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- ALLPAPER.EXE (VERSION 1.0) Copyright (c) 1994, Jeff Prosise
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- First Published in PC Magazine September 13, 1994 (Utilities)
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-
- ALLPAPER by Jeff Prosise
-
- PURPOSE:
-
- The Windows wallpaper feature does not have a facility for
- adjusting the size of bitmaps. Wallpaper is either centered on the screen
- or tiled. AllPaper lets you stretch or shrink a bitmapped image so that
- one copy of the image fills the screen.
-
- SETUP:
- AllPaper is extremely simple to use. You select a .BMP
- file, select an output resolution, and then click the Shrink/Expand
- button to create a new version of the image under the filename of your
- choice.
-
- Once you have the new .BMP file, you need only copy it to your Windows
- directory to make it available to the Control Panel's Desktop applet,
- where wallpaper settings are selected.
-
- REMARKS:
-
- AllPaper works with almost any .BMP file, including
- OS/2-style .BMP files, but there are some exceptions. It doesn't
- work with the 16-bit and 32-bit .BMP files used by Microsoft
- Windows NT, and it doesn't work with compressed .BMP files,
- which can be very difficult to deal with when bypassing GDI
- (Graphics Device Interface) functions as AllPaper does.
- If you attempt to input a compressed .BMP file, AllPaper displays
- the message, "Unsupported file format (DIB is compressed)." DIB
- stands for device-independent bitmap, the data format that lies
- at the heart of every .BMP file.
-
- On-line services such as CompuServe and ZiffNet are loaded with
- bitmapped images that can be used as wallpaper. With AllPaper,
- you can download the image of your choice without worrying about
- its resolution. If the bitmap is the wrong size, AllPaper can fix
- it for you. If you download a bitmap that is in compressed .BMP
- format, however, you will need a different utility to convert it
- to an uncompressed .BMP file. AllPaper does not support conversion
- between different graphics file formats.
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- Jeff Prosise writes our Tutor column and is a contributing editor of
- PC Magazine. He is also the author of the book Windows Desktop Utilities,
- published by Ziff-Davis Press.
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