GRAFCAT 2.1 Graphics cataloging program deluxe: Requires a laser printer... LaserJet Plus compatible or a Postcript printer... and some graphics to catalog. Works with any mixture of MacPaint, GEM/IMG, PC Paintbrush PCX, TIFF, Microsoft Paint MSP, Deluxe Paint IFF/LBM, EPS files with previews and GIF files. __________________________________________________________________ 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. If your local bookstore doesn't have Coven, ask them to order it for you. Alternately, send us $35.00, 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. Please tell us the version number of your copy of Grafcat when you register... we'll send you the most recent one immediately if it's newer than yours. Our address can be found at the end of this file. __________________________________________________________________ New features as of version 2.1 ______________________________ - Largely rewrote the beast using the file handling code from Graphic Workshop. It now works with virtually all the popular PC based image files, handles all 256 colour files correctly and so on. What it Does and Why ____________________ We have seven hundred and sixteen image files in a subdirectory called \GEMART. They occupy almost twenty megabytes. We use 'em a lot... they're all public domain graphics and we can pop them into desktop publishing documents when we want to dress up a page quickly or just throw in a nude for effect. You know, it's damn hard to remember what three hundred and seventy five picture files contain. In addition, I think that late at night after we've gone away the little mothers breed in there. In order to help figure out what all those file names are, we wrote GRAFCAT. It creates a visual catalog of picture files which makes it easy to check out a whole collection of pictures and find the one you want. The pictures can be any mixture of image files you like. The program prints sixteen files to a page. Said pages come out of a laser printer... you'll need one of these or GRAFCAT won't be much use. The pictures are printed at three hundred dots to the inch, so they come out readable but pretty small... which is how so many make it onto a page. The printer must be connected to LPT1 on your computer. You'll need at least a megabyte of memory in the printer. GRAFCAT will print pictures up to 576 by 720 pixels in their entirety. This is the size of a MacPaint file. Confronted with files bigger than this, it will print the middle part of the image. GRAFCAT can print a mixture of image types at once. Thus, if you just tell it to print *.*, it will sort out the file types it knows how to handle and print them, ignoring anything else. It assumes that the file extensions reflect the file types properly. The default extensions are as follows. - MAC: MacPaint files - IMG: GEM/IMG files - PCX: PC Paintbrush files - GIF: GIF files - TIF: TIFF files - EPS: EPS files - WPG: WordPerfect graphic files - MSP: Microsoft Windows Paint files. - LBM: IFF files (Deluxe Paint and others) You can change any of them if you like. How to use GRAFCAT __________________ Well, it's pretty heavy stuff. Type GRAFCAT followed by any wild card file specification that points to some image files of the types discussed. Examples are: GRAFCAT D:\*.PCX GRAFCAT \GEMART\*.IMG GRAFCAT *.MAC GRAFCAT *.* GRAFCAT A*.GIF GRAFCAT @LISTFILE Make sure there's lots of paper in your printer and that you have some time to kill. GRAFCAT takes a while, especially on slower laser printers. If you want to print selected pages of a large collection of images, you can use GRAFCAT's command line options, to wit, /Sn for the page to start printing with /En for the page to stop printing after To print pages 10, 11 and 12 of a catalog of images, you would do this: GRAFCAT *.IMG /S10 /E12 If you want to work out which images these would be, you can do so as follows. First off, use a sorted directory utility to look at the image file names. GRAFCAT prints them in alphabetical order. Page 10 would start 160 files from the beginning of the directory, as there are sixteen images to a page. If you create a text file with the names of all the files you want cataloged, to you can make GRAFCAT print those files by passing the name of the text file as the file parameter with an "@" in front of it, for example: GRAFCAT @LISTFILE Where LISTFILE is the name of a plain text file with one file name per line. LISTFILE must be in the subdirectory where the files you want to print reside. It's all so simple a politician could use it... probably. Printer Selection GRAFCAT defaults to printing to a PostScript printer, but you can use it with a LaserJet printer if that's what you have. If you have a printer which can do both emulations, be advised that LaserJet printing is a great deal faster than PostScript printing is... at least so far as GrafCat is concerned. You can set the default printer GrafCat will print to with the installer, as discussed below. You can override the default printer by using the command line switches: /P - PostScript printer /H - Hewlett Packard LaserJet Plus compatible printer Note that if you print PostScript data to a LaserJet you'll get many pages of fairly meaningless PostScript code and if you print LaserJet data to a PostScript printer you'll probably hang it, necessitating a reboot. Installing GrafCat __________________ The GCTINSTL program allows you to configure GrafCat if you don't like the defaults as they stand. To use it, GrafCat must be named GRAFCAT.EXE and reside in the same subdirectory as GCTINSTL. Run GCTINSTL and a screen should appear with the configurable options. The things you might want to change are the default printer and perhaps the file name extensions. Hit Esc to abort the changes or F10 to save them. You can run GCTINSTL as often as you like. 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. It also includes the source code for a simplified version of this program. 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 $35.00. 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 GrafCat if you like it. Oh yes, and if 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 and EPS files. It drives CGA, Hercules, EGA, VGA, Paradise, Video 7, Trident 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. VFM - Ventura soft font manager deluxe with a side of fries. Adds new fonts and creates width tables with menu driven simplicity. CROPGIF - allows you to crop smaller fragments out of 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. If you can't find them in the public domain, they're available from us for $35.00 each. 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...