GIF FILE CROPPER 1.1 __________________________________________________________________ If you like this program, please do one of the following: Go down to your local bookstore and buy a copy of "Coven: A Novel", by Steven William Rimmer, published by Ballantine Books. In Canada, try Coles... they usually have it. Read the book and tell your friends about it if you like it. Send us some comments about the book or a photocopy of the cover and we'll consider you a registered user of this program. Alternately, send us $25.00, the normal user fee for this software. (The book is $3.95 or $5.50 in Canada: considerably cheaper than cash.) Registered users of this software are entitled to phone support, notification of upgrades and good karma. Our address can be found at the end of this file. __________________________________________________________________ Thanks for checking out CROPGIF. This program will allow you to crop fragments from existing GIF files. The fragments will be written to new... smaller... GIF files. Unlike other GIF cropping programs, this one doesn't involve the use of any tricky measurements. It works like the cut and paste functions of a paint program. It requires that a Microsoft compatible mouse driver be present before it will work, as the mouse does all the work. In order to make the program work reasonably fast and in a decent amount of memory, the image you'll get to work with will not be a full colour one. Instead, CROPGIF will show you a dithered monochrome version of your source GIF file. However, the destination file will have the same colours as the source file did. Because the CROPGIF display works with monochrome graphics, it can be used with pretty well any display card. It supports: - CGA (ugh!) - EGA - VGA - Hercules monochrome and, of course, anything which can emulate these modes. It should automatically sense your display card type. Here's how the beast works. Let's assume that you have a GIF file called ANGELA.GIF, from which you wish to crop a fragment to be called FACE.GIF. We'll allow that the fragment will probably contain Angela's face, although the program itself probably won't care. Note that FACE.GIF, the destination file, will be created by CROPGIF. ANGELA.GIF, the source file, will not be modified in any way. Making sure that you have previously loaded your mouse driver... and that, prior to doing so you have indeed remembered to buy a mouse... you would type the following: CROPGIF ANGELA.GIF FACE.GIF In fact, you can leave off the .GIF extensions, as CROPGIF assumes these. You will see a beg notice... please don't merely ignore this... with the program status below it. CROPGIF will begin by loading ANGELA.GIF. It will then proceed to dither ANGELA.GIF, that is, to create a temporary black and white version of it. When this is complete, your screen will pop into graphics mode and you'll see the dithered image. The dithered image probably won't look too great, but don't worry about this. It's only used to help you decide what to crop out, and has no effect on the final image. Move the mouse cursor to the upper left corner of the part of the image you want to crop out. Hold down the left mouse button and drag your mouse until the bounding rectangle encloses everything you want to crop into FACE.GIF. Release the mouse button. If you discover that you've selected the wrong bit of the picture you can click your mouse to erase the bounding rectangle and try again. When you've got the right part of the picture enclosed, hit the End key and your screen will return to text mode. The beg notice will return... once again, please don't ignore this... and you'll see a line at the bottom of your screen informing you that your fragment is being written to FACE.GIF. When this is done, you'll return to the DOS prompt. If you change your mind and decide you don't want to crop a fragment once you're in graphics mode, just hit Esc to return to DOS. Note that if you attempt to crop a fragment in which either dimension is less than eight pixels, CROPGIF will assume you've made a mistake and abort. Also note that the cropped fragment will include everything within the bounding rectangle and the pixels under the lines of the rectangle. OTHER DETAILS _____________ CROPGIF uses a fair bit of memory, especially for large GIF files. It might refuse to function on machines with restricted memory, or on computers which have a lot of resident stuff already loaded. Some of the more voluminous GIF files around might be larger than your screen. This probably won't occur if you use a VGA card... which will show you up to 640 by 480 pixels in monochrome mode... but it could happen on an EGA or Herc system. In this case, you can make the picture scroll around by simply moving the mouse cursor to the edge of your screen. If your computer refuses to go into graphics mode, chances are you have a multimode card which is confusing CROPGIF. In this case, you can manually force the screen mode by adding a third command line argument. For example, this would make CROPGIF use Hercules graphics. CROPGIF ANGELA.GIF FACE.GIF /HER The following are the mode switches which CROPGIF recognizes. /CGA - CGA card /EGA - EGA card /VGA - VGA card in 640 by 480 monochrome mode /HER - Hercules card in 720 by 438 monochrome mode Some low rent Microsoft compatible mice seem to have a problem in some graphics modes, in that their cursors will refuse to move more than about halfway down the screen, flash on and off, vanish and so on. The Agiler mouse, for example, is a problem. This doesnt happen with real Microsoft mice, or with the better compatibles, such as the LogiTech mice. Some versions of the ATI EGA Wonder card refuse to go into the Hercules graphics mode under CROPGIF. The EGA graphics mode works fine. We're looking into this. ROLL YOUR OWN _____________ This is another book plug. If you're interested in writing programs which use graphics, you'll find everything you need to know in "The Book of Bitmapped Graphics", also by Steven William Rimmer. It's published by TAB books, (TAB book 3558) and should be available in August 1990. It features code to pack and unpack MacPaint, IMG, PCX, GIF and TIFF files, as well as chapters on screen drivers, dithering and printing. MORAL DOGMA ___________ If you like this program and find it useful, you are requested to support it either by buying the book mentioned at the top of this file or by sending us $25.00. We'd rather you bought the book. This will entitle you to telephone support, notification of updates and other good things like that. More to the point, though, it'll make you feel good. 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 this program 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: Scoop - MacPaint, GEM/IMG and PC Paintbrush file readers, with Epson FX-80, LaserJet and PostScript printer support. Drives CGA, EGA, VGA and Hercules cards. Source code in Turbo C and Microsoft MASM is included for this program. HP_Slash - Make LaserJet soft fonts smaller by selectively excising those characters you'll never use. Calendar - Slick perpetual calendar that tells you when the equinoxes happen, what day Michaelmas fell on in 1705 and so on. gemCAP - Capture graphics screen in GEM/IMG paint format, suitable for inhalation into Ventura. CPM2DOS - Read CP/M formatted disks on your PC. IMGCUT - Crop GEM/IMG paint files into smaller files. ADDRESS - Memory resident envelope addresser with graphics. VFM - Ventura soft font manager deluxe with a side of fries. Adds new fonts and creates width tables with menu driven simplicity. MCOPY - Copying program which packs as many files as possible onto a floppy, pauses when the current floppy is full and asks for another one. TCAP - A text screen capture program which generates GEM/IMG graphics that look like your text, all ready for inhalation into Ventura. 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, MAC and IMG files. GRAPHIC WORKSHOP - This is the last word in image programs. It converts, prints, views, dithers and halftones MacPaint, GEM/Ventura IMG, PCX, GIF, TIFF and EPS files. It drives CGA, Hercules, EGA, VGA, Paradise 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. If you can't find them in the public domain, they're available from us for $25.00 each, except Graphic Workshop, which is $35.00. REVISION HISTORY ________________ Version 1.1 - Now supports monochrome GIF files. 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...