Greetings,

   In order to provide you with the capability of using images which you
   may have aquired which are not in IFF or PhotoSynthesis (PS) format with
   PS, the program AscToPS has been provided in the 'c' directory on this
   disk.  It's usage is as follows:

      1> AscToPS input_ascii_file output_ps_format_file

   AscToPS simply converts an image file in the format about to be 
   described into PS format.  Then, if you later wish to convert it to IFF, 
   simply read the PS image into PhotoSynthesis and write it out as IFF. 

   The ASCII format used was chosen to be as simple as possible so that
   it is relatively straight forward to write your own programs to put
   your images into it.  Unfortunately, the cost of such a simple format
   is that it's files are HUGE, and conversion is very SLOW.  Alas, these
   are the breaks.

   Before describing the file format, it's probably best to get AscToPS'
   RESTRICTIONS mentioned and out of the way.  AscToPS expects 320x200
   images of depths in the range (1..8), furthermore if a colormap is
   specified in the file, it must contain exactly 32 values.

   Information contained in the ASCII file format is as follows:
      1) Width & height of image (in this case 320 and 200)
      2) Depth of image (in this case in range 1..8)
      3) Sign of image (0 for unsigned, 1 for twos-complement signed)
      4) Optional 32 colormap values
      5) The pixel values

   In the following description, <cr> represents a newline character
   (the return key on your Amiga keyboard), '_' is the blank space
   character, and <EOF> represents the end of the file.

   A simple unsigned image of size 4x2x1 would look like the following 
   in ASCII format:

WIDTH:4_HEIGHT:2_DEPTH:1_SIGN:0_<cr>
0_1_0_1_<cr>
1_0_0_1_<cr>
<EOF>

   Similarly, if we wanted the above image to also contain a color look-up
   table where all pixels of value 0 are black, and pixels of value 1 are 
   white (the Amiga 12-bit color values are converted to integers) we would
   have:

COLOR:0_4095_0_0_0_0_0_0_0_0_0_0_0_0_0_0_0_0_0_0_0_0_0_0_0_0_0_0_0_0_0_0_<cr>
WIDTH:4_HEIGHT:2_DEPTH:1_SIGN:0_<cr>
0_1_0_1_<cr>
1_0_0_1_<cr>
<EOF>

   Important things to note are that:
      1) There are NO spaces between a ':' and the following integer value
      2) All lines end with a space followed by a newline character
      3) Each row of the image data is on ONE line of the file
      4) Pixel values are seperated by EXACTLY one space
      5) If a colormap is specified, it must contain EXACTLY 32 values

   Alternately, to be compatable with the format of the DUMP command
   PhotoSynthesis uses, the above image can ALSO be like the following:

WIDTH:4_HEIGHT:2_DEPTH:1_SIGN:0<cr><cr>
0_1_0_1_<cr>
1_0_0_1_<cr>
<EOF>

   This format has been chosen to allow for easy transfer between machines
   since it is simply a text file and NOT a binary file.  It is also easy
   to write programs which read and write images into files in this format.

   If you have any questions regarding the ASCII file format described
   herein, please do not hesitate to contact us.

                     Cheers!

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