@database viewing @wordwrap @node MAIN " Viewing files from disk" @toc "grecall:helptext/contents/main" You can view files (images) from disk in several ways, depending on the type of file and the viewer utilities you prefer. The miniature images often provide you with sufficient information, combined with the text entry, but if it's a question of details then you need to be able to view the original image. For IFF files and opcode 5,6 or 8 anims the public domain utilities like VT ©, PPSHOW © or VIEW © offer exceptional speed and versatility. You may use the viewer of your preference by selecting the `View utility' item from the `DISPLAY' menu. The viewer can also be switched on or off using the requester which appears. When ADPro is running and the viewer is off the file information will be sent to ADPro which will then display the image if possible. Anims are not sent to ADPro, only to the viewer. The @{"`Palette remap'" link "palette"} item, under the `DISPLAY' menu, affects the way the miniatures are presented. When NOT checkmarked, the images palette is used when processing. If this item IS checkmarked, the palette used for the miniature is the GRpalette and remapping is used. PRESS THE RIGHT MOUSE BUTTON, WITH THE POINTER OVER A MINIATURE, and the viewing method of your choice will be invoked. (The right mouse button will also play an image sequence if one was created with VLab.) To SELECT a miniature, and display its entry in the main panel, click once on it with the LEFT mouse button, or `view' the file first with the right mouse button. Also, by double-clicking on a file displayed in the graphicRECALL file requester either a viewer or ADPro will be activated. Files will only be sent to ADPro if the viewer is switched `OFF'. By selecting a text file reader such as MuchMore instead of an image viewer you can also double-click on and read text files. If `AUDIO' is selected in the `FILE-TYPE' menu, double-clicking on a sound or MOD file in the requester will play the file. @endnode @node "viewscreen" " The graphic RECALL Viewscreen" @toc "grecall:helptext/contents/main" graphicRECALL PROVIDES TWO WAYS OF VIEWING MINIATURE IMAGES CREATED WITH A DATABASE; ON A CUSTOM SCREEN (VIEWSCREEN), OR ON THE WORKBENCH SCREEN. THE COLORS OF MINIATURES CREATED ON THE WORKBENCH WILL ALWAYS BE MAPPED TO THE WORKBENCH COLORS. MINIATURES CREATED USING A `VIEWSCREEN' WILL USE OTHER PALETTE INFORMATION, AND WILL NOT DISPLAY IN THEIR CORRECT COLORS WHEN VIEWED ON THE WORKBENCH. For a brief viewscreen demonstration click here: @{" Viewscreen demo. " rx "grecall:grrexx/viewdemo.gRrx"} Up to sixteen miniatures may be displayed together on a viewscreen. Up to 49 miniatures may be displayed on a large Workbench screen. THE REST OF THIS CHAPTER DEALS WITH MINIATURES CREATED ON A VIEWSCREEN, FOR DETAILS ON THE WORKBENCH-MODE SEE: @{" WORKBENCH-ONLY VERSION " link "grecall:helptext/WB/main"} * The size and resolution of the miniature images created is determined by the Viewscreen resolution. This is set by making your selection from the list in the `Viewscreen »' menu item under the `DISPLAY' menu, BEFORE creating the miniatures! The palette used for miniatures is determined by setting the @{"`Palette remap'" link "grecall:helptext/viewing/palette"} item, under `DISPLAY'. * * SWITCHING OFF AUTO SCREEN SLIDING/SCROLLING: As of writing, a number of third party 24 Bit graphics boards do not support sliding or scrolling screens. When software is run on them which attempts to display multiple screens with vertical displacement, serious conflicts can result. To avoid conflicts of this nature, graphicRECALL provides a menu item which allows you to switch off the automatic sliding of its screens. Under the `DISPLAY' menu is the `Sliding screen' item, which can be toggled on or off. The setting is saved and used as the default on program start-up. With screen slide toggled off, the viewscreen will always come to the front when `VIEW' or F4 are pressed. Double-clicking on the viewscreen or pressing F4 again, will bring the main screen back to the front. OPENING AND CLOSING THE VIEWSCREEN: The screen is opened when a miniature image is available and either `VIEW' is clicked on, or the F4 key is pressed. Once the viewscreen is open, F4 toggles between it and the main screen. If a search is successful the miniature will also be displayed. The first miniature is always displayed at the top left of the viewscreen. @{" Moving miniatures on the viewscreen " link "moving"} The viewscreen can be closed using one of two `invisible' buttons. The first button is across the entire width of the screen at the very top. The second is along the entire LEFT-hand edge of the viewscreen. Double-click anywhere on the viewscreen, (or press F4), to either bring it to the front, or send it behind the main screen. Also, along the RIGHT-hand edge of the viewscreen is a button, which acts in a similar way, and sends the viewscreen to the back. VIEWSCREEN RESOLUTIONS: On non-AGA AMIGAs there are three screen resolutions available for displaying miniature images: 320*200 with 32 colors. 320*400 with 32 colors. (9 miniatures. Three rows, each with THREE miniatures.) 640*400 with 16 colors (SEE NOTE AT END OF CHAPTER) (16 miniatures. Four rows, each with FOUR miniatures.) AGA AMIGAs allow an additional choice of five higher resolutions: 640*400 with either 32, 64, 128 or 256 colors. (16 miniatures. Four rows, each with FOUR miniatures.) 640*400 with 256 colors. (Larger miniatures, nice for presentations.) (9 miniatures. Three rows, each with THREE miniatures.) RESOLUTIONS AND FILE SIZE: * It is very important to realize the disadvantages as well as the advantages of the various resolutions! * A low resolution 32 color miniature will have a file size of roughly 3.5K to 5.5K. The same image, but created in high resolution 640*400 32 colors, may be between 6.5K and 10K. A hi-res 256 color miniature will often exceed 30K ! The choice of viewscreen depends on how much detail you require in the miniature images, but also on the size of the databases you anticipate making. The ECS modes use automatic palette switching. The 640*400 256 color miniatures are one ninth screen size and provide very high detail. AGA modes use palette remapping. The 640*400 32 color miniatures are one sixteenth screen size, but still provide enough detail for most purposes. A database with 1000 entries, each with a hi-res 256 color miniature, could take up over 30 megabytes of disk space! The same database, but using 640*400 32 color miniatures, would only require roughly 8 megabytes of disk space. Please experiment with the resolutions and images before committing yourself to a particular format. graphic RECALL is intended for creating databases with visual references. The images that really matter are the ones you are trying to keep track of, the originals. ANIMATION: A not-so-obvious feature of the viewscreen is the ability to animate any sequence of miniatures being displayed. Arrange them in the desired order and then select them by holding down the left shift key and click on the images with the left mouse button. The same can be done with VLab sequences, linking multiple sequences to form a mini movie. To play the animation press the right AMIGA key and the space bar together, to stop it press the keys again. The animation will appear in the centre of the viewscreen and all other miniatures will be temporarily blacked-out. The miniatures will be restored when you stop the animation using the space bar. The playback speed of a sequence or animation can be altered using the `-' and `+' keys on the numerical keypad. @{" FLUSHING THE VIEWSCREEN MEMORY " link "grecall:helptext/contents/memory"} DISPLAYING FILE NAMES WITH MINIATURES: In the `EXTRAS' menu you will find the `File names »' item, which has two sub-items, `Show' and `Hide'. If `Show' is checkmarked, the file names will appear above any miniatures displayed on the viewscreen. If `Hide' is checkmarked the file names will not be shown. GRABBING AND PRINTING THE VIEWSCREEN: The final item in the `DISPLAY' menu is `Grab viewscreen'. The menu short cut for this is right AMIGA and the g key together. The viewscreen is grabbed using the `Screen' Loader in ADPro, so that ADPro must be running for this function to work. If ADPro is not running, a requester will notify you, and provide a button to run ADPro. During the screen grab, the viewscreen will pop to the front for a few moments, then the main screen will return with a requester, which offers the options of printing, saving or canceling. Selecting `PRINT', from the above requester, will utilize the Prefprinter Saver in ADPro. As of writing, graphicRECALL uses whatever settings have previously been made in the ADPro Prefprinter Saver. Depending on your set up, it may be best to simply grab the screen with graphicRECALL, and then print the image in whatever way provides you with the best results. Selecting `SAVE' from the requester calls up a file requester, allowing you to save the grabbed viewscreen as an IFF file. NOTE ON 640*400 16 COLOR VIEWSCREEN: If `Palette remap' is selected for this resolution, a palette of 16 shades of gray is used ! This is intended for displaying miniatures on ECS AMIGAs, of images where detail is more important than color; technical or medical images are often likely candidates. If `Palette remap' is not selected, the images original palette will be computed and reduced by ADPro, producing surprisingly good color images. The only drawback is that the graphicRECALL palette-auto-switching will be used, which means the mouse pointer must be placed over a miniature to view it in its correct colors. See also the section on @{" color palettes " link "palette"}. @endnode @node "moving" " Positioning and moving miniature images on the Viewscreen" @toc "grecall:helptext/contents/main" MOVING MINIATURES ON THE VIEWSCREEN: The most flexible method of moving a miniature from one location on the viewscreen to another is by dragging with the mouse. Click on the miniature you wish to move and, whilst holding down the left mouse button, move the mouse to the new location for the image. The mouse pointer will be replaced with a `cross-hair' brush for as long as the left mouse button is held down. Now simply release the left mouse button and the miniature will be placed in its new location. If a miniature is already occupying the new location it will be swapped with the miniature you have selected. POSITIONING WITH THE F KEYS: When using the low-res or the hi-res 9*256 color viewscreens, the F6, F7, F8 and F9 keys allow you to place a miniature in the top left, top centre, top right or center-left positions directly. With the other four 640*400 AGA viewscreens, sixteen miniatures are viewable in four rows of four miniatures each, but the sequence of F keys remains the same. No-matter where the miniature is located on the viewscreen, clicking on it once with the left mouse button will display the full text entry on the main screen. * The palette of the selected miniature is applied to the entire viewscreen so that other miniatures will temporarily appear in false colors. This way maximum color fidelity is assured for each individual miniature when selected, rather than having a locked palette of only limited color range. * VIEWSCREEN IMAGE `SCROLL': If you wish to fill the screen with miniatures from consecutive database entries, switch `Capslock' on, and press either the 6 or 4 keys on the numerical keypad ONCE. The main screen will be sent behind the viewscreen and one full screen of miniatures will be displayed. The 6 key displays from top left to bottom right, and forwards through the database, the 4 key from bottom right to top left and backwards through the database. Pressing the 6 or 4 keys again will display the next or the previous 9 or sixteen miniatures. This is the fastest way to fill the viewscreen with miniatures, and is of most use when the database is sorted in such a way that entries representing similar or closely related files are grouped together. The main screen can be brought back to the front by double-clicking with the left mouse button anywhere on the viewscreen. A double-click on the viewscreen will also bring it to the front, if it is behind the main screen. (A @{"list" link "grecall:helptext/lists/lists"} of entries can also be viewed in a similar way, using the Right and Left ARROW keys, but the `crawl' will always be in one direction, from top left to bottom right. The Right arrow key scrolls UP in the list, and the Left key scrolls DOWN in the list.) LOCKING THE ORDER OF MINIATURES ON THE VIEWSCREEN: You can arrange the miniatures on the viewscreen in any order and effectively save that order by simply pressing the ASTERISK key on the numerical keypad. This will set the `LI' field of the miniature's database entry to reflect that order. (This field defaults to the maximum value of 100 if nothing has previously been set.) The top left miniature on the viewscreeen is allocated the number 1, the miniature to the right, the number 2, and so on. After you press the asterisk key the viewscreen will pop to the front as the location of the miniatures is processed. To actually save the set order, the database must be saved before any further changes are made. As of writing, only one viewscreen full of miniatures can saved this way for any given database. If you wish to change the order once set, or use a different set of miniatures you must first reset the `LI' fields by pressing the `Ctrl' and `r' keys together. (Control + r ). This resets the `LI' fields in the ENTIRE database ! The `LI' button at the top of the sort buttons will re-sort the database according to the `LI' field's contents, thereby allowing you to restore the set order, even after sorting the database by one of the other sort criteria. The above is only possible if a list is NOT open, and the multi-DB mode is NOT active. Click here for more information on @{"sorting a database" link "grecall:helptext/contents/sorting"} @endnode @node "palette" " Activating/deactivating palette remapping." @toc "grecall:helptext/contents/main" The `Palette remap' item, under the `DISPLAY' menu, affects the way a miniature's palette is computed, when processing image files. When `Palette remap' is selected, and checkmarked, a default palette is used to remap the colors for the miniature. If not selected, the images original palette will be used to compute the palette for the miniature. PALETTE REMAPPING MUST BE SELECTED BEFORE PROCESSING IMAGE FILES, IT HAS NO EFFECT ONCE THE MINIATURES HAVE BEEN CREATED. The graphicRECALL viewscreen utilizes automatic palette switching, so that the palette used for display at any one time, is always the palette stored with the miniature over which the mouse pointer is currently positioned. The palette switching ensures maximum color fidelity, even when using miniatures with 16 colors. However, it also means that the colors of any other miniatures on the viewscreen will be temporarily falsified, if they were NOT created with the `Palette remap' option switched on. Therefore, two very similar miniatures may be difficult to compare as you can only see one palette at a time. It's a matter of preference; if you have a series of images which you wish to compare using the miniatures on the vewscreen, it may be annoying to have the palette switched whenever the mouse is moved. Processing the images with the remap option switched on, will avoid this, at the expense of some color fidelity. When processing images that contain a tight range of colors, such as close-ups of a sunset, the default palette may not contain enough different hues of the main colors in the image, in this case bright yellow to deep red. The resulting miniature would look relatively `blocky', with large areas of one color, instead of the subtle range of colors in the original image. The effect is going to be most pronounced when using viewscreen resolutions of limited color depth. The miniatures created for the 128 and 256 color AGA viewscreens, can usually be made with palette remapping switched on, as the default palette will often contain a broad enough range of colors for most miniature representations. You can mix remapped and unmapped miniatures on the same viewscreen; as the mouse is moved from one miniature to another, the palette will only change if the miniature the mouse pointer is moved to was created with palette remapping switched off. The `Palette remap' setting is automatically saved, whenever the menu item is selected, so that the last setting will be the default one, when graphicRECALL is re-started. `DCTV' and 'Palette remap' are mutually exclusive! `DCTV' will be automatically switched off when `Palette remap' is selected, and vice versa. (See DCTV section.) * If you would like to experiment with palettes of your own, you can make back-up copies of the palette files in the GRECALL:BRUSHES drawer, and then alter any of the palettes by loading them into ADPro and using the ADPro palette editor. graphicRECALL looks for these palette files whenever `Palette remap' is selected and check-marked. The back-up files should be renamed, and the modified files must have the names of the original files. If you accidentally lose or damage an original palette file, you can always copy the originals from the `graphicRECALL.1' disk. Although we have put considerable time and effort into optimizing the palette files for graphicRECALL, it may be that you work with many images which have similar and unusual color ranges in them. If the re-mapping is not producing the kind of results you would like, it may be worth doing some experimentation. Should you need some help with modifying a particular palette, please do not hesitate to call our technical support line. * @endnode