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PCXLAB 1.00 Copyright (c) Jesper Frandsen April 13., 1993 ================================= DISCLAIMER ---------- This product is distributed AS IS. The author specifically disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, including, but not limited to, implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose with respect to defects in the diskette and documentation, and program license granted herein, in particular, and without limiting operation of the program license with respect to any particular application use or purpose. In no event shall the author be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damage including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential or other damages. LICENSING AGREEMENT ------------------- PCXLAB is copyrighted software and all rights are reserved. PCXLAB may not be changed or modified in any way except by the author. PCXLAB is part of the PCXDUMP system. The PCXDUMP system is SHAREWARE and may be freely distributed as long as it remains in its complete form with all support and documentation files. It may be used for a 10 day free trial period. Regardless of how the copy is obtained, it is requested that all users comply with the following licensing and registration provisions if they continue to use it after the 10 day trial period. Should you find this program useful, you must register it; you will then be provided with the latest releases of the PCXDUMP system. OVERVIEW OF PCXLAB ------------------- * It can be used on any color EGA, VGA or SVGA display card (except EGA mono). * It can show any 2, 16, 256 and 16.7 million (24 bit) color PCX file in both 16 and 256 color modes. However viewing real 256-color and 24 bit pictures in 16 color will only give you a hint of the picture. Viewing 24 bit pictures in 256 color is acceptable. If the images displayed is bigger than the current resolution you can scroll the images around FAST with the arrowkeys and PgDn & PgUp. You can also change resolution with '+' or '-'. * It detects these SuperVGA card and uses their HiRes modes in 16 or 256 colors: ATI-VGA, Trident, Genoa, Paradise, Tseng 3000, Tseng 4000, MXIC, Realtek OAK-37, OAK-67, OAK-77, Video7, Ahead A/B, Chips & Tech 451/452/453 and VESA compatible cards. * On HiColor or TrueColor cards, you can view 24 bit colors PCX files in 32768 colors or 16.7 million colors (TrueColor card needed for this). PCXLAB will use the HiColor extensions on these cards: Tseng ET 4000, Paradise, Realtek, OAK-77, Trident, ATI, VESA. With the proper VESA-driver, you will be able to show images in 16.7 million colors (if supported by videoadapter). * It has a neat file browser, so you can walk through your whole harddisk without leaving PCXLAB. There is a limit of 2000 PCX-files per directory (you are not likely to hit this limit!). You simply use the cursor arrows or PgUp or PgDn to select the file you want to see. Press Enter to view file. * The PCX-files must be no larger that 3800 pixels wide, which should be more than enough. * You can easily set up a slideshow by tagging a number of files and then hitting F8 (to start the slideshow). You must tag at least 2 files to have a slideshow. * PCXLAB will detect which videomodes your videocard can use, and you can easily switch between these modes by pressing F2 (or + & -). * It is FAST! PCXLAB is written in a high level language and assembler for all the screen and unpacking operations. Compared with the great shareware fileviewer VPIC (which can show a large number of formats, not only PCX), PCXLAB is 30%-700% faster with an average about 2 times faster as VPIC! * Converts PCX-files to other fileformats: Postscript, Windows BMP, Amiga LBM TIFF, Targa TGA, Wordperfect WPG. * Manipulate PCX-files: 1) Convert color files to monochrome with Floyd/Steinberg or Burkes dithering. 2) Reduces 256 or 16.7 million color PCX-files to 16 or 256 colors. 3) Converts color PCX-files to gray scaled PCX-files. * Shows both PCX-files and ANS-files (ANSI text files) * Shows images from commandline. USAGE ----- USAGE: PCXLAB [/CHIPSET=number] [File1 [File2] ...] If one or more arguments are valid filenames on PCX- or ANS-files, these will be showed. Otherwise the PCXLAB will start as usually. If PCXLAB somehow fails to recognize your video adapter that you know is on the list below, you can force PCXLAB to use it with the /CHIPSET switch. The number must be in the range 2-23: Number Chipset Number Chipset ---------------------- ------------------- 0 UNSUPPORTED 12 OAK-67 1 RESERVED 13 Video 7 2 EGA-card 14 Ahead A 3 VGA-card 15 Ahead B 4 ATI-vga 16 Chips & Technology 451 5 Trident 17 Chips & Technology 452 6 Genoa 18 Chips & Technology 453 7 Paradise 19 VESA 8 Tseng 3000 20 Tseng 4000 TrueColor 9 Tseng 4000 21 OAK-77 10 Tseng 4000 HiColor 22 MXIC 11 OAK-37 23 Realtek By forcing PCXLAB to use your adapter you will not be able to use your videocards HiColor extension (if it has any)! FILE CONVERSION - F3 -------------------- WPG FILES - MAXIMUM BITS: 8 (OR MAYBE 4) ---------------------------------------- These are the native import graphic files for WordPerfect. These files can contain both bitmaps and line art, or vector graphics. PCXLAB will only generate the bitmapped part of them. PCXLAB will deal with WPG files having one, four or eight bits of color information, that is, monochrome files, sixteen-color files and 256-color files. The WPG specification allows for 256-color files. As of this writing, WordPerfect itself would not read them. If you wish to use 256-color images in a WordPerfect document, you might want to either reduce them to sixteen colors or dither them to monochrome, depending upon what you'll be outputting them to. 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 color 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 colors change too. This means that transferring an image to the BMP format will generally result in some color shifts when BMP files are imported into Windows applications. The BMP format can support 24-bit files, which PCXLAB does generate. However, as of this writing importing a 24-bit BMP image into Windows Paint results in a noticeable color shift. This appears to be a peculiarity of Windows Paint. 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. PCXLAB will not generate a preview. 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. PCXLAB can transform PCX-files with between 1 and 24 bits of color information... between two and 16.7 million colors... into EPS files. Images with more than two colors will be turned into PostScript halftones. Please note that the EPS files which PCXLAB 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 PCXLAB 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. TIFF FILES - MAXIMUM BITS: 24 ----------------------------- PCXLAB generates 1, 4, 8 or 24 bit TIFF files. Color TIFF files are useful in Corel Draw, among other places. Corel Draw 3.0 will import color TIFF files for inclusion in CDR graphics. Due to the complicated nature of TIFF-files PCXLAB will only dump uncompressed TIFF. This will allow almost any TIFF-reader to read the files generated by PCXLAB without choking. IFF/LBM FILES - MAXIMUM BITS: 24 -------------------------------- 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. 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 PCXLAB 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 PCXLAB, so it's probably a bug in these versions of Deluxe Paint. 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 colors. PCXLAB will generate 1, 4, 8, or 24 bit TGA files. As with TIFF files, PCXLAB will only generate uncompressed TGA files. DITHERING - F4 -------------- Dithering is a sort of magical process by which color 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 color information. Dithering often works a lot better if you scale the original image up. PCXLAB lets you dither with images from "size as" up to 300 percent expansion. Note that the F4 function only dithers to monochrome. Color dithering is handled by one of the functions of the F5 key. Dithering is a fairly slow process, and the better the dithering algorithm, the slower it gets. If you have PCXLAB dither a file, it will create a new file for you of the type selected and with "$" as the first char in the name. Thus PICTURE.PCX could be dithered to $ICTURE.PCX, for example. PICTURE.PCX would be left untouched. The two 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 better... and slower... is Burkes (in my opinion). It is possible to adjust the brightness and contrast of dithered image with the GAMMA and CONTRAST values. Also it is possible to invert the dithered image. COLOR REDUCTION - F5 -------------------- This function allows you to create destination files with fewer colors than the source files they're derived from. You can use this function, for example, to reduce a 256-color file down to a 16-color one. It's particularly useful for reducing 24-bit files down to 256-color files. Whenever you reduce the number of colors in a file, some image information will get lost. The simplest form of color reduction is "remapping". This simply means that the destination image will have the best color palette it can, and that all the pixels in it will be replaced with colors from that palette. The results aren't usually very attractive. Color dithering, also available in this function, can produce decidedly better results. With color dithering, you can reduce 24-bit files down to eight bits with very little loss of detail or color resolution. If you have PCXLAB color dither a file, it will create a new file for you of the type selected and with "!" as the first char in the name. Thus PICTURE.PCX could be dithered to !ICTURE.PCX, for example. PICTURE.PCX would be left untouched. Gray scale ---------------- This function creates a gray scale destination image from a color source image. The number of bits of color will remain the same, although when grayscaling a 24-bit image, the destination image will be a 8-bit image. If you have PCXLAB dither a file, it will create a new file for you of the type selected and with "#" as the first char in the name. Thus PICTURE.PCX could be dithered to #ICTURE.PCX, for example. PICTURE.PCX would be left untouched.