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<H4>
&quot;Linux Gazette...<I>making Linux just a little more fun!</I>&quot;
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<P> <HR> <P> 
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Graphics Muse
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		<!-- What is a Graphics Muse? -->
		<FONT size=4><B>muse:</B></FONT>
		<OL>
			<LI><I>v;</I> to become absorbed in thought
			<LI><I>n;</I> [ fr. Any of the nine sister goddesses of learning and the
				arts in Greek Mythology ]: a source of inspiration
		</OL>
		<IMG SRC=../gx/hammel/w.gif ALT="W" ALIGN="left" 
			HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0" WIDTH="36" HEIGHT="28">elcome 
		to the Graphics Muse!  Why a "muse"?  
		Well, except for the sisters aspect, the above definitions are
		pretty much the way I'd describe my own interest in computer graphics:  
		it keeps me deep in thought and it is a daily source of inspiration.

		<!-- Text based navigation -->
		<P>
		<CENTER>
		<FONT size=2>
		[<A HREF="#mews">Graphics Mews</A>]
		[<A HREF="#musings">Musings</A>]
		[<A HREF="#resources">Resources</A>]
		</FONT>
		<CENTER></td>

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	<td>
	<IMG SRC=../gx/hammel/cleardot.gif ALT="indent" ALIGN="left" 
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	<IMG SRC=../gx/hammel/t.gif ALT="T" ALIGN="left" 
		HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0" WIDTH="26" HEIGHT="28">his 
	column is dedicated to the use, creation, distribution, and discussion of 
	computer graphics tools for Linux systems.  

	<BR clear=both>
	&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;
	This month has been even more hectic than most.  I finished the first
	pass of an article on the 1.0 release of the GIMP and submitted it to the
	LInux Journal editors.  That will be out in the November Graphics issue.
	I'll probably have to do some updates after I get back the marked up
	version.  I'm also working on the cover art for that issue, using the
	developers release (currently at 0.99.10) of the GIMP.  I've also had
	quite of bit of regular work (that kind that pays the rent) since I'm
	getting very close to my code freeze date.  This weekend I'll be writing up
	documentation for it so I can give an introductory class to testers, other
	developers, Tech Pubs, Tech Support, and Marketing on Monday.  I think I
	picked a bad time to start lifting weights again.

	<BR clear=both>
	&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;
	In this months column I'll be covering ...
	<UL>
		<LI> More experiences with printing using the Epson Stylus Colro 500
		<LI> A brief discussion about DPI, LPI, and Halftoning
		<LI> An even briefer discussion about 3:2 pulldown - transerring film
			to video.
	</UL>

	Next month may not be much better.  I don't know exactly what I'll be
	writing about, although I do have a wide list from which to choose.  Mostly
	I'm looking forward to my trip to SIGGRAPH in August.  Any one else going?
	I should have plenty to talk about after that.  I plan on going to at
	least two of the OpenGL courses being taught at the Conference.  I haven't
	completely decided which courses I'm going to take, however.

	<BR clear=both>
	&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;
	I'm also looking forward to a trip to DC in August as well.  A real
	vacation.  No computers.  Just museums and monuments.  I may need to take 
	some sort of anti-depressant.  Nah.  I need the break.

	<P>
	
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	<BR clear=both>
	&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;
		Disclaimer:
		Before I get too far into this I should note that any of the news items I
		post in this section are just that - news.  Either I happened to run 
		across
		them via some mailing list I was on, via some Usenet newsgroup, or via
		email from someone.  I'm not necessarily endorsing these products (some of
		which may be commercial), I'm just letting you know I'd heard about 
		them in the past month.
		<P>

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		<H4> Announcing bttv version 0.4.0 </H4>
		&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;
		BTTV is a device driver for Booktree Bt848 based frame grabber cards 
		like the
		Hauppauge Win/TV pci, Miro PCTV, STB TV PCI, Diamond DTV2000, and
		AverMedia.  Major new features in version 0.4.0 are rudimentary 
		support for grabbing into user memory and for decoding VBI data 
		like teletext, VPS, etc. in software.
		<P>
		The Motif application xtvscreen now has better support for selecting 
		channels and also works in the dual visual modes (255+24 mil. colors) 
		of Xi Graphics AcceleratedX 3.1 X server.
		<P>
		Author:
		<BR>
		&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;
			Ralph Metzler <A HREF="mailto:rjkm@thp.uni-koeln.de">
			rjkm@thp.uni-koeln.de </A>
		<BR>
		&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;
			Marcus Metzler	<A HREF="mailto:mocm@thp.uni-koeln.de">
			mocm@thp.uni-koeln.de </A>
		<BR>
		Web Site:
		<BR>
		&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;
			<A HREF="http://www.thp.uni-koeln.de/~rjkm/linux/bttv.html">
			http://www.thp.uni-koeln.de/~rjkm/linux/bttv.html</A>

		</td>


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	<td width="49%" valign=top>
		<H4>
		OpenGL4Java 0.3
		</H4>
		&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;
		This is an initial developer's release of an (unoffical) port of
		OpenGL(tm) for java.  Leo Chan's original package has been
		ported to both WindowsNT/95 and to Linux.  
		Several features have been added, the main
		one being OpenGl now draws into a Java Frame.  
		What advantage does this provide?  Well, you can now add menus 
		to the OpenGL widget as well as receiving all normal events such 
		as MouseMotion and Window events.  You
		could very simply have a user rotate a OpenGL object by moving the mouse
		around in the Frame ( the demo for the next release will have this
		feature ).
		<P>
		You can grab it from the developers web page at 
		<A HREF="http://www.magma.ca/~aking/java">
		http://www.magma.ca/~aking/java</A>.

		</td>

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		<H4>
		WebMagick Image Web Generator - Version 1.29
		</H4>
		WebMagick is a package which makes putting images on the Web as
		easy as magick.  You want WebMagick if you:

		<UL>
		<LI>Have access to a Unix system
		<LI>Have a collection of images you want to put on the Web
		<LI>Are tired of editing page after page of HTML by hand
		<LI>Want to generate sophisticated pages to showcase your images
		<LI>Want to be in control
		<LI>Are not afraid of installing sophisticated software packages
		<LI>Want to use well-documented software (33 page manual!)
		<LI>Support free software
		</UL>

		After nine months of development, WebMagick is chock-full of
		features. WebMagick recurses through directory trees, building
		HTML pages, imagemap files, and client-side/server-side maps to
		allow the user to navigate through collections of thumbnail
		images (somewhat similar to xv's Visual Schnauzer) and select
		the image to view with a mouse click. In fact, WebMagick
		supports xv's thumbnail cache format so it can be used in
		conjunction with xv.
		<P>

		The primary focus of WebMagick is performance. Image thumbnails
		are reduced and composed into a single image to reduce client
		accesses, reducing server load and improving client performance.
		Everything is pre-computed. During operation WebMagick employs
		innovative caching and work-avoidance techniques to make
		successive executions much faster. WebMagick has been
		successfully executed on directory trees containing many tens of
		directories and thousands of images ranging from tiny icons to
		large JPEGs or PDF files.
   
		<P>
		Here is a small sampling of the image formats that WebMagick
		supports:
   
		<UL>
			<LI>Windows Bitmap image (BMP)
			<LI>Postscript (PS)
			<LI>Encapsulated Postscript (EPS)
			<LI>Acrobat (PDF)
			<LI>JPEG
			<LI>GIF (including animations)
			<LI>PNG
			<LI>MPEG
			<LI>TIFF
			<LI>Photo CD
		</UL>
   
		WebMagick is written in PERL and requires the ImageMagick (3.8.4
		or later) and PerlMagick (1.0.3 or later) packages as well as a
		recent version of PERL 5 (5.002 or later). Installation
		instructions are provided in the WebMagick distribution.

		<P>
		Obtain WebMagick from the WebMagick page at
		<A HREF="http://www.cyberramp.net/~bfriesen/webmagick/dist/">
		http://www.cyberramp.net/~bfriesen/webmagick/dist/</A>. 
		WebMagick
		can also be obtained from the ImageMagick distribution site at
		<A HREF="ftp://ftp.wizards.dupont.com/pub/ImageMagick/perl">
		ftp://ftp.wizards.dupont.com/pub/ImageMagick/perl</A>.

		</td>

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	<td width="50%">
		<H4>
		EasternGraphics announces public release of `opengl' widget
		</H4>
		&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;
		EasternGraphics announces the public release of `opengl' widget
		which allows windows with three-dimensional graphics output,
		produced by OpenGL to be integrated into Tk applications. The
		widget is available for Unix and MS-Windows platforms.
		<P>
		You can download the package from
		<A HREF="ftp://ftp.EasternGraphics.com/pub/egr/tkopengl/tkopengl1.0.tar.gz">
		ftp://ftp.EasternGraphics.com/
		<BR>
		&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;
			pub/egr/tkopengl/tkopengl1.0.tar.gz</A>
		<P>
		Email: <A HREF="mailto:wicht@EasternGraphics.com">
			wicht@EasternGraphics.com</A>
		<BR>
		WWW: <A HREF="http://www.EasternGraphics.com/">
			http://www.EasternGraphics.com/</A>
		</td>

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	<td width="49%">
		<H4>
		ELECTROGIG's GIG 3DGO 3.2 for Linux for $99.
		</H4>
		&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;
		There is a free demo package for Linux.  Its roughly 36M tarred
		and compressed.  A 9M demo's file is also available for download.
		I had placed a notice about this package in the May's Muse column,
		but I guess ELECTROGIG had missed that, so they sent me another
		announcement (I got the first one from comp.os.linux.announce).
		Anyway, one thing I didn't mention in May was the price for the
		full Linux product:  $99.  This is the complete product, although
		I'm not sure if this includes any documentation or not (it doesn't
		appear to).  The Linux version does not come with any product
		support, however.  You need a 2.0 Linux kernel to run GIG 3DGO.

		<P>
		I also gave a URL that takes you to an FTP site for downloading the
		demo.  A slightly more informative page for downloading the demo and
		its associated files is at 
		<A HREF="http://www.gig.nl/support/indexftp.html">
		http://www.gig.nl/support/indexftp.html</A>

		</td>

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	<td colspan=4>
		<H4>
		Type1Inst updated
		</H4>
		&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;
		<A HREF="mailto:J.Macnicol@student.anu.edu.au">James Macnicol</A>
		uploaded version 0.5b of his type1inst font installation utility
		to sunsite.unc.edu.  If its not already there, it will end up in
		/pub/Linux/X11/xutils.
		<P>
		Type1inst is a small perl script which generates the
		"fonts.scale" file required by an X11 server to use any
		Type 1 PostScript fonts which exist in a particular
		directory.  It gathers this informatiom from the font files
		themselves, a task which previously was done by hand.  The
		script is also capable of generating the similar "Fontmap"
		file used by ghostscript.  It can also generate sample sheets
		for the fonts.
		<P>
		FTP: 
		<A HREF="ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/X11/xutils/type1inst-0.5b.tar.gz">
		ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/X11/xutils/type1inst-0.5b.tar.gz</A>
		<P>
		Editors note:  I highly recommend this little utility if you 
		are intent on doing any graphics arts style work, such as with
		the GIMP.

		</td>
  
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	<td colspan=4>
		<H4> 
		libgr-2.0.13 has been updated to png-0.96
		</H4>
		&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;
		It seems the interface to
		png-0.96 is not binary compatible with png-0.89, so the major
		version of the shared library was bumped to libpng.so.2.0.96 
		(last version was libpng.so.1.0.89).
		<P>
		WHAT IS LIBGR?
		<BR>
		Libgr is a collection of graphics libraries, 
		based on libgr-1.3, by Rob Hooft (hooft@EMBL-Heidelberg.DE),
		that includes:
		<UL>
			<LI>fbm
			<LI>jpeg
			<LI>pbm
			<LI>pgm
			<LI>png
			<LI>pnm
			<LI>ppm
			<LI>rle
			<LI>tiff
			<LI>zlib, for compression
		</UL>
		These are configured to build ELF static and shared libraries.
		This collection (libgr2) is being maintained by 
		<A HREF="mailto:neal@ctd.comsat.com">
		Neal Becker</A> &lt;neal@ctd.comsat.com&gt;

		<P>
		FTP:
			<A HREF="ftp://ftp.ctd.comsat.com:/pub/linux/ELF">
			ftp.ctd.comsat.com:/pub/linux/ELF</A>

	</td>


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	<td colspan=4>
		<!--
		  -- Did You Know Section
		  -->
		<H4>Did You Know?</H4>
		...there is a site devoted to settign up Wacom tablets under XFree86?
      <A HREF="http://www.dorsai.org/~stasic/wacomx.htm">
      http://www.dorsai.org/~stasic/wacomx.htm</A>
		The pages maintainer,
			<A HREF="mailto:stasic@dorsai.org">Edward</A>, says:
		<BLOCKQUOTE>
		So far, nobody has told me that he or she couldn't follow the
		instructions.
		<P>
		Fred Lepied is the man who actually created the support for the
		Wacom tablets under XFree86. He gave me instructions on setting
		my ArtPad II up and I repeated this, periodically, on Usenet.
		When the requests for help there turned into a steady stream,
		I decided to put up a web page (mainly to show that I can make
		one but not use it for a lame ego trip).
		</BLOCKQUOTE>
		<A HREF="mailto:adam@uunet.pipex.com">Adam D. Moss</A>
		&lt;adam@uunet.pipex.com&gt; has said he's also gotten this to work
		and offered to help others who might need assistance getting 
		things set up.


		<P>
		...there is rumored work being done on 3Dfx support for Linux?
		<A HREF="mailto:tige@umr.edu">Tige</A> writes:
		<BLOCKQUOTE>
		I was looking around for info about the 3Dfx based cards and came across
		a guy's page that said he is working on a full OpenGl driver for 3Dfx
		boards for NT.  What does this have to do with Linux?  Well, he says
		that after the NT driver is done, he is going to start work on 3Dfx
		drivers for Linux and an OpenGl driver for XFree86/3Dfx.
		<P>
		The guy's name is Zanshin and the address of his site is:
		<A HREF="http://www.planetquake.com/gldojo/">
		http://www.planetquake.com/gldojo/</A>
		<P>
		Most of this stuff is in the News Archives section under 4/18/97
		Oh yeah, he also mentions hacking SGIQuake to work with Linux, so we may
		get to see a hardware accelerated version of Quake for Linux.
		</BLOCKQUOTE>

		<P>
		...the MindsEye Developers mailing list has moved to
		<A HREF="mailto:mindseye@luna.nl">
		mindseye@luna.nl</A>.
		unsubscribing can be done by sending a body of
		<PRE>
         unsubscribe
		</PRE>
		to 
		<A HREF="mailto:mindseye-request@luna.nl">
		mindseye-request@luna.nl</A>
		and a body of
		<PRE>
         unsubscribe mindseye@luna.nl
		</PRE>
		to 
		<A HREF="mailto:majordomo@luna.nl">
		majordomo@luna.nl</A>
		Other majordomo commands should be send to majordomo@luna.nl
		a body of 'help' gives an overview.
		Users which are subscribed to the old mindseye@ronix.ptf.hro.nl adress
		do not need to unsubscribe.  The list will be removed shortly afterwards.
		They will get this message twice: one from mindseye@luna.nl and one from
		mindseye@ronix.ptf.hro.nl.
		A HTML interface by using hypermail is under construction.


		<!--
		  -- Q and A Section
		  -->
		<P><FONT size=3><B>Q and A</B></FONT>
		<P>
		<I>Q: 
		Forgive what might be a dumb question, but what exactly is meant by
		"overlays"?
		</I>
		<P>A: 
		Imagine a 24bpp image plane, that can be addressed by 24bpp visuals.
		Imagine an 8bpp plane in front of the 24bpp image plane, addressed by
		8bpp visuals.
		<P>
		One or more of the 8bpp visuals, preferably the default visual, should
		offer a 'transparent pixel' index.  When the 8bpp image plane is painted
		with the transparent pixel, you can see through to the 24bpp plane.
		You can call an arrangement like this, a 24bpp underlay, or refer to the
		8bpp visuals as an overlay.
		<P>
		Strictly, we call this "multiple concurrent visuals with different color
		depths", but that's rather a mouthful.  Hence, shorthand we refer to it
		as "24+8" or "overlays", with "24+8" as the preferred description.
		<P>
		<FONT size=2>
		From Jeremy Chatfield @ <A HREF="http://www.xi.com/">Xi Graphics, Inc.</A>
 
		</td>

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</table>



<P>
<A NAME="musings">
<table>
<tr>
<td>
<IMG SRC=../gx/hammel/musings.gif ALT="Musings" ALIGN="left" 
	HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0" WIDTH="247" HEIGHT="52">
</td>
</table>
</A>
<BR clear=both>

<TABLE width=560>
<tr>
	<td valign=top>
		<H4>
		Microstation update
		</H4>
		&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;
		After last months 3D Modeller update I received email
		from Mark Hamstra at Bentley Systems, Inc.  Mark is the man 
		responsible for the ports of Bentley's MicroStation and Masterpiece
		products that are available for Linux.  I've included his response
		below.  The stuff in italics is what I had orginally written:

		<BLOCKQUOTE>
		Thanks for the mention in Gazette #18 --it's kinda fun watching where
		MicroStation/Linux info pops up.  Being the guy that actually did the
		ports of MicroStation and Masterpiece, I'll lay claim to knowing the most
		about these products.  Unfortunately, you've got a few errors in Gazette
		#18; allow me to correct them:

		<P>
		<I>
  		Includes programming support with a BASIC language and linkages
  		to various commericial databases such as Oracle and Informix.
		</I>

		<P>
		Programming support in the current product includes the MicroStation
		Development Language (C syntax code that compiles to platform-independent
		byte-code), BASIC, and support for linking MDL with both MDL shared
		libraries and native code shared libraries (i.e., Linux .so ELF
		libraries).  For a look at the future direction of Bentley and 
		MicroStation, take a look on our web site at the recent announcement by
		Keith Bentley at the  AEC Systems tradeshow of MicroStation/J and our
		licensing agreement with Javasoft.  

		<P>
		Because of the lack of commercial database support for Linux, there are
		no database linkage facilities in the current Linux port of MicroStation.

		<P>
		<I>
  		This looks like the place to go for a commercial modeller, although
  		I'm not certain if they'll sell their educational products to the
  		general public or not.
		</I>

		<P>
		Nope, academic-only at this time; although we're collecting requests for
		commercial licensing (at our normal commercial prices) at
		<A HREF="http://www.bentley.com/products/change-request.html">
		http://www.bentley.com/products/change-request.html</A>.
		The <B>only</B> thing preventing MicroStation from being available 
		commercially for Linux is a lack of adequate expressed interest.

		<P>
		<I>
		Note that the Linux ports have not been released (to my knowledge - I'm
		going by whats on the web pages).
		</I>

		<P>
		The first two of our new Engineering Academic Suites that contain the
		Linux ports, the Building Engineering and GeoEngineering Suites, have been
		available in North America since the middle of February.  European and
		worldwide distribution should be underway now too, although it took a
		little longer.  Incidentally, the web pages you list are for our Europe,
		Middle East, and Africa (ema) division; you probably actually want
		<A HREF="http://www.bentley.com/academic">
		http://www.bentley.com/academic</A>.

		<P>
		<I>
		[output formats] Unknown
		</I>

		<P>
		We output a wide range of formats (and import a wider range than you give
		us credit for).  I always forget just which ones are actually in the
		product and which are only in my current builds from the most recent
		source, so I'll just refer you to
		<A HREF="http://www.bentley.com/products/microstation95">
		http://www.bentley.com/products/microstation95</A> and
		<A HREF="http://www.bentley.com/products/masterpiece">
		http://www.bentley.com/products/masterpiece</A>, and note that my copy of
		MicroStation/Linux currently lists DGN, DWG, DXF, IGES, CGM, SVF, GRD,
		RIB, VRML, Postscript, HPGL, PCL, TIFF, TGA, BMP, and a couple other
		raster and animation formats as output options -- and I know I haven't
		currently got some of our soon-to-be-released translators compiled.  Like
		I said, probably not all of these are in the current Linux port, but it's
		a simple matter to add whatever's not there to future versions of the
		Linux products, provided there's enough demand to keep the project
		going.  

		</BLOCKQUOTE>
		I wasn't sure what a few of these formats were, so I wrote Mark back
		to ask about them.  He informed me on the following (which were the ones I
		had asked specifically about):

		<UL>
			<LI> DGN is MicroStation-native design file format and 
				has its ancestry in the Intergraph IGDS file format.  
			<LI> SVF is the Simple Vector Format (see
				<A HREF="http://www.softsource.com">
				http://www.softsource.com</A>), 
				which works pretty good for web browser plug-ins.  
			<LI> GRD is used by our MicroStation Field product.  
			<LI> CGM is the Computer Graphics Metafile format, a 
				vendor-independent standard supported in various software 
				packages, browser plug-ins, printers/plotters, etc.
		</UL>

		I want to thank Mark for offering updated information so quickly.  My
		information is only as good as what I can find or am fed, and it helps 
		when vendors, developers or end users provide me with useful info like 
		this.  Many thanks Mark.

		<P>
		If you've used this product on MS platforms feel free to drop me a
		line and let me know what you thought of it.  I'm always out to support
		commercial ports of graphics-related products to Linux.
		</td>

<tr>
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</table>

<TABLE width=560>
<tr>
	<td valign=top width="44%">
		<H4><I>
		Printing with an Epson Stylus Color 500
		</I> </H4>
		&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;
		I bought an Epson Stylus Color 500 printer back in December of last year 
		so I could print in color.  I had done some 
		<A HREF="../issue14/gm.html">
		research into what printers would be best</A>, 
		based in part on reviews in online PC magazines 
		and also on support available in the Ghostscript 4.03 package.  The
		Epson Stylus Color 500 was rated very high by the reviews and I found a 
		<A HREF="http://www.pe.net/~williams">
		web page</A> 
		which provided information on how to configure Ghostscript
		for use with the printer.  I bought the printer, got Ghostscript
		working in a very marginal way (that is to say, it printed straight 
		text in black and white).  But thats as far as it went.  I had gotten
		some minor printing in color done, but nothing very impressive and 
		most of it was downright bad.

		<BR>
		&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;
		Earlier this month I was given the opportunity to work on the cover
		art for an issue of the Linux Journal.  A few trial runs were given
		the preliminary ok but they were too small - the size of the image
		needed to be more than twice as big as the original I had created.
		Also, because the conversion of an image from the monitors display to
		printed paper is not a straightforward one (see the discussion on
		LPI/DPI elsewhere in this months column) it became apparent I needed
		to try printing my artwork to sample how it would really look on paper.
		I had to get my printer configuration working properly.

		<BR>
		&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;
		Well, it turned out to be easier than I thought.  The hardest part
		is to get Ghostscript compiled properly.  The first thing to do is 
		to be sure to read the text files that accompany the source code.
		There are 3 files to read:  
		<UL>
			<LI>make.txt - general compiling and installation instructions
			<LI>drivers.txt - configuration information for support of the 
					various devices you'll need for your system.
			<LI>unix-lpr.txt - help on setting up a print spooler for Unix
					systems.
		</UL>
		The first two are the ones that made the most difference to me.  I 
		didn't really use the latter, but my solution isn't very elegant.
		However, what it lacks in grace it makes up for in simplicity.
		
		<BR>
		&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;
		Building the drivers was fairly simple for me - I took most of the
		defaults, except I added support for the Epson Stylus Color printers.
		There is a section in make.txt devoted specifically to compiling on
		Unix systems (search for <I>How to build Ghostscript from source
		(Unix version)</I> in that file).  In most cases you'll just be able
		to type "make" after linking the correct compiler specific makefile 
		to <I>makefile</I>.  However, I needed to configure in the Epson
		printers first.
		
		<BR>
		&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;
		What I did was to edit the unix-gcc.mak file 
		to change one line.  The line that begins
		<BR><B>
		&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;
			DEVICE_DEVS=
		</B><BR>
		was modified to add
		<BR><B>
		&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;
			stcolor.dev
		</B><BR>
		right after the equal sign.  I also didn't need support for
		any of the HP DeskJet (DEVICE_DEVS3 and DEVICE_DEVS4) or 
		Bubble Jet (DEVICE_DEVS6) devices so I commented out those lines.
		Now, once this file had been linked to <I>makefile</I> I could just
		run 
		<BR><B>
		&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;
			make
		<BR>
		&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;
			make install
		</B><BR>
		At this point the Ghostsript package was ready for use.  Note that
		many of the current distributions already include Ghostscript, but may not
		have the 4.03 release.  Run 
		<BR><B>
		&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;
			gs -v
		</B><BR>
		to find out if you have Ghostscript 4.03.  You'll need it to work
		with the Epson Stylus Color 500.

		<BR>
		&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;
		Now I needed to set up my print spooler.  This turned out to be
		rather easy.  First, you need to know that the stcolor driver
		(which is the name of the driver Ghostscript uses to talk to 
		Epson Stylus printers) has a pre-built Postscript file that is
		used to prepare the printer for printing.  This file, called
		stcolor.ps, is included with the 4.03 distribution.  The file
		contains special commands that are interpreted by the printer,
		however it does not actually cause anything to be printed.

		<P clear=both>
		<CENTER>
		<A HREF="#next-column">-Top of next column-</A>
		</CENTER>
		</td>

	<td bgcolor="#ffffff" cellpadding=1 cellspacing=0 valign=top>
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	<td valign=top width="53%" cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0>
	<table>
	<tr>
		<td valign=top cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0>
			<UL>
				<LH>
					<A NAME="next-column">
					<B>More Musings...</B>
					</A>
					</LH>
				<LI>
					<A HREF="more-musings.html#1">
					DPI, LPI, Halftoning and other strange things
					</A> - A short discussion on printing computer
					images.
				<LI>
					<A HREF="more-musings.html#2">
					How many frames makes a movie?
					</A> - a discussion with Larry Gritz about
					how video animations are transferred from film.

			</UL>
			<table width=100%>
			<tr>
				<td width=100% bgcolor="#000000" cellpadding=1 
						cellspacing=0 valign=top>
					<IMG SRC=../gx/hammel/cleardot.gif ALT="indent" ALIGN="left" 
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			</table>

			<IMG SRC=../gx/hammel/cleardot.gif ALT="indent" ALIGN="left" 
				VSPACE="5" WIDTH="1" HEIGHT="1">
			<BR clear=both>
			When you
			want to print something you need to first print this file followed
			by the file or files you want to print.  Don't worry about how to 
			do this just yet - I have a set of scripts to make this easier.

			<BR clear=both>
			&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;
			There were a number of options I could use with Ghostscript for
			my printer, but I found I only needed to work with one:  display
			resolution or Dots Per Inch (DPI).  In order to handle the two 
			resolutions I simply created two scripts which could be used as
			input filters for lpr (the print spooler).  The 
			<A HREF="./stcolor.txt">
			scripts</A>
			are almost
			exactly the same, except one is called <I>stcolor</I> and one
			is called <I>stcolor-high</I>, the latter being for the higher
			resolution.   Both of these were installed under
			/var/spool/lpd/lp and given execute permissions.
		
			<BR clear=both>
			&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;
			Next came the configuration for lpr.  I needed to edit the 
			<A HREF="./printcap.txt">
			/etc/printcap</A>
			file to create entries for the new printer filters.
			I decided to give the printers different names than the standard,
			non-filtered printer name.  In this way I could print ordinary
			text files (which I do more than anything else)  using the default
			printer and use the other printer names for various draft or
			final prints of images, like the cover art.

			<BR clear=both>
			&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;
			Now the system was ready to print my images, but I still needed 
			to do a couple more things.  First, I wanted to write a script
			for handling printing of my images in the most common formats 
			I created.  I wrote a
			<A HREF="./print-tga.txt">
			script</A>
			to do this which I named <I>print-tga.sh</I>.  I made symbollic
			links from this file to variations on the name.  The script
			uses the name used to invoke it to determine which type of
			conversions to run before printing the file.
			The script converts the various formats, using the tools in
			the NetPBM kit, to Postscript files and then prints them to the
			high resolution printer setup in the previously mentioned printcap 
			file.

			<BR clear=both>
			&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;
			Once I got all this done I was able to print full page images
			on high-gloss paper.  They come out beautifully.  The images I
			created for the cover art are far bigger than the paper, so Ghostscript
			resizes them to fit.  It wasn't until I got this working that I 
			realized just how good Ghostscript is.  Or just how good the Epson
			Stylus Color 500 is.

			<BR clear=both>
			&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;
			As a side bonus, I also discovered that I could now print pages
			from my Netscape browser to my printer.  I configured the 
			print command to be <I>lpr -llpps</I> (using the lower resolution
			printer from the /etc/printcap file) in the Print dialog.  Since
			Netscape passes the page as a Postscript file to the filter, there
			is no need to do any conversions like I do with my images.  I now
			get full color prints of the pages I wish to save (like SIGGRAPH's
			registration forms).  I also can print directly from Applixware
			using the same printer configurations.  I just had to set up the
			print options to output as Postscript, which was simply enough to do.

			<BR clear=both>
			&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;
			There are a number of other settings that can be set using the
			filters.  If you are interested in using these you should consult the
			devices.txt file for information on the stcolor driver.  There are
			probably some better settings than what I'm using for other types of
			printing needs.

			<BR clear=both>
			&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;
			Well, thats about it.  I hope this was of some use to you.  I was
			really thankful when I got it working.  My setup is probably not
			exactly like anyone elses, but if you have the Epson Stylus Color
			500 you should be able to get similar results.  Don't forget:  if
			you plan on printing high resolution images using the 360 DPI (as 
			opposed to the 180 DPI also supported by the printer) then you'll 
			probably want to print on high-gloss paper.  This paper can be rather 
			expensive.  The high-gloss paper Epson sells specifically for this 
			printer is about $36US for 15 sheets.  Also, I should note that
			I recently heard Epson now has a a model 600 that is to replace
			the model 500 as their entry level color printer.   I haven't
			heard if the 600 will work with the stcolor driver in Ghostscript
			so you may want to contact the drivers author (who is listed
			in the devices.txt file, along with a web site for more info) if 
			you plan on getting the model 600.
		</td>

	<tr>
		<td bgcolor="#000000" cellpadding=1 cellspacing=0 valign=top>
		<IMG SRC=../gx/hammel/cleardot.gif ALT="indent" ALIGN="left" 
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	<tr>
		<td valign=top cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0>
		<IMG SRC=../gx/hammel/cleardot.gif ALT="indent" ALIGN="left" 
			HSPACE="8" WIDTH="1" HEIGHT="1">
		<BR clear=both>

		</td>
	</table>
	</td>



</table>


<P>
<A NAME="resources">
<table>
<tr>
<td>
<IMG SRC=../gx/hammel/resources.gif ALT="Resources" ALIGN="left" 
	HSPACE="0" VSPACE="0" WIDTH="246" HEIGHT="57">
</td>
</table>
</A>

<BR clear=both>
The following links are just starting points for finding more information
about computer graphics and multimedia in general for Linux systems.  If
you have some application specific information for me, I'll add them to my
other pages or you can contact the maintainer of some other web site.  I'll
consider adding other general references here, but application or site
specific information needs to go into one of the following general 
references and not listed here.

<BR clear=both>
<P>

<A HREF="http://www.csn.net/~mjhammel/linux/lgh.html">
Linux Graphics mini-Howto
</A>

<BR>
<A HREF="http://www.csn.net/~mjhammel/ugu/ugu.html">
Unix Graphics Utilities
</A>  

<BR>
<A HREF="http://www.digiserve.com/ar/linux-snd/">
Linux Multimedia Page
</A>  

<P>
Some of the Mailing Lists and Newsgroups I keep an eye on and where I get alot
of the information in this column:

<P> <A HREF="http://www.XCF.Berkeley.EDU/~gimp/">
		The Gimp User and Gimp Developer Mailing Lists</A>.
<BR> <A HREF="http://www.irtc.org">
		The IRTC-L discussion list</A>
<BR> <A HREF="news:comp.graphics.rendering.raytracing">
		comp.graphics.rendering.raytracing</A>
<BR> <A HREF="news:comp.graphics.rendering.renderman">
		comp.graphics.rendering.renderman</A>
<BR> <A HREF="news:comp.graphics.api.opengl">
		comp.graphics.api.opengl</A>
<BR> <A HREF="news:comp.os.linux.announce">
		comp.os.linux.announce</A>

<br>


<P>
<A NAME="future">
<H2>Future Directions</H2>
</A>
Next month:
<BLOCKQUOTE>
	I have no idea.  I have a ton of things that need doing, but I just
		haven't had time to figure out what I *should* do.  I still have part 3 of
		the BMRT series to do, which I plan on doing as part of the process of
		creating an animation.  The animation is another topic I'd like to do.
		I've also had requests for a number of other topics.  One good one was to
		cover the various Image Libraries that are available (libgr or its
		individual components, for example).  I have a review of Image Alchemy to
		do (long ago promised and still not done *sigh*).  Well, at least I'll
		never be short a topic.
</BLOCKQUOTE>

<P>
<A HREF="mailto:mjhammel@csn.net">
Let me know what you'd like to hear about!</A>

<!--===================================================================-->
<P> <hr> <P> 
<center><H5>Copyright &copy; 1997, Michael J. Hammel<BR> 
Published in Issue 19 of the Linux Gazette, July 1997</H5></center>

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