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From: almquist@cis.udel.edu (Squish)
Newsgroups: comp.graphics
Subject: Gif to HPGL followup
Keywords: Bummer )-:
Message-ID: <45687@nigel.ee.udel.edu>
Date: 25 Feb 91 03:41:55 GMT
Sender: usenet@ee.udel.edu
Organization: U of Del
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Nntp-Posting-Host: daffy.cis.udel.edu

I recently posted a request to the net and these are the following replies I
got - that is if anyone is interested:

|From:    pdbourke@ccu1.aukuni.ac.nz
|Subject: Re: Looking for a gif to hpgl converter
|
|Regarding GIF to HPGL, you do realise that GIF is a bitmap format
|and HPGL is a plotter language, ie: something that likes to draw lines
|primarily. There are no primitives in HPGL for bitmaps!
|
|That is not to say that such a converter does not exist. I have written
|such a thing that takes Macintosh PICT bitmaps and created plot files.
|This is done by drawing each pixel in the bitmap as a rectangle in
|HPGL and then fill in the rectangle in some way for the black parts.
|The result is very large files and not very good results on a plotter.

|From:    Andy Sun Anu-guest <sun@me.utoronto.ca>
|Subject: Re: Looking for a gif to hpgl converter
|
|I am not sure if this beast exists at all. GIF is a raster representation
|and HPGL is a point-to-point graphics language. You are asking for something
|to convert raster image to vector form, which is unlikely to exist. PostScript
|is a different story because PostScript itself supports raster images.

So basically, it don't look good.  BUMMER.  Why is it that HP has to make such
a pain-in-da-a** standard?  What I wanted to do was make fractal wallpaper.
I've got access to a HPGL electrostatic plotter that can produce 15' prints.
It would've been fun to dump gif to hpgl to plotter.  The plotter doesn't like
DOS HPGL format and I can't find a proper unix filter for it.  Oh well, I'll
keep looking.  Thanks anyways.

- Mike Almquist (almquist@cis.udel.edu)


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