GRAPHICS tool for FreeDOS - GPL by Eric Auer [email protected] 2003 Please go to www.gnu.

org if you have no copy of the GPL license yet. *** INTRODUCTION AND QUICK START GUIDE *** Usage: GRAPH-PS (options) - for laser printers only (PostScript) GRAPHPIN (options) - for dot matrix printers and other ESC/P (Epson) GRAPH-HP (options) - for HP PCL 3 printers I recommend that you copy the file that fits YOUR printer to GRAPHICS.COM for better overview. Run the GRAPH*.COM that fits your printer - It will stay resident in the background until you reboot. You can use the 'shift PrtScr' key while GRAPH... is resident to print hardcopies (screenshots) of your graphical screen contents in all standard CGA, EGA and VGA modes. No support for high resolution modes / VESA / Hercules yet. The output is roughly 7.4 x 9.9 inch (18.8 x 25.1 cm) in size (landscape) and should fit all commonly used types of paper. Make sure that you run only versions that match your type of printer. Otherwise, the print screen key will cause lots of nonsense to be printed: You can abort the printing (not in PostScript) by pressing 'shift print screen' again. In the PostScript versions, this trick will only cause the rest of the printout to stay white, but this will not save you from printing nonsense on non-PostScript printers. Luckily, many 24-pin printers and even Epson ink jet color printers are compatible to Epson. When in doubt, you can always turn off the printer and/or reboot the PC before too much paper is wasted. Accidentally sending PostScript to printers that cannot handle it looks less weird than sending Epson code to other printers (PostScript only uses plain text commands). Possible options: /B - process the CGA background color setting /I - inverse printing (useful if lots of dark areas on screen, to save ink / toner: will print black where screen is white etc.) /R - use random dither instead of ordered dither (not for PostScript) /C - compatibility mode: 120x72 dpi 9 pin (instead of 180x180 dpi 24 pin) in Epson case, HP Laserjet extra compatibility in PostScript case, 150 dpi instead of 300 dpi in HP PCL case. /E - economy mode: only 50% of the density. Done by reducing the distance of every color to white to 50% of the normal value. /2 - use LPT2 (default is to use LPT1) /3 - use LPT3 (you already guessed it) /? - show help screen instead of going resident - you do not need to give any options :-) *** DETAILS ON SUPPORTED PRINTER TYPES *** PostScript version:

GRAPH-PS produces PostScript output for laser printers, assuming that the laser printer can make some sense of 256 gray level images itself. If you press print screen again while print data is generated, the part of the screen that is not already processed will be printed in white. HP PCL version: GRAPH-HP is for 300dpi and 150dpi printing on HP PCL 3 compatible printers, like HP Ink-jets. The 300dpi mode also uses EconoFast and depletion (can be deactivated at compile time). You can select either "random" or "ordered" dither as described below. Output looks somewhat different, however, as "regular pattern avoidance" code is different in HP PCL and Epson modes. Output image size is like in PostScript mode. No color printing or RET (up to 4 intensity levels per color / black channel) is supported currently. Tell me if you want colors! Epson version: GRAPHPIN is for 180dpi and 120x60dpi printing on Epson compatible dot matrix printers. If you do not select the /R option, dithering patterns will be based on a bit-mirrored counter, while the /R option enables "random" dither using a linear congruential pseudo random number generator, using both low and high byte of the random number to print a black pixel with probability equal to the darkness of the corresponding screen pixel. If you do not understand this tech-speak, look at epson.png: The left image is "ordered", the right image is "random". For space reasons, epson.png only shows about 100x100 pixels of an MCGA picture. The full printed screenshots will use - independent of the screen resolution - 1330x1776 black and white pixels (less in 120x72 dpi of course). You can use my pin-read utility for Linux to convert printer data (only 180x180 dpi currently) into images, I provide it in the "extra" subdirectory of the sources. If you press print screen again while printing is in progress, printing will abort at the next available position (a few 100 per screenshot) and some message like "aborted" will be printed to tell you about it. Currently, 120x72 dpi images are 6.2 x 8.2 inch landscape mode, and 180x180 dpi and PostScript images are 7.43 x 9.9 inch landscape mode. This is to make sure that 120x60 dpi (24 pin printers in compatibility mode) still fit the page. Tell me if you want colors. If you do, also tell me how YOUR printer does it (probably ESC/P2 - but what are the details?). Other versions: Please tell me if you need a driver for yet another type of printer! Normally, many printers will be compabible to HP PCL, ESC/P or PostScript. Image quality might not be optimal, but you should get at least SOME image printed. Other dot matrix or Epson ink jet printers: If you have any 9-pin or 24-pin printer, please contact me. The Epson driver is pretty generic, so I should be able to customize it for YOUR printer (for free, as long as you cooperate in finding the right configuration parameters for you). You can expect that 24-pin printers are 180dpi vertical and 60..360dpi horizontal

resolution (use more than 180dpi at your own risk!). 9-pin printers normally have 72dpi vertical and 60..180dpi horizontal resolution (60dpi instead of 72dpi for 24-pin printers in low resolution modes). The acronym dpi stands for dots per inch. An inch is 2.54cm. Other HP PCL printers: You should be able to set things like image density and paper type and draft / high quality mode with some configuration tool that came with your printer. If this is not the case, you can change the string in the source code (hppcl.asm, hppclINIT and hppclINITold), but take care not to mess up things. When in doubt, ask me to change the strings for you. Current settings are "nothing special" for 150 dpi. For 300dpi, I normally compile as "depleted (50%, no gamma correction, up to 20% of the dots are selected for removal by the hardware to avoid ink bleeding), single pass (no shingling), EconoFast (300dpi). If your results do not look okay with that setting, try "nothing special" setting (remove the "%define HPPCL3PLUS" define line and recompile), maybe in combination with using some config tool or front panel settings. Setting the paper type (normal, glossy...) and quality (draft or letter) affects the same settings (letter is 600dpi, glossy paper uses 2 or 4 passes (shingling) to give ink more time to dry...). *** TECHNICAL INFORMATION, LICENSING, GOODIES AND WARNINGS *** To compile: nasm -DPOSTSCRIPT -o graph-ps.com graphics.asm nasm -DEPSON -o graphpin.com graphics.asm nasm -DHPPCL -o graph-hp.com graphics.asm Supported graphics modes: Numbers are horizontal and vertical resolution and colors each: CGA 320x200x4, CGA 640x200x2, EGA 320x200x16 EGA 640x350x16 VGA 640x480x16 MCGA 320x200x256 Tell me if you need other modes. VESA / high resolution may be slow. Hercules might not be auto-detectable, so if I implement it, you may have to give a startup option like /H to GRAPHICS. If you need a way to remove GRAPHICS from RAM without rebooting, please tell me. GPL (GNU Public License) and other licensing issues: You may modify this for your own needs, but may not change the license. You may not use this in closed source projects, that is. Please send any improvements and bug reports to help making this version better, rather than only improving / repairing your local copy. Feel free to mail even for just telling that it works :-). As usual with GPLed software, if it does not work, you cannot blame me at all. However, any bugs are of course unintentionally and GRAPHICS -should- work fine. If you use the PostScript version for a non-PostScript printer, you will get a pile of printed text describing the image. Do not do that.

Even worse, using the Epson version on incompatible printers will print even more confusing gibberish in large amounts. I recommend that you turn off the printer until the next reboot in that case, to avoid piles of paper to be printed. You can abort printing by pressing print screen again, but it may take a while until all the gibberish that is already waiting for being printed is processed. However, most "Epson ESC/P language compatible" 24-pin printers will give useful output (e.g. NEC P2 acts just like Epson). If your 9- or 24-pin printer or Epson color ink printer prints nonsense with my driver, PLEASE contact me to help me adding the right parameters for your printer to the list of possible settings. Printing to a file in DOSEMU: I am using the following DOSEMU configuration: $_printer = "file file" (you need TWO printers because a bug in DOSEMU 1.1 can cause it to send print screen results for TEXT modes to LPT2 rather than LPT1). I am also using the following /etc/printcap entry with LPRng: file printtofile:\ :lp=/tmp/printtofile.ps :sd=/usr/spool/lpd/file:\ :la@:mx#0:sh:\ :lf=/usr/spool/lpd/file/log:\ :if=/var/lib/apsfilter/bin/DJ8xx-a4dj-raw: # :of=/usr/spool/lpd/file/: # la@ clears accounting flag, sh is suppress banner # mx#0 sets maximum size to 0k, which means unlimited You must create the /usr/spool/lpd/file/ owned by lp.lp and the printtofile.ps writeable for lp etc. to make this work. Just delete / overwrite the file before you print to the file. DOSEMU usually waits a moment before actually sending data to the printtofile "printer". The DJ8xx-a4dj-raw filter is just ANY filter which is in RAW mode. Just use some which you have around. You (lp the cat have to create /tmp/printtofile.ps and give the printer user on SuSE Linux) write permissions to that file. You can wipe contents with the following command: /dev/null > /tmp/printtofile.ps

As soon as a printout is done (you can check when the printtofile.ps starts and stops growing, or just wait a little while), you can cp /tmp/printtofile.ps screenshot.ps if you use the PostScript version of GRAPHICS. For the Epson version, you can use my pin-read tool for Linux (included): pin-read </tmp/printtofile.ps >bitmap.raw The pin-read tool will print a message telling how big bitmap.raw is - you can then use other software, like www.imagemagick.org (free) to convert the raw bitmap into other formats. Example: convert -verbose -size 1330x1848 gray:bitmap.raw screenshot.png I think the pin-read tool is a great help for debugging the dithering algorithms of the Epson versions of GRAPHICS. For testing the HP PCL driver, I provide an HP-READ tool for Linux. It works pretty much like the PIN-READ tool, so you should be able to use it after reading the above explanation of the pin-read tool.

Have fun - and TELL ME how good or bad GRAPHICS works for you! Eric.