Questions and Answers

Copyright (c) 1995 Apple Users' Group, Sydney
Republished from Applecations, a publication of the Apple Users' Group, Sydney, Australia.

Q: A friend is distressed because he is unable to mimic the printed output from a Macintosh on his Apple IIgs. Pointless allows fonts of comparable quality but there seems to be nothing that can be done with a bitmap which he converted from the Macintosh using SuperConvert. When printed from the Mac, the lines are very smooth, but when printed on the IIgs the lines are very jagged. No amount of doctoring with a magnification tool seems to help. Is there anything that can be done?

A: Yes, as a matter of fact there is. If the Macintosh graphic image is 640 x 480 pixels, convert it to a 320 x 200 (multiple screen) SuperHiRes Apple Preferred Format image -- two screens wide, two screen in length so that it must be scrolled. Next load the image into a program such as Platinum Paint 2.0 and select "50% Actual Size" from the 'Print Setup' option under the 'File' menu. Print to your ImageWriter II and viola, beautiful non-jagged graphic images just as Pointless does with fonts! As I mentioned in past, cartoon images found in alt.binaries.pictures.cartoons work quite well using this printing method.
Now, if only someone would write a companion program to go with Pointless. Something that would scale graphic images to a double-size before getting sent to the printer (This is the cause of them problem actually, bitmapped scaling just doubles each pixel, the reason things look jagged. We need something that can enlarge the image without distorting it's original appearance, i.e. Outline scaling).


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