name extensions. Hit Esc to abort the changes or
F10 to save them. You can run GCTINSTL as often as you like.


Notes about PIC files
---------------------
The structure of sixteen colour PIC files is a bit troublesome
for GrafCat, requiring that the entire file be buffered before it
can be printed. As such, unlike as for the other formats which
GrafCat supports, printing a large PIC file requires that there
be a lot of memory around.

Secondly, you'll find that if you have the /F switch active,
there will be an inordinately long pause at the end of any
picture which gets scaled.


Roll Your Own
_____________

This is another book plug. If you're interested in writing
programs which use graphics, you'll find everything you need to
know in "The Book of Bitmapped Graphics", also by Steven William
Rimmer. It's published by TAB books, (TAB book 3558) and should
be available in August 1990. It features code to pack and unpack
MacPaint, IMG, PCX, GIF and TIFF files, as well as chapters on
screen drivers, dithering and printing. It also includes the
source code for a simplified version of this program.


Moral dogma
___________

If you like this program and find it useful, you are requested to
support it either by buying the book mentioned at the top of this
file or by sending us $35.00. We'd rather you bought the book.
This will entitle you to telephone support, notification of
updates and other good things like that. More to the point,
though, it'll make you feel good. We've not infested the program
with excessive beg notices, crippled it or had it verbally insult
you after ten days. We trust you to support GrafCat if you like
it.

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

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

Other programs we've done that you might like include:

GRAPHIC
 WORKSHOP - This is the last word in image programs. It converts,
            prints, views, dithers, transforms, scales and
            halftones MacPaint, GEM/Ventura IMG, PCX, GIF, TIFF,
            WPG, MSP, IFF/LBM, BMP, PIC and EPS files. It drives
            CGA, Hercules, EGA, VGA, Paradise, Video 7, Trident,
            Hercules Graphics Station and ATI VGA Wonder cards.
            It features batch processing, extended and expanded
            memory support, an intuitive user interface and easy
            to follow menus. It allows you to convert colour
            image files into superb black and white clip art for
            desktop publishing, among other things.

VFM      -  Ventura soft font manager deluxe with a side of fries.
            Adds new fonts and creates width tables with menu
            driven simplicity.

CROPGIF   - allows you to crop smaller fragments out of your GIF
            files. Use graphic Workshop, above, to convert other
            formats into GIF files for cropping. This program
            uses a simple mouse interface to make cropping image
            fragments no more complicated than using a paint
            program. Requires a Microsoft compatible mouse.

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

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 -
        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 stucture. 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.

If you can't find them in the public domain, they're available
from us for $35.00 each.

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

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

That's it...