Re: Printing MAC bitmaps on GS

[nathan@cco.caltech.edu (Nathan Mates)]

In article <3gupl8$aei@triode.apana.org.au>,
Andrew Roughan <posty@triode.apana.org.au> wrote:

>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?

   Bitmaps are naturally chunky; that's why people would much prefer
to stay away from most of them. But, especially on Macs, bitmaps can
be provided at 300dpi, or printer resolution. If you display that to
the screen, the quality remains 300dpi internally, but is displayed at
only 72dpi because that's all the screen can handle. By clipping that
screen, and converting it to the GS, the quality remains at 72dpi.

   If you were to print it at this point, the Mac still has the 300dpi 
info to print it nicely, but the GS has 1/16 the data (1/4 in both
horizontal and vertical) to work with. 

   The solution is this: either shrink the picture on the GS side (cut
in size twice from something that'll keep around the extra info (AWGS
might do this. I'd be surprised, though), or display at 4x the size on
the mac, clip that, and shrink by 4x on the GS end.

Nathan Mates
-- 
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