CompuServe Thread

Eric: You should pick up two other packages for working with your graphics. AdPro (or even TAD, for that matter) has an excellent scaling tool in addition to all of its other goodies (like color to greyscale, dithering patterns and on and on) ProDraw has a utility called TRACE which will turn your bitmaps into structured clips that can then be imported into ProDraw and saved as EPS images… bye bye jaggies. Anytime you change the size of a bitmap from within PageStream, you're going to get unpredictable results… moire patterns & jaggies, etc. Scale the image outside of PageStream to the size you need and then for dot matrix output, appply a halftone screen (if it's a bitmap greyscale) of something like 63 LPI. It takes some experimenting but you can get outstanding results. BTW, softLogic is due out, RSN, with a structured drawing program that is supposed to also have a TRACE type utility in it.

Eric: You should pick up two other packages for working with your graphics. AdPro (or even TAD, for that matter) has an excellent scaling tool in addition to all of its other goodies (like color to greyscale, dithering patterns and on and on) ProDraw has a utility called TRACE which will turn your bitmaps into structured clips that can then be imported into ProDraw and saved as EPS images… bye bye jaggies. Anytime you change the size of a bitmap from within PageStream, you're going to get unpredictable results… moire patterns & jaggies, etc. Scale the image outside of PageStream to the size you need and then for dot matrix output, appply a halftone screen (if it's a bitmap greyscale) of something like 63 LPI. It takes some experimenting but you can get outstanding results. BTW, softLogic is due out, RSN, with a structured drawing program that is supposed to also have a TRACE type utility in it. Hope this helps.. – Whapping from the North Coast Michael

I import iff files all the time and don't have a problem. The paint program that I use is Express Paint though and I suspect that the fact that Express Paint uses a 900K virtual page is the difference. A full screen image from DPaint would probably only amount to roughly a 9 square inch surface on a laser printer output. If you expand that to be a full page size in PGS then I would think it would be very blocky. If DPaintIII will work with "superbitmaps" you might still have a chance. You need something close to 2400 by 3200 pixels for a full page image. An Amiga message processed by Whap!, bill

Craig, I am not SL tech support. But I may be able to help. Preparing a bitmapped graphic for printing within PgS or any other DTP program requires a little extra planning to obtain the best results. There are really two different cases that require two different strategies. First B&W line art. The ideal for line art is to have one pixel in your graphic for every pixel your printer will place on the paper. Now, for a 300dpi printer that's alot of pixels! A high rez (640 x 400) interlace image created in Dpaint will print out at a little over 2" wide by 1 1/3" high at 300dpi. The key here is to create really BIG graphics. When I scan at 300dpi I routinely produce images that are thousands of pixels wide by thousands of pixels high. Whether is is scanned or created by hand, work so that you have 300 pixels (for a 300dpi printer) on the screen for every inch that is to be printed. The second case is color or greyscale images. The default screen (<- printing term, not monitor screen) for 300 dpi printers used by PgS uses a block of 4 printer pixels by 4 printer pixels to represent one image pixel. This gives 17 levels of grey. Here the ideal would be 75 pixels (300/4) on the screen for every inch to be printed – which happens to be close to the dpi of a high rez interlace screen! Now, how to get your image into PgS? PageStream has the little known feature of letting you specify the size you wish the imported image to be in dpi (image dot per inch). When you import a graphic a requestor pops up. One of the text fields is labeled "As:" and has either window or object in it. Place the curser at the beginning of the field and type "dpi=300,300" (no quotes) to import your 300 dpi line art, or "dpi=75,75" for grey scale images. The words "object" or "window" will be push aside, but that's OK. When the graphics curser appears click down (not click and drag) and your image will imported at the specified resolution. Of course you can experiment with any resolution you [ MORE ]

[ continuation ] would like. In practice I usually only use the dpi=300,300 for importing line art. I usually just click and drag ( holding down the shift key to maintain the aspect ratio) greyscale images to get them to the size I want. -Paul-