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1995-04-22
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B/GRAPH
CUSTOM SCREEN DUMPS
B/GRAPH has a very versatile built in printer dump capability that supports
most of the popular graphics printers on the market. Nevertheless, there
are new printers being introduced almost every week, and some of these
may not be compatible with our screen dump routine. Also, some users may
find that they have need for printouts of different sizes, shading or other
parameters.
We have therefore created a BASIC program named PICLOAD. This program
may be freely copied and does not require any other B/GRAPH program to
load it. In fact, you may distribute it to anyone whom you wish to provide
with B/GRAPH Images, who doesn't own the B/GRAPH program and thus would
otherwise be unable to view them.
Simply boot (turn on) your computer with a disk installed that contains
DOS and with the BASIC cartridge installed (on non-XL machines). Now insert
the disk containing PICLOAD and type...
RUN "D:PICLOAD"
You will be presented with a menu containing the following choices.....
Load a B/GRAPH Image.
Display a Standard Image. (Load)
Redisplay a Current Image.
Save a B/GRAPH Image.
Image in Standard Form. (Save)
Exit to BASIC.
To use this program as a means of displaying B/GRAPH Images, use the
L function. As with all B/GRAPH programs, OPTION will always redisplay the main
menu. You may then Redisplay an already loaded Image with the R function.
The main purpose of this program though is to allow you to use custom
or commercial screen dump routines with B/GRAPH Images. This may be done
in several ways. The first is, if the special printer dump program is in
machine language (such as The APX Screen Dump Utility), you can first load
it, do the appropriate Pokes as detailed in the instructions, for scaling
and setting other parameters, then just RUN"D:PICLOAD". The printer
dump would then be executed with whatever command is specified (CTRL-P
in the case of the APX program).
Many printer dump utilities though, such as COLOR PRINT from Datasoft,
by Courtney Godin, first require that the screen Image that you wish to
print out be in a standard compatable form. Regular B/GRAPH Images are
not in such form and therefore can not be properly loaded and printed out.
The reason for this is that when we designed our Imaging routine we decided
that it was important that all of the screen colors be set before the Image
was displayed. Most other programs first save the screen data and THEN
the color information. The end result is the same but we find having the
colors set first to be more elegant.
The solution then is simple, Load a B/GRAPH Image and then use the Image
function to save it back to disk in Standard form. You can now boot your
favourite printer dump program and the file saved with the function can
be loaded normally.
Finally we also provide in PICLOAD.BAS the D and S functions so that you
can take any Standard Graphics 8 Image file and convert it into B/GRAPH
compatable form, possably so that you can use our Custom Labeling module,
or to mix that Image with a B/GRAPH Slide Show sequence.
One final note: the program Graphics Master, from Datasoft, by Courtney
Godin is a superior program that we have found very useful in enhancing
B/GRAPH Images. To use this program, Load a B/GRAPH Image, Image it in Standard
form; use Graphics Master; Save from Graphics Master; Display with PICLOAD
then use the Save command to resave back in B/GRAPH Image form. A bit
of work, but worthwhile.