Pic To ANSI Written on February 1991 by Patrick Evans ------------------------------------------------------------------- After years of seeing keyboard-graphic title pages on almost every bulletin board system advertisement, contest, or anything else worth making a title page for, one would like a new dimension to the primitive graphics programs for making text files. The capabilities of the Amiga and the graphics artists who work with this powerful machine are quite incredible. There just had to be a way to make things more versatile..... And after pondering some ideas, I am proud to provide this program to every and any Amiga user who wants to go beyond keyboard graphics. Put simply, the process of creation is very simple; use your favourite paint program to create a 320x200 size picture, one plane deep. The picture can actually be up to 5 planes, but the last four will be absent in the final product (ie. you will see only the first bit plane image). This picture must (for now) be in IFF format. Popular programs include Deluxe Paint, Fusion Paint, Graphic Craft, and you could even use Grabbit if you wanted. The next step is the conversion process; Get yourself a CLI and unarchive this program (which you must have done by now, right? :>). The following is a simple breakdown of the features; PicToANSI The is your IFF picture (ex. DH1:MYTITLE.PIC). The is the path and file name of the output file (ex. DH1:MYTITLE.TXT). The is an interesting animal; It is the horizontal size in WORDS (16 bit chunks) describing how far from the left-hand side of your picture to convert. To convert your pixels to bytes, divide by 16 (ex. 320/16=20). You may have to experiment with this a bit to get the desired size. Default is 40 if you don't give it a size. The is just the number of vertical lines to take from your bitmap. The default is 180, as windows consume a top and bottom border, but you can push it to 200 (it will draw harmlessly off the bottom of the screen). Here's an example: PicToANSI dh1:MyTitle.pic dh1:MyTitle.txt 20 100 The final product (dh1:MyTitle.txt) when displayed would be 160 pixels across by 100 pixels vertical. PicToANSI dh1:MyTitle.pic dh1:MyTitle.txt The final product defaults to a 320x180 display! Nice eh? The output text file can be displayed by typing it (ex. type myout.txt), or by displaying in any ANSI supporting display. Terminal programs WILL NOT support the picture.. you will just see ANSI codes! An exceptional idea is the use of Lharc by Paolo Zibetti, in which if you add a .DISPLAYME to the text file, it will open up a window the same size as your picture and display it when the archive is unlharc'ed. Very handy! You will also notice that even though a full size picture can be almost 33 000 bytes large, it will compress to anywhere from 1 000 bytes to 4 000 bytes in an archive! This is very nice! (some example pictures have been included) It is my hopes that everyone will enjoy this program and make "blocky" text and pictures a thing of the past. Use your talents, and show the world what you can do, now that you have the technology! This program is ShareWare. Copy it, give it to your friends, other systems and your enemies. I ask only that this text file, the program and thier .info files be distributed together, and that if you use this program and find it helpful, PLEASE, make a donation, so that authors like me and many others can make MORE programs like this one! Yes, I know you've heard it all before, but ANY donation would help me! If you send five dollars or more, I will register you, and send you any future updates, and new versions, which will include a much faster displaying time on the output files (the major drawback right now). The following is an address where you can send comments/donations/or any programs you want me to test or anything else! Patrick Evans, Box 785, Nobleton, Ontario, Canada, LOG1N0. This program uses the IFF library version 18.4, written by Christian A. Weber, which is a freely distributable library. Have fun, and happy programming!