NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #18/NN_1992_18.iso/spool/comp/graphics/8767

Text File | 1992-08-12 | 5.3 KB | 130 lines

Newsgroups: comp.graphics
Path: sparky!uunet!well!moon!pixar!ec
From: [e-mail] (Ed Catmull)
Subject: SIGGRAPH '92 proceedings on a CD
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Organization: Pixar -- Point Richmond, California
Date: Wed, 12 Aug 1992 15:36:00 GMT
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Conference attendees who registered for papers and panels at SIGGRAPH
'92 each received a CD with the proceedings of the conference on it.
This note is written to help people get information off the disk.

We made 5000 copies of the CD and all were distributed at the
conference.  There are no plans to make any more copies, nor is there
any money to do so.

The disk should be mounted as a 9660 CD.  The viewers only work for
Sun, Dec, Windows, and DG.  However, there is hope for others.  Young
Minds, Inc. is writing viewers for other workstations and for the Mac,
and will make these viewers available to anyone who requests one.

Young Minds has also fixed some problems in the viewers for DEC, DGI,
and Windows, and will have the Mac viewer ready in about two weeks.
Call them at:
    Young Minds, Incorporated
    1910 Orange Tree Lane
    Suite 300
    Redlands, CA 92374
    [phone]
    [phone] fax

So far, the disk has been successfully mounted on several workstations
and on Windows.  All problems we have seen with mounting the disk have
been local mounting software problems.  If you have a problem, consult
your local mount CD guru.

All of the tiff files described below are on the CD.  I hope that
someone will write a viewer for the other platforms, and I will give
here some information to help people decode the disk.

The black and white page images were all scanned in at Xerox and are on
the CD at three different resolutions: 120, 150, and 300 dpi.  Each
page, then, has three tiff files associated with it, one for each
resolution.

The color images are stored in both 8 bit and 24 bit tiff files.  Most
of the color images were sent electronically by the authors and were
not scanned in, thus you are getting the "originals."  Those pictures
that were not sent by the authors were scanned in with a color scanner
at Xerox.  Incidentally, the pictures and text are copyrighted, so one
shouldn't abuse the easy access to them.

The directories at the top level include a directory for each supported
host along with a viewer and a startup program.

The important data directories are:
page - contains all bw tiff images of pages in subdirectories called
    120, 150, and 300
figure - contains all color tiff images.
siggraph - contains ascii versions of each paper and figure captions.
sgtext_i - contains various lists and indexes

There is a numbering scheme used to refer to the papers.  Jim Clarks'
paper is paper number one and they are numbered sequentially as they
appear in the proceedings.  The last paper then is 45, however the
panel abstracts start at number 46 and again continue in order.

An eight digit number is used.  i.e. 10070000.  The first digit is 1
for all papers.  The next three digits are the paper number (007 in
this case, which refers to seventh paper by Schroeder).  This number is
used as a directory name for that file.  Within the file, there are
several file names, i.e. 10070069.085.  the 0069 is the page number
that the figure appears on.  The first two digits of the extension (08
in this case) are the figure number.  Unfortunately, the figure number
is the count of the figures within the paper, and not necessarily the
authors figure number.  So if the author named the figures 1a, 1b, 1c,
they will be named on the CD as 1, 2, and 3.  The last digit is either
a 1, 3, or 5.  The 1 means that is a 1 bit image.  For most of the
color images, a file with this as the last digit will be empty.  A
trailing 3 means an 8-bit image, and a 5 means 24 bit.


Note that we have both bit-map images of the pages and ascii versions.
The ascii version is frequently not quite complete because we couldn't
capture the formulas.  It was included to help people build indexes or
build other kinds of viewers.

The sgtext_i directory contains the index for doing word searches.  I
do not know the format of the files.  I suspect that one could figure
it out or use some other software to create another index.  Of course
its the index that makes the CD useful, otherwise, just read the book.

------ NeXT -----

The next directory contains our first multimedia paper.  There was
a minor screw up however, which results in the program not being able
to be run directly off the disk.  Instead, it must be copied onto
the hard disk and renamed.  This isn't all bad because the performance
for running off the hard disk is much better.

The files to be renamed are: (all under the next directory)
        FROM                       TO
medview/app/medview           MediaView
(this file must then be made executable by chmod +x MediaView)
full/fat.mvw                  fast.mdvw
lite/lite.mvw                  lite.mdvw
split/fast1.mvw                fas1.mdvw
split/fast2.mvw                fast2.mdvw

The file next/readme.rtf explains all of the above terminology.



-------------

You should be able to figure out how everything is put together
by examination and by looking at the paper copy of the proceedings.
If anyone would like to attempt a viewer for some platform, then
please let me know.

- thanks

Ed Catmull
SIGGRAPH '92 papers chair