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DESKTOP PAINT 256 1.4 __________________________________________________________________ If you like this program, please send us $35.00. US and overseas users should make this payable is US dollars. Canadian users please add GST and PST where applicable. A disk of extra fonts and tools to convert fonts from GEM/Ventura VGA, Windows 3 FNT and Macintosh FONT and NFNT files is available to registered users for $10.00 if you order it when you register, or $15.00 afterwards. Registered users of this software are entitled to phone support, notification of upgrades and good karma. When you register Desktop Paint 256 we'll send you a copy of the latest version. Please tell us the version number of your copy of Desktop Paint 256 when you register. Our address can be found at the end of this file. Please tell us the exact name you wish to have Desktop Paint 256 registered under. Please give Desktop Paint 256 to your friends, but if you do, give them the entire Desktop Paint 256 package as you received it, unconfigured. NOTE: If you'd like to register Desktop Paint 256 by phone using Visa or Mastercard, you can call (705) 458-1562 during regular business hours. Your update will be shipped immediately. NOTE: Australian users of Graphic Workshop should contact our Australian distributor, Budgetware, P.O. Box 496 Newtown NSW 2042. Phone (02) 519-4233 FAX (02) 516-4236. NOTE: German users of Desktop Paint 256 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. __________________________________________________________________ Welcome to Desktop Paint 256... WHAT IT IS __________ Desktop Paint 256 is a full colour bitmapped paint program written to use the extended resolution of super VGA cards. It features a mouse driven user interface, full colour manipulation and drawing tools and a choice of popular image file formats. Desktop Paint 256 supports the following image file formats: - PCX (As used by ZSoft's PC Paintbrush) - GIF (As used by CompuServe) - IFF/LBM (As used by Electronic Arts' Deluxe Paint) - TIFF Note that Desktop Paint 256 will work with image files having between two and 256 colours. However, if you're working with two colour... monochrome... graphics, you'll find that our monochrome Desktop Paint package is better for handling them. It's faster, requires much less memory and has tools designed for monochrome applications. Desktop Paint 256 is a paint program, rather than a drawing program. It does not support GEM, Corel Draw, Designer, DXF or EPS files. Unlike many other paint programs, Desktop Paint 256 features complete EMS and XMS support. It will handle enormous images... pictures which unpack into several megabytes... if you have sufficient expanded or extended memory in your system. Note that you must have at least 300 kilobytes of EMS or XMS to edit a 640 by 480 pixel picture under Desktop Paint 256. HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS _____________________ You can theoretically run Desktop Paint 256 on an 8088 based system, although it will be very slow and cumbersome. We recommend at least an 80286 system. An 80386 system will improve its performance considerably. Desktop Paint 256 requires a Microsoft compatible mouse and driver and one of the following super VGA display adapters: - Paradise card (256K or more on board) - ATI VGA Wonder card (256K or 512K on board) - Headland Video7 or 1024i card (256K or 512K on board) - Tseng Labs 3000 series based cards (256K or more on board) - Trident 8900 series based cards (256K or more on board) Cards which are genuinely compatible with these cards are also suitable... for example, there are numerous cards which use the Western Digital chip set and are thus effectively Paradise cards. The OEM VGA cards supplied with Dell computers behave as Paradise cards, for example. There are quite a few Tseng Labs based super VGA cards, all of which should work with Desktop Paint 256 as long as they use a 3000 series compatible chip set. The Trident drivers have been tested with Trident cards using the 8900 series chip set. It's possible they won't work with older series chips. Note that having more than 512K of memory on your super VGA card won't affect Desktop Paint 256. Desktop Paint 256 does not run in the "standard" 320 by 200 pixel VGA mode. If you have access to several machines, you might want to note that the Paradise card driver will allow Desktop Paint 256 to run slightly faster than will the drivers for the other super VGA cards it supports, due to the internal workings of Paradise cards. You should have a full 640 kilobytes of main memory to run Desktop Paint 256... you can get by with as little as 384 kilobytes if you will be working exclusively with very small images, but it's not recommended. For practical purposes, you will probably want to have some extra memory in your system... either expanded (EMS) memory or extended (XMS) memory. In order to work on 640 by 480 pixel images... a commonly found size... a minimum of 300 kilobytes of available extra will usually be required to use all the features of Desktop Paint 256. You may be able to get by with no extra if you'll be working with smaller files. See the discussion about memory later in this file. If you wish to use Desktop Paint 256 with graphics files in formats other than those it currently supports, we recommend that you get a copy of Graphic Workshop, which will convert among virtually all of the popular image file formats. See the end of this file for more information about Graphic Workshop. CONFIGURING DESKTOP PAINT 256 _____________________________ Desktop Paint 256 will not run until it has been configured. Among other things, configuring it supplies it with a driver that will suit your particular display card. You must know your display card type before you configure Desktop Paint 256... the configuration program cannot figure it out for you. Here are the names of the drivers supplied with Desktop Paint and the display cards they correspond to: PARA400.DRV - Paradise Plus (256K on board) PARA480.DRV - Paradise Professional (512K on board) PARD400.DRV - Paradise D series with 256K on board PARD480.DRV - Paradise D series with 512K on board PARD600.DRV - Paradise D series with 512K on board PARD768.DRV - Paradise D series with 1024K on board ATI400.DRV - ATI VGA Wonder card (256K on board) ATI480.DRV - ATI VGA Wonder card (512K on board) HEAD400.DRV - Headland Video 7 (256K on board) HEAD480.DRV - Headland Video 7 or 1024i (512K on board) TSNG400.DRV - Tseng Labs with 256K on board TSNG480.DRV - Tseng Labs with 512K or more on board TSNG600.DRV - Tseng labs with 512K or more on board TSNG768.DRV - Tseng labs with 1024K on board TRDNT400.DRV - Trident cards with 256K on board TRDNT480.DRV - Trident cards with 512K or more on board The numbers in the file names tell you the screen dimensions supported by the driver in question: ????400 - 640 by 400 pixels ????480 - 640 by 480 pixels ????600 - 800 by 600 pixels ????768 - 1024 by 768 pixels Note that the 1024 by 768 pixel drivers are pretty hard to use at the moment, as the screen fonts get pretty tiny at this resolution. The next release of the software will use larger fonts in the higher resolution drivers. You should place the following files in the directory you plan to keep Desktop Paint 256 in. - DTP256.EXE The program - DTP.RES Fonts and other resources - DTPCINST.EXE The installer - EXAMPLE.PCX A picture file - *.DRV The appropriate driver Note: The DTP.RES file provided with Desktop Paint 256 is identical to the one used by monochrome Desktop Paint, and the two programs can share the same DTP.RES file. Those resources specific to one will be ignored by the other. You can install both programs in the same directory and save a few hundred kilobytes of disk space if you like by giving them a common copy of DTP.RES. To configure Desktop Paint 256, run DTPCINST.EXE. It must reside in the same directory as DTP256.EXE. You will see a screen like this one: Desktop Paint 256 installer version 1.4 RUN TIME DEFAULTS Default file type: PCX PCX file extension: PCX GIF file extension: GIF IFF/LBM file extension: LBM TIFF file extension: TIF Extra memory: DOS EMS/XMS overhead (kilobytes): 256 Default printer: PostScript 100 DPI Default New width: 640 Default New depth: 480 Drive map: ABCDEFGH Path to DTP.RES: Screen driver path: DRIVR256.DRV Default smudge value: 3 TIFF colour: COLOUR TIFF grey expansion: NO Registered name: [ Unregistered ] Registration code: 00000 You can change the values in any field by cursoring down to it and hitting Enter. Here's a quick overview of what the fields in the installer do. Default file type: This line sets the default file type which Desktop Paint 256 will initially use to open and save files with. Keep hitting Enter until the one you want appears. PCX file extension: GIF file extension: IFF/LBM file extension: TIFF file extension: These lines allow you to change the file extensions with which Desktop Paint 256 will look for each of its image file types. You can usually leave these alone. Extra memory: Set this line to tell Desktop Paint 256 whether you have EMS or XMS memory available. Make sure you set this to EMS or XMS if you have extra and want to work with large pictures. Make sure you choose the appropriate type of extra memory for your system or Desktop Paint 256 may crash. If you're running Desktop Paint under Windows 3, use XMS. EMS/XMS overhead (kilobytes): This line tells Desktop Paint 256 how much free DOS memory to leave if it has EMS or XMS available. If this value is set to 256... two hundred and fifty-six kilobytes... any picture which would leave less than 256 kilobytes of free DOS memory were it to be loaded would instead be loaded into extra memory. If EMS or XMS are not enabled, this value is ignored. You can probably leave this value alone initially. Increase this number if you start running into memory problems in Desktop Paint 256 when you're editing large files and you have EMS or XMS. Default printer: This line sets the default printer. Do not set it to "Dot matrix" unless you will have a PDRV resource loaded into DTP.RES, as described below. Default New width: This line sets the default width value which appears in the New box in Desktop Paint 256. This setting can be overridden from within Desktop Paint 256. Default New depth: This line sets the default depth value which appears in the New box in Desktop Paint 256. This setting can be overridden from within Desktop Paint 256. Drive map: This is a string which should contain all the letters of the legal hard and floppy drives on your system. It should have no spaces or extraneous characters. This string is not checked for validity. Change this to suit your system Path to DTP.RES: This should be the complete DOS path to the directory where DTP.RES will be located on your system. It should include the drive letter and a trailing backslash. For example, C:\PAINT\ This string is not checked for validity. If you get it wrong, DTP.RES will not be loaded when Desktop Paint 256 is run, and you will have no text fonts. With this string set correctly, you can run Desktop Paint 256 from anywhere on your hard drive and still have it find its resource file. Change this to suit your system. Screen driver path: This must be a complete path to the screen driver for your display card. For example, if you will be using a Paradise Plus card... the driver for which is PARA256.DRV... and the driver will be in the directory \DTP on drive C, you would fill in C:\DTP\PARA256.DRV in this field. This field must be correctly filled in for Desktop Paint 256 to boot up. Its initial contents are a dummy driver name. Smudge value: This affects the amount of diffusion the smudge function will impose on a selected image fragment. It can range from 1 through 6, where 1 will produce the least amount of smudging. This setting can be overridden from within Desktop Paint 256. TIFF colour: This setting determines whether TIFF files written to disk from Desktop Paint 256 will be colour or grey scale pictures. This setting can be overridden from within Desktop Paint 256. TIFF grey expansion: This setting determines whether TIFF files written to disk from within Desktop Paint 256 will have linear grey scales or expanded ones. See the section on TIFF files for more information about how to use this function. This setting can be overridden from within Desktop Paint 256. Registration name: Registration number: When you register Desktop Paint 256, we'll send you back a number. Enter your name in the registration name field exactly as it was when you registered Desktop Paint 256 and your registration number in the next field. Upper and lower case matter. This will disable the beg notice at the end of Desktop Paint 256. If your name contains characters with accents or other non-English characters, please read ACCENT.DOC for instructions for entering them into the Registration name field. RUNNING DESKTOP PAINT 256 _________________________ Once you have configured Desktop Paint 256 with DTPCINST.EXE, type DTP256. When the program has loaded you'll see a grey screen with a menu bar at the top. Click on one of the menu items to pull down a menu. Drag the mouse pointer to the menu item you wish to select and release it. The function you've chosen will pop up. (Chances are you already know how to work a menu bar.) Note that on mice with more than one button, Desktop Paint 256 expects you to use the left one for clicking in controls and such. To open a file, you must first tell Desktop Paint 256 which of its file types you want to deal with using the File Type box of the File menu. It comes set up to default to PCX files... you might have changed this when you configured it. Select the File Type item from the File menu and set the file type you wish to use. Next, select the Open item and select the file you want to Open. If you want to start from scratch, select the New item instead. The New function comes set up to default to creating 640 by 480 pixel files. You can type in different values if you like, and these default values can be changed with the installer program. A work area will open on your screen. If the picture you want to work on is too big to fit on the screen all at once, scroll bars will appear to allow you to move the work area over your picture. If you wish to open a different picture, you must first select Close from the file menu to close your current picture and then select New or Open. You can return to DOS at any time by selecting Quit from the File menu. You can run Desktop Paint 256 and load a file into it with one command from the DOS prompt. For example, if you wanted to edit a file called PICTURE.GIF, you could do this C>DTP PICTURE.GIF This would run Desktop Paint 256 and load the picture as if it had been loaded with the Open command from the File menu. Desktop Paint 256's dialog boxes will respond to the keyboard. If you hit the Enter key when a dialog box is visible, the box will respond as if you had clicked in the "Ok" box. If you hit Esc it will respond as if you had clicked in the "Cancel" box, assuming there is one. A WORD ABOUT MEMORY AND DESKTOP PAINT 256 _________________________________________ Desktop Paint 256 is forever calling for and releasing blocks of memory. Each time it opens a window, displays a picture or an icon, responds to a mouse click and so on, it calls for at least a bit of memory. If you hear a beep when you ask Desktop Paint 256 to do something, this usually indicates that it could not find enough memory to do what you asked it. This may be because you're running it in restricted memory, or because most of your memory is occupied by a picture. If possible, you should not run Desktop Paint 256 from a shell program, or shelled out of another application, as this will reduce the amount of memory it has available for its own use. In very cramped memory situations, you can free up a bit of memory by unselecting an area of your drawing if one is currently selected. Selecting things will be dealt with later in the discussion of the Selector tool. Note that if you attempt to quit Desktop Paint 256 and there isn't enough memory to open the window that asks "Do you want to quit?", Desktop Paint 256 will assume that you do and return you immediately to DOS. As such, you can't actually get trapped in it. A WORD ABOUT PICTURE MEMORY ___________________________ A 256 colour picture is stored in Desktop Paint 256 with one byte of memory for each pixel of the picture. Thus, you can figure out how much memory is needed for basic storage by simply multiplying the dimensions together. A 640 by 480 pixel picture needs 307,200 bytes of memory, or 300 kilobytes. On a system with absolutely no resident programs or device drivers loaded... a rare thing... you can just load such a picture into Desktop Paint 256 using nothing but DOS memory. There will, however, be no memory left over to run the menus or do anything with the drawing tools. A 640 by 400 line picture fares a bit better... you can actually work with one to a limited extent using nothing but DOS memory. Desktop Paint is primarily intended for use as a full colour paint program. It will edit pictures having fewer than 256 colours, but with a slight memory catch. Having fewer colours does not allow a picture to take up any less memory under Desktop Paint 256. Thus, a sixteen colour picture is still stored with one byte per pixel, and a 16 colour picture will occupy exactly the same amount of memory as a 256 colour picture of the same dimensions. The same is true for a monochrome picture. A monochrome picture of 576 by 720 pixels... the dimensions of a MacPaint file... will occupy about 50 kilobytes under the monochrome version of Desktop Paint and about 400 kilobytes under Desktop Paint 256. As was mentioned above, Desktop Paint 256 will handle monochrome pictures if you insist, but it's not the ideal tool for it. A WORD ABOUT COLOUR ___________________ A VGA card in one of its 256 colour modes can display 256 unique colours drawn from a palette of a quarter of a million. This presents a program like Desktop Paint 256 with a bit of a problem. Assuming that there are 256 colours in the picture you want Desktop Paint 256 to work with... that is, that all the available screen colours are spoken for... Desktop Paint 256 would be left with nothing to draw its menus, icons and other paraphernalia in. Desktop Paint 256 gets around this problem by finding five "system" colours in the palette of each picture it loads. The ideal system colours are the ones it uses when there's no file in memory, that is, white, black and three levels of grey. When a picture has been loaded, it finds the colours in the picture's 256 colour palette which are as close as possible to its ideal system colours and uses these. Thus, for example, "white" might actually be bright green if bright green happens to be the lightest colour in the picture you want to work with. This could be a problem if you were to load in a picture of a sand dune or a tar pit, for example, wherein all 256 colours were nearly identical. In practice, this rarely happens. Unlike some commercial paint programs, Desktop Paint 256 will not arbitrarily remap a few colours in your picture to create suitable colours for its menus. Nor will it assume that the extreme ends of the palette are also the the extremes of the palette's colours. You'll never wind up with black text on a black screen unless all the colours in your picture's palette are black. Here's another word about colour. A VGA card only has six bit colour registers. Colour image files define colours with eight bit values. This means that, for example, a VGA card can only display 64 unique levels of red, while an image file can specify 256 levels. When a VGA card gets hold of an image file, then, each group of four consecutive eight bit levels of red would be mapped to one six bit level for the VGA card. This means that you can theoretically draw with more colour resolution than your screen can show you. This can be important in working with grey scale TIFF files. A VGA card can only display 64 levels of grey, whereas a grey scale TIFF file of the type Desktop Paint 256 can work with can hold 256 levels. You will find, for example, that a gradient which runs from black to white will have noticeable bands on your screen, but that the bands will not be particularly noticeable when you print the file. Here's yet another word about colour. Each pixel of an image is actually a number corresponding to one of the 256 available colours. If you define two different colours as being the same shade of bright blue, they will look identical but they'll be two different colours to Desktop Paint 256. Finally, if you work with sixteen-colour pictures under Desktop Paint 256 and subsequently view them on a sixteen-colour display, you may find a marked difference between the colours you've worked with under Desktop Paint 256 and those on your sixteen- colour screen. Desktop Paint 256 allows you to control colour to a greater resolution than a sixteen-colour display can handle. A WORD ABOUT TIFF FILES _______________________ The TIFF standard was originally devised jointly by Aldus and Microsoft in order to infuriate all the programmers in the world to such an extent that they'd take up stone carving or Morris dancing, leaving Aldus and Microsoft with little competition. While this strategy cannot be said to have been wholly successful, TIFF files remain vexing little beasts none the less. There are nine million or so ways to create a TIFF file, with more being devised every day. No two applications which generate them do so in the same way. As such, few applications exist which can claim to be able to successfully unpack all TIFF files. Desktop Paint 256 is not one of these. It can only work with a very small percentage of TIFF files. Specifically, it will import TIFF files having one or eight bits per pixel, the latter in either in full colour or as grey scale files. It will handle TIFF files which have been packed using no compression or using run length compression, but not ones which employ some of the more exotic compression methods, such as Huffman encoding, CCITT FAX compression, LZW compression and so on. The principal use of the TIFF file handling of Desktop Paint 256 is to allow it to serve as a graphic front end for such programs as Ventura Publisher, PageMaker and Corel Draw. The TIFF files it creates are suitable for use in these applications. No promises are extended for other applications which purport to read TIFF files. Likewise, if your scanner's TIFF files won't read into Desktop Paint... or files from other sources which export in the TIFF format... you've probably encountered some of the nasties. You might want to get a copy of our Graphic Workshop package if you'll be working with TIFF files. It can read a wider variety of them, and it will help you analyze TIFF files to see how they're structured. You can have Desktop Paint 256 write TIFF files either in colour or as grey scale files. Colour files will preserve colour information in the same way the other colour formats Desktop Paint 256 support do. Grey scale TIFF files are specifically intended to be used by applications which import pictures for printing as halftones on a black and white PostScript laser printer. If you import a colour GIF file into Desktop Paint 256, for example, and save it as a TIFF file with the grey scale option enabled, all the colours will be replaced with appropriate shades of grey. Grey scale files usually look a bit flat when they're printed. For this reason, there's a second TIFF option which will allow you to "expand" the TIFF grey scale to make it more contrasty when you save a TIFF file to disk. You should enable TIFF grey scale expansion if the TIFF files you're saving will be imported into an application which will ultimately print them. You should disable this option if you're saving grey scale TIFF files which you will later load back into Desktop Paint 256 for further modification. Note that the setting of the TIFF grey scale option will be ignored if Desktop Paint 256 will be writing colour TIFF files rather than grey scale ones. It will also be ignored when you're working with monochrome... one bit per pixel... TIFF files. You can set up these two TIFF options through DTPCINSTL, described above. You can override them with the appropriate command line switches, as discussed later on, and with the Override box in the File menu from within Desktop Paint 256. WHAT ALL THE SCREEN BITS ARE CALLED ___________________________________ This is a twenty second overview of what all the screen objects will be referred to as. You can probably skip most of this. The white line at the top of the screen is the menu bar. The box at the left is the toolbox. The place where your picture appears is the work space. The box at the bottom with all the coloured tiles in it is the palette. The box to the left of the palette is the colour selector. This is the bit you probably shouldn't skip. The left side of the palette selector is the current foreground colour. The right side is the current background colour. The foreground colour is manipulated with the left mouse button. The background colour is manipulated with the right mouse button. THE MENUS _________ The easiest way to go through the functions of Desktop Paint 256 is to look at its menus and toolbox. Here's a quick overview of the menus, starting from the left edge of the screen. Note that many of the menu items have keyboard equivalents. This is indicated by a diamond and a letter, the diamond representing the Alt key. For example, if you wish to select the Open function, you may do so by either selecting it from the file menu or by holding down the Alt key and hitting O. Some menu items may be printed in grey type, rather than in black. These are disabled. Items are disabled because it's inappropriate to use them at the moment. For example, you would not be able to select the Print item until there was a picture in Desktop Paint 256 to print. The Desk Menu ------------- Clipboard: This function lets you see the most recent fragment cut or copied from a picture. The Clipboard is a holding area for bits of images. In the Clipboard window, the current contents of the Clipboard will be displayed padded out with black if they're too small to fill the window or cropped if they're too big. This is only how the image is displayed in the window, and will not affect it when it's pasted into your picture. You can import and export small image files into and out of the Clipboard in the current file format, as set by the File Type item of the File menu. The dimensions of imported files must be fairly modest... certainly no larger than those of your current drawing area. The Clipboard will complain if attempt to import a picture which it considers to be too large. You can change the file type to import pictures in a file type other than that of the picture you're working on. For example, to import a small PCX file into the Clipboard while you're working on a larger TIFF file, load the TIFF file, select File Type from the File menu and select PCX. Select Clipboard from the Desk menu and click on Import. Select the PCX file you wish to import. Once you've closed the Clipboard window, you can use the Paste item of the Edit menu to paste the imported picture into your drawing. We'll discuss cutting and pasting in greater detail in the Edit menu section. If you import a fragment into the clipboard which originally came from a picture other than the one you're currently working on, there will be a bit of a palette problem. Your main picture will have a 256 colour palette and your imported fragment will have a different 256 colour palette. As a VGA card can't deal with two palettes at once, each colour in the imported picture will be replaced with the colour which most closely matches it from the palette of your main picture. This colour "remapping" may or may not have a noticeable effect on the colours of your imported fragments, depending upon how much alike the colour palette of your main picture and fragments imported into the clipboard are. Screen Save: If you select Screen Save, a file dialog box will pop up allowing you to capture the current screen into an image file of the current type. The capture will not include the dialog box or the mouse cursor. You can also capture the screen to a file by hitting Alt 1. This allows you to capture the screen when a menu is visible, a window is open and so on. About: The About box will tell you what version of Desktop Paint 256 you're using, as well as how much memory you have free at the moment. Note that is only conventional DOS memory... it does not include any EMS or XMS you may have on hand. It also displays the driver name. File Menu --------- New: The New function allows you to create a blank drawing of any size... at least, of any size you have memory for. The smallest dimension a drawing can have is thirty-two pixels on a size. The largest is 32,767 pixels. Note that a drawing 32,767 pixels square would require well over a thousand megabytes of EMS or XMS to contain it. You cannot create a new drawing which occupies more memory than you have. Open: The Open function will load a drawing from your disk into Desktop Paint. You must have the file type set appropriately before you select Open. The same minimum and maximum file sizes apply to Open as they do to New. You can't open a file if there's one currently visible in Desktop Paint 256... you must close your existing file first. Close: The Close function disposes of an existing drawing and prepares Desktop Paint 256 to have a different drawing opened or created. Save: The Save function will save your current drawing back to the disk under the current file name. If you have started your drawing from scratch with New, you must first select Save As to assign it a file name. Save As: The Save As function allows you to save your drawing under a new file name. The file type will be the current file type, as set by the File Type function. Print: The Print function will print your current drawing to a laser or dot matrix printer. Desktop Paint 256 supports PostScript and LaserJet compatible laser printers in four resolutions. Note that even though your printer may have three hundred dot per inch resolution, you can still print to it at a lower resolution. Selecting, for example, one hundred dot per inch resolution will cause the picture to be printed larger. Pictures printed to PostScript printers will be output as screen halftones. Other devices... LaserJets and dot matrix printers... will print your pictures as dithers. If you use a colour print driver such as PAINTJET.RES, your pictures will be printed in dithered colour. Desktop Paint 256 prints to dot matrix and ink jet printers through a special driver resource called a PDRV, which lives in DTP.RES. There is a PDRV installed in the distribution version of Desktop Paint 256 for an Epson FX-80, which is emulated by most dot matrix printers. This option will be visible as the ninth printer in the print box list. If you don't need dot matrix support you can remove the PDRV from DTP.RES to save a bit of disk space, memory and to shorten the time it takes Desktop Paint 256 to boot up. Managing resources is discussed later in this file. If there is no PDRV available, the ninth printer will be unavailable. If you have a Hewlett-Packard PaintJet or Kodak Diconix Color 4 printer, you can replace the Epson print driver with PAINTJET.RES, included with this package, and print in colour. The colours will be dithered down to what a four colour printer can manage, but the results look pretty reasonable. You can select the number of copies to be printed. The number can range from 1 through 99. Note that this value only affects output to laser printers. Printing to an external printer driver will only print one copy at a time no matter how the Copies value is set. Overrides: This item will allow you to fine tune some of the default values for Desktop Paint. Anything you change in the Overrides box will stay changed for the rest of your current session in Desktop Paint 256. The New values affect the default size for images created by the New menu item. The smudge value affects the degree of fuzziness caused by the Smudge command of the Edit menu, to be discussed shortly. The posterize level setting determines how the posterize function will work, to be discussed shortly. The TIFF options have been discussed. Get Info: This will allow you to look at any image file of the currently selected file type and see how big it is, how much memory it will require to edit, how many colours it has and so on. File Type: The File Type function will allow you select the file format for use in subsequent file operations. The current choices are PCX, GIF, IFF/LBM and TIFF. Note that you can load a file from one format, change the file type and then save it in another. The current file type setting affects Save, Save As, Open, Get Info and the import and export functions of the Clipboard. Quit: The Quit function returns you to DOS. Edit Menu --------- Copy: The Copy function is only active when an area of your drawing has been selected using the Select tool... the scissors. When selected, the Copy function will copy the contents of the selected area into the Clipboard. Cut: The Cut function behaves like Copy except that it will fill the selected area with white and unselect it. Paste: The Paste tool is only active if there's something in the Clipboard. It will paste the current contents of the Clipboard into the upper left corner of the drawing window. It will be selected, and you can move it to where you want it to be. If you hold down the control key while pasting, the pasted fragment will be transparent. Clear: The Clear function behaves like the Cut function except that it does not copy the selected area to the Clipboard. It just fills it with white and unselects it. Invert: The Invert function is only active when an area of your drawing has been selected. It inverts all the pixels in the selected area to their approximate negative colour values. Note that in choosing a negative colour value, Desktop Paint must find the ideal colour and then locate a palette colour which more or less matches it. As such, inverting an area twice will return the area to more or less normal colours, but you'll usually notice some colour shift. Flip horizontal: The Flip Horizontal function is only active when an area of your drawing has been selected. It flips the selected area right to left. Flip Vertical: The Flip Vertical function is only active when an area of your drawing has been selected. It flips the selected area top to bottom. Rotate (90, 180 and 270): These three functions are only active when an area of your drawing has been selected. They rotate the selected area by the specified amounts. Scaling The Scaling function is only active when an area of your drawing has been selected. It scales the selected portion of your drawing to your choice of sizes... a dialog box will pop up asking for a scaling factor. The scale factor can range from .1 (ten percent of your original) to 10 (one thousand percent of your original) assuming that the scaled fragment will actually fit in the drawing window. You can specify different horizontal and vertical scaling factors by selecting the "Anamorphic" box. If this box is not selected, clicking in the most recently changed value will copy it to the other value. Stain: The Stain function is only active when an area of your drawing has been selected. It causes all the pixels in the selected area which are of the foreground colour to be replaced by the background colour. Smudge: The Smudge function is only active when an area of your drawing has been selected. It will blur the image within the selected area. You can control the degree of blurring by adjusting the Smudge value in the Overrides box, or permanently through DTPCINST.EXE. Soften: The soften function is only active when an area of your drawing has been selected. It will soften the image within the selected area. The softening is fairly subtle. It's also fairly processor intensive, and softening areas of moderate size will take a while. As such, a wait window will open while the soften function is working to indicate how much longer the process will require. Softening is very useful for reducing the effect of moire patterns which occur when screened pictures are scanned. Posterize: The posterize function is only active when an area of your drawing has been selected. It will map all the colours in the selected area to a fixed number of colour steps, as set by the posterize level value. This can be set to a default value when you configure Desktop Paint 256 and adjusted with the Overrides item of the File menu. Sharpen: The sharpen function is only active when an area of your drawing has been selected. It will sharpen the image within the selected area. Sharpening is also fairly processor intensive, and sharpening areas of moderate size will take a while. As such, a wait window will open while the sharpen function is working to indicate how much longer the process will require. Gadgets Menu ------------ Gradient: The Gradient function allows you set the characteristics of the gradients which are drawn by the Gradient tool, to be described shortly. Set Line: The Set Line function selects the current drawing line width and colour. The current choice for line width are one, two or three pixels. You can also select no thickness, which is useful if you want to draw a filled rectangle, ellipse or gradient with no line around it. Set Fill: The Set Fill function lets you decide whether rectangles and ellipses will be filled with the foreground or background colour. Grid: The Grid function allows you to turn the magnetic grid on and off, and to set its spacing. When the grid is switched on, the mouse will snap to the nearest grid point when you draw things, allowing you to accurately position lines, rectangles, ellipses and so on. Palette: The Palette function will allow you to change the whole colour palette of your picture, that is, to make all the colours more red, or brighter, for example. You can change the colour values by up to half their range in either direction. This function is intended to allow you to fine tune the colour balance of a picture. Note that if you really crank things up or down, you can lighten or darken the palette so much as to make it impossible to see the controls. In this case, hit Esc to return things to normal. The Reset button will restore the palette to its state before you started playing with the sliders. Note that once you click on Ok in the Palette box, you can't undo the changes you've made to the palette. Text Menu --------- Font Size: The Font Size function selects the size in which the current font will be drawn. It will also tell you what the current font is, just in case you forget. When Desktop Paint 256 first boots, the current font is the first one in the Font menu and the current size is the smallest size that font is available in. Left, Centre and Right: These functions set the direction that text will be drawn. Font Menu --------- The Font menu will only appear if DTP.RES is present and if there are some fonts in it. Desktop Paint 256 comes with three fonts initially, these being Swiss, Dutch and Courier. Swiss corresponds to ITC Helvetica and Dutch corresponds to Times Roman. Courier looks like typewriter type. Various sizes of Swiss and Dutch are available. Selecting a font from the Font menu will make it the current text font when you next use the text tool. A check mark will appear next to the name of the current font in the font menu. THE TOOLBOX ___________ The toolbox will appear at the left side of your screen when you have opened or created a drawing file. The currently active tool will be inverted. You can select a new tool by clicking on it. Selector (the scissors): The Selector tool allows you to select areas of your drawing. Selected areas can be transformed using the tools in the Edit menu. You can move a selected area by placing the mouse cursor in it, holding down the left button and dragging it to its new location. If you hold down the left shift key while you select an area, the original image below the selected area will be left behind, and a copy made to appear in the selected box. If you do not, the image below the selected area will be filled with white. You can cause a selected area to become a permanent part of your drawing by clicking outside it. The selection box will go away. This is called "deselecting". If you paste an image fragment into your drawing, it will appear in the upper left corner of your drawing window and behave as if it had been selected with the left shift key held down. Airbrush (ozone friendly spray paint): The Airbrush tool will allow you to spray random areas of colour pixels in your drawing window. The longer you leave the mouse in one place and held down, the blacker the area will become. As with all tools, selecting the airbrush tool and painting with the left mouse button will paint in the foreground colour. The right button will paint in the background colour. Text (the big T tool): The Text tool will allow you to draw text in your picture using the currently selected font, font size and direction. The text will emanate from wherever you click in the drawing window. A vertical text cursor will indicate where the next character will appear. If you hit Enter when you are typing text, the cursor will move down a line. You cannot draw text if part of the text would appear outside the drawing window. Text is always drawn in the foreground or background colour, depending upon which mouse button you use. Line: The Line tool allows you to draw lines. The thickness of the lines is set by the Set Line function in the Gadgets menu. The colour will be determined by the mouse button you use to draw with. As there is no sense in drawing a line with no thickness, the line thickness will default to a thin line if you have it set to no thickness. You can constrain lines to be perfectly horizontal, vertical or diagonal by holding down the left shift, right shift or alt key respectively. Eraser (the pencil end): The Eraser tool allows you to erase areas of your drawing. Eased areas will be filled with the current background colour. The left mouse button will generate a small eraser. The right mouse button will generate a bigger eraser. Rectangle: Filled rectangle: The Rectangle tool draws rectangles... seems pretty obvious, doesn't it... Rectangles will be drawn in the current line thickness in the colour selected by the mouse button you choose. They will be hollow if you select the hollow rectangle tool and filled with the current fill colour... as set in the Set Fill item of the Gadgets menu... if you select the filled rectangle tool. You can constrain rectangles to be perfect squares by holding down the Alt key. Fill (paint roller): The Fill tool performs a "flood" or "bucket" fill using the current foreground or background colour based on the mouse button you use to set it off. The fill tool likes to fill closed areas. If the area you attempt to fill has a hole in its periphery, the paint will leak out and fill the area outside it, too. The Undo tool is very useful when you're using the Fill tool. Ellipse: Filled ellipse: The ellipse tool draws ellipses. In fact, due to a limitation in the current ellipse algorithm, you'll see a rectangle as you draw the ellipse and an ellipse only after you release the mouse button. Ellipses will be drawn in the current line thickness in the colour selected by the mouse button you choose. They will be hollow if you select the hollow ellipse tool and filled with the current fill colour... as set in the Set Fill item of the Gadgets menu... if you select the filled ellipse tool. You can constrain ellipses to be perfect circles by holding down the Alt key. Undo: The Undo tool will undo the last thing you did and then select whatever tool you were using before you selected undo. Changes to your drawing cease to be undo-able after you save the drawing, scroll the drawing or draw something else. A note about undo: The undo works by copying the appropriate part of the picture you're working on from its buffer onto the screen when you click on the undo tool, thus wiping out the changes you want to undo. Obviously, this will wipe out everything since the last time the buffer was updated from the screen. In a monochrome paint program, such as the monochrome version of Desktop Paint, it's practical to update the buffer just prior to each drawing operation. As such, you can undo single operations. Because of the amount of data involved in a full colour picture, this isn't practical under Desktop Paint 256. As such, the buffer is updated when you click on a scroll bar, when you change tools and when you save a picture to disk. If you draw three rectangles in succession and then click on the undo tool, all three rectangles will vanish. To make your current drawing non-undoable, click on the a scroll bar or temporarily change tools. Brush (the paintbrush): The Brush tool allows you to draw free form lines in the line colour corresponding to the mouse button you're using and in the currently selected line width. Zoom (the magnifying glass): The Zoom tool allows you to zoom in on a section of your drawing and make pixel by pixel changes to it. When the zoom window is open, clicking in the enlarged area with the left mouse button will draw in the current foreground colour. The right button will draw in the background colour. You can select new colours by clicking in the palette. You can also select colours from the zoom box image. If you hold down the left shift key while the zoom box is open and click on a pixel in the enlarged image fragment, the current foreground colour will be set to the colour of that pixel. The same thing goes for the right mouse button and the background colour. The Zoom tool allows you to wash colours. If you hold down the Alt key and draw in the enlarged image fragment, the pixel under the mouse will change to a colour which is tinted with the current foreground or background colour, depending upon which mouse button you hold. This process is can be a bit unpredictable, as the colour chosen for the wash must come from the existing colour palette, wich may not have very good matches for some intermediate colours. You'll probably want to experiment with this a bit. You can Undo zoomed changes if you don't like them after you've closed the Zoom box. Gradient: The Gradient tool draws rectangles which will be filled with a graduated grey tone, the details of which are defined in the Set Gradient function of the Gadgets menu. The area will be surrounded by a line as defined in the Set Line function of the Gadgets menu. You can have a no thickness line if you like. Gradients are useful for giving areas a three dimensional appearance. Gradients run from the current foreground colour to the current background colour. Using the Gradient box in the Gadgets menu, you can decide whether gradients should run vertically or horizontally. The Gradients box also allows you to select how gradients will be formed. Colour mapping creates a hypothetical gradient which makes a smooth transition between the two extreme colours, and then selects colours from the current palette which best match the ones it has mathematically arrived at. Dithering creates a gradient by dithering between the two extreme colours. In most cases, colour mapping will not work well in colour pictures as there will not be a sufficient selection of colours to create an attractive gradient. Colour mapping looks great in grey scale pictures. If you're working with a colour image, select the dithering option for gradients. Eyedropper tool: The eyedropper tool allows you to change the curret foreground and background drawing colours by picking colours from within your picture. If you select the eyedropper tool and click in the work space with the left mouse button, the foreground colour will change to the colour of the pixel under the mouse cursor. If you click with the right button, the background colour will change. Blank tool: This tool doesn't do anything. It's a space filler because at the moment there are an odd number of tools implemented in Desktop Paint 256, and the toolbox looked funny with one icon missing. USING THE PALETTE AND THE COLOUR SELECTOR _________________________________________ All the available colours are displayed at the bottom of your screen in the palette box. Clicking on one with the left mouse button will make it the current foreground colour. Clicking on one with the right mouse button will make it the current background colour. If you click in one of the colour tiles of the colour selector... the box to the left of the palette... a window will appear to allow you to change the percentages of red, green and blue light which make up the colour in question. As has been discussed, there are five colours which Desktop Paint 256 selects for use as "system" colours, colours which it uses to draw its windows, buttons and so forth. You can edit these if you happen to select one, but the colour adjustment window will warn you that you're meddling with a system colour. The Test button will tell you how many times a specific colour has been used in your picture. It's not uncommon to find scanned images with unused colours, usually at the ends of their palettes. If you have to create a custom colour... to add some text to a picture, for example... you should try to find an otherwise unused colour. COMMAND LINE SWITCHES _____________________ You can use command line switches when you run Desktop Paint 256 to temporarily adjust the settings which DTPCINST configures. Each command line switch is of the form /XXX, a slash and three letters. Multiple switches should be separated by spaces. These are the current command line switches. /DOS - disable EMS or XMS /EMS - enable EMS /XMS - enable XMS /PCX - default to PCX files /GIF - default to GIF files /IFF - default to IFF/LBM files /TIF - default to TIFF files /RES - disable loading DTP.RES /TCL - Create colour TIFF files /TCG - Create grey TIFF files /TXP - Expand TIFF grey scale /TXN - Do not expand TIFF grey scale FONTS ----- Assuming that you have fonts installed in DTP.RES, the Font menu will appear in Desktop Paint 256 and you'll be able to type text into your pictures. Desktop Paint 256 comes with a basic selection of fonts, and you can add more to it. Fonts are large, and a whole family of fonts can easily cause DTP.RES to swell by a few hundred kilobytes. There is no commercial source of proportional bitmapped fonts for PC applications per se. Instead, Desktop Paint 256 allows you to utilize fonts from other sources. Specifically, you can convert bitmapped fonts from GEM applications such as Ventura Publisher, from Microsoft Windows 3 FNT files and from Macintosh FONT and NFNT resource files. Once converted, these fonts can be added to Desktop Paint 256. If you downloaded Desktop Paint 256 from a bulletin board, you'll probably be able to find a wealth of suitable fonts there too. There are three separate programs to do these conversions, GEM2FONT, MAC2FONT and WIN2FONT respectively. There is also a program called SEEFONT which will allow you to look at samples of the fonts you've converted to see what they're like. The basic Desktop Paint 256 package does not include these tools... it's arguably big enough as it stands. Registered users can have a disk with these programs on it as well as an assortment of additional fonts ready to add to DTP.RES for $10.00 if it's ordered when you register, or for $15.00 afterwards. The font toolkit also includes the source code and instructions to write your own assembly language dot matrix printer driver PDRV resource, should you feel like doing so. MANAGING RESOURCES __________________ You do not have to understand one word of the next section to use Desktop Paint 256. You can skip it with impunity if you like. The DTP.RES file is a list of resources. Resources are unrelated bits of data and code which Desktop Paint 256 might need. These could have been kept as separate files, but keeping them all in DTP.RES makes them easier to manage, requires less space on your hard drive and allows Desktop Paint 256 to get at them more rapidly. Desktop Paint 256 looks at DTP.RES when it first boots up... assuming that it's there at all. If Desktop Paint 256 can't find DTP.RES, it simply doesn't use any of the things it expects to find as resources, such as fonts. All of the resources which might be in DTP.RES are optional. If you don't want to deal with resources or you like Desktop Paint 256 as it is, just skip this section. These are the resource types which Desktop Paint 256 will recognize in DTP.RES. FONT - screen fonts MENU - alternate menus PDRV - dot matrix printer driver CMAP - alternate default colour map (palette) VGAD - a screen driver stored in a resource Some or all of these may be present in DTP.RES, depending on how you want to configure Desktop Paint 256. Using RMOVER ------------ 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. Listing resources: Let's begin with the simplest function of RMOVER, listing the resources in a resource file. DTP.RES is a resource file. To see what was in it, you would do this. RMOVER DTP /L You would see something like the following list for the DTP.RES file which comes with the distribution version of Desktop Paint 256. Resource mover version 1.0 - copyright (c) 1990 Alchemy Mindworks Inc. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Description: Extracted resource 33 resource(s) _____________________ Rsrc 0000 - type:BTMP - number 000000012 - 08004 bytes Rsrc 0001 - type:PDRV - number 000000000 - 00348 bytes Rsrc 0002 - type:FONT - number 000000000 - 02471 bytes Swiss 8pt #2 Rsrc 0003 - type:FONT - number 000000001 - 02971 bytes Swiss 9pt #2 Rsrc 0004 - type:FONT - number 000000002 - 03535 bytes Swiss 10pt #2 Rsrc 0005 - type:FONT - number 000000003 - 04045 bytes Swiss 11pt #2 Rsrc 0006 - type:FONT - number 000000004 - 04559 bytes Swiss 12pt #2 Rsrc 0007 - type:FONT - number 000000005 - 05897 bytes Swiss 14pt #2 Rsrc 0008 - type:FONT - number 000000006 - 07391 bytes Swiss 16pt #2 Rsrc 0009 - type:FONT - number 000000007 - 09077 bytes Swiss 18pt #2 Rsrc 0010 - type:FONT - number 000000008 - 11135 bytes Swiss 20pt #2 Rsrc 0011 - type:FONT - number 000000009 - 13599 bytes Swiss 22pt #2 Rsrc 0012 - type:FONT - number 000000010 - 15575 bytes Swiss 24pt #2 Rsrc 0013 - type:FONT - number 000000011 - 20891 bytes Swiss 28pt #2 Rsrc 0014 - type:FONT - number 000000012 - 30731 bytes Swiss 36pt #2 Rsrc 0015 - type:FONT - number 000000013 - 01875 bytes Dutch 6pt #14 Rsrc 0016 - type:FONT - number 000000014 - 02519 bytes Dutch 8pt #14 Rsrc 0017 - type:FONT - number 000000015 - 03215 bytes Dutch 9pt #14 Rsrc 0018 - type:FONT - number 000000016 - 03425 bytes Dutch 10pt #14 Rsrc 0019 - type:FONT - number 000000017 - 04113 bytes Dutch 11pt #14 Rsrc 0020 - type:FONT - number 000000018 - 04631 bytes Dutch 12pt #14 Rsrc 0021 - type:FONT - number 000000019 - 06023 bytes Dutch 14pt #14 Rsrc 0022 - type:FONT - number 000000020 - 07815 bytes Dutch 16pt #14 Rsrc 0023 - type:FONT - number 000000021 - 09293 bytes Dutch 18pt #14 Rsrc 0024 - type:FONT - number 000000022 - 11665 bytes Dutch 20pt #14 Rsrc 0025 - type:FONT - number 000000023 - 13939 bytes Dutch 22pt #14 Rsrc 0026 - type:FONT - number 000000024 - 16355 bytes Dutch 24pt #14 Rsrc 0027 - type:FONT - number 000000025 - 21885 bytes Dutch 28pt #14 Rsrc 0028 - type:FONT - number 000000026 - 30735 bytes Dutch 36pt #14 Rsrc 0029 - type:FONT - number 000000027 - 01875 bytes Swiss 6pt #2 Rsrc 0030 - type:FONT - number 000000028 - 03839 bytes Courier 12pt #102 Rsrc 0031 - type:FONT - number 000000029 - 09049 bytes Courier 20pt #102 Rsrc 0032 - type:FONT - number 000000030 - 12425 bytes Courier 24pt #102 Deleting resources: This is how you would delete a resource from DTP.RES with RMOVER. Let's delete the PDRV resource. This has resource number zero. RMOVER DTP /D /TPDRV /N0 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 DTP.RES, that is, to copy it from DTP.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 PDRV resource. Note that this will not delete it from DTP.RES. RMOVER DTP /E /TPDRV /N0 /FEPSNFX80.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... EPSNFX80.RES... will be deleted if it exists and a new one created. Adding resources: This is how you would add a resource to DTP.RES. In this example we'll add COLOUR.CMP to DTP.RES. This is an alternate default palette which will be used if you use the New function of the File menu. RMOVER DTP /A /FCOLOUR.CMP 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 DTP.RES. NOTE: RMOVER can quite easily delete resources you might want to keep if you give it erroneous instructions. Keep a backup copy of your resource files while you're working with it. Common Resource Types --------------------- Here's what each of these resources does and how to work with them. Make sure as you work with DTP.RES that you keep a copy of the original DTP.RES file which comes with Desktop Paint 256 so you can start over if you find you've deleted something you might want. The FONT Resources: Each font which will be available in Desktop Paint 256 must have a separate resource. Thus, if you have Dutch in seven sizes, there will be seven FONT resources for Dutch. A complete discussion of fonts is available in FONTS.DOC, which comes with the font toolkit discussed above. Note that Desktop Paint 256 can function without any fonts in DTP.RES at all. If you have no need of the text capabilities in Desktop Paint 256 and you want it to boot up more rapidly, remove all the fonts from DTP.RES. The MENU Resources: You can add MENU resources to DTP.RES to change the names of the menu items in Desktop Paint 256. The AMERTEXT.RES file included with Desktop Paint 256 is an example of such a menu. It replaces the Text menu in Desktop Paint 256 with one in which the spelling of "Centre" is American, that is, "Center". Add AMERTEXT.RES to DTP.RES if you want to make this change. The Desktop Paint 256 package does not come with a resource file editor, which is what you would need to create further custom menus. Registered users of the software can contact us for more information about modifying resources like this if they wish. The CMAP Resource: When you create a new picture with Desktop Paint 256, the default palette has 256 shades of grey. However, if a different default palette is stored in DTP.RES as a CMAP resource, it will be used instead. One comes with Desktop Paint 256 in the file COLOURS.CMP. If you get the font toolkit, you'll find a utility called PCX2CMAP.EXE which will allow you to create your own CMAP resources. The PDRV Resource: If you want to be able to print to a dot matrix or ink jet printer you'll need a PRDV resource in your DTP.RES file. There's one in the default DTP.RES to support the Epson FX-80, which is emulated by most other dot matrix printers. If you want to drive a printer which does not emulate the Epson FX-80, or you wish to use a higher resolution mode of a more sophisticated printer, you must create a new PDRV resource for your printer, delete the existing PRDV resource from DTP.RES and put your PRVR in its place. If you wish to use PAINTJET.RES to drive a PaintJet compatible colour ink jet printer, delete the existing PDRV resource from DTP.RES and add PAINTJET.RES using RMOVER. A discussion of printer drivers and the creation thereof can be found in the Desktop Paint 256 font toolkit, described earlier. The VGAD Resource: Rather than specify a screen driver in DTPCINST, you can add it as a resource to DTP.RES, which will make Desktop Paint 256 boot up a little quicker and leave you with one fewer file to keep track of. In order to convert a DRV file into a resource, you'll need BIN2RES.EXE, which is provided with the font toolkit. COMING IN THE NEXT MAJOR RELEASE OF DESKTOP PAINT 256 _____________________________________________________ If you register Desktop Paint 256 you'll be notified of the next major release of the software. Among the things we're working on are: - An irregular area selector tool - Fill with gradient - Editable brushes - Brush with image fragments - Text with gradients - Text effects - Free rotation - Polygon tool - More colour special effects We are also most interested in suggestions from registered users. ROLL YOUR OWN _____________ This is yet another book plug. If you're interested in writing programs which use graphics, you'll find everything you need to know in "Bitmapped Graphics", also by Steve 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. If you would like to write programs with a graphical user interface, you will find the complete user interface code for a monochrome graphical user interface in The PC GUI Book by Steve Rimmer, published by TAB Windcrest (TAB book 3875). It will be available in October 1991. If you can't find these books locally, you can mail or phone order them from the following bookstore: Christies of Cookstown, P.O. Box 392, Cookstown, Ontario, Canada, L0L 1L0, (705) 458-1562. Please don't call them about the PC GUI book until it's actually available. MORAL DOGMA ___________ If you like this program and find it useful, you are requested to support it by sending us $35.00. This will entitle you to telephone support, notification of updates, a free copy of the latest version of Desktop Paint 256 and other good things like that. More to the point, though, it'll make you feel noble. 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 Desktop Paint 256 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. 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, TGA, BMP and EPS files. It drives CGA, Hercules, EGA, VGA, Paradise, Video 7, Trident, Tseng Labs, Orchid, 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. MONOCHROME 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/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. VFM - Ventura soft font manager deluxe with a side of fries. Adds new fonts and creates width tables with menu driven simplicity. GRAFCAT - Prints a visual catalog of your image files, with sixteen pictures to a page. 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 - 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 Requires a Microsoft compatible mouse. CINEMA - Displays 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... this 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 - 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 - 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. If you can't find them in the public domain, they're available from us for $35.00 each. BUNDLING DESKTOP PAINT 256 __________________________ If you'd like to include Desktop Paint 256 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 Desktop Paint 256 and we don't have to set our leather winged demon of the night on 'em. SOURCE CODE AVAILABILITY ________________________ It isn't. SHAREWARE DISTRIBUTORS ______________________ We are happy to have Desktop Paint 256 distributed by shareware distributors provided you distribute a copy which has come directly from us and that you don't modify the package in any way. We will provide a free master copy of the current version of this software to those distributors which we feel make a reasonable effort to promote the registration of our shareware. Other distributors are welcome to distribute the package if they purchase a registered copy of it. If you wish to request a free master copy of this package for distribution, please send us a copy of your current catalog and a letter requesting a copy on your letterhead. We will not consider requests which are not accompanied by a printed catalog. Sorry... we've been getting deluged with requests. REVISION HISTORY ________________ Version 1.4 - Fixed a bug in the way files with between thirty- two and one hundred and twenty-eight colours were created with the New function. Added drivers for Tseng Labs and Trident cards. Added a box to ask "Do you want to close?". Added colour printing for four colour devices. A driver for the Hewlett-Packard PaintJet and Kodak Diconix Color 4 printers is included. Version 1.3 - Fixed several minor bugs, including one in the Paste function which caused black lines to appear around some pasted fragments. Also improved the GIF decoder. Interlaced monochrome images are now handled correctly. Fixed a bug which allowed pixels outside the picture area to be edited with the zoom function. Version 1.2 - Added extrended (XMS) memory support for Windows users. Added colour washes to the Zoom window. Fixed an inconsistancy in the way the select box works when a picture is saved. Version 1.1 - Added the Sharpen effect, added double clicking to the file selector box. Version 1.0 - Desktop Paint 256 wanders out into the infinite cosmos seeking destiny. 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...