Xref: utzoo alt.fax:535 comp.lang.postscript:4169
Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!pt.cs.cmu.edu!sam.cs.cmu.edu!vac
From: vac@sam.cs.cmu.edu (Vincent Cate)
Newsgroups: alt.fax,comp.lang.postscript
Subject: Re: G3 Fax <--> (E)PS  (and compressed bitmaps in postscript)
Summary: Found some stuff that lets you go from group 3 to postscript.
	 The same package also can produce postscript with a compressed bitmap.
Message-ID: <8027@pt.cs.cmu.edu>
Date: 16 Feb 90 20:52:18 GMT
References: <10260@hoptoad.uucp>
Organization: Carnegie-Mellon University, CS/RI
Lines: 86


>galen@hoptoad.UUCP (Galen Wolf)
>I'm interested to find any hardware or software which allows translating
>electronically between G3 Fax and either plain or encapsulated PostScript.

I also am interested in this.  Here is what I have found so far.
There is a package called pbmplus that can convert many bitmap formats
into other formats.  Among these is a pbmtog3 and g3topbm.  These handle 
only one-dimensional group III FAX.  PBM stands for "Portable BitMap".  
There is also a pgmtops which can take pbm files, so you can do a:

cat file.g3 | g3topbm | pgmtops | lpr

And it works just fine.  You can FTP pbmplus from:

expo.lcs.mit.edu:contrib/pbmplus.tar.Z

There is also a faxtopbm and pbmtofax in the ISO Development package
(ISODE-6.0) that also does two dimensional encoding.  The whole package 
(something like 4 MB) can be FTPed from:

nisc.nyser.net:pub/isode/isode-6.tar.Z

And the files are in isode-6.0/others/quipu/photo.  However, they are
a little tied to the rest of the package.  I have the pbmtofax
working and am probably going to pull faxtopbm out of the package
(anyone else already done this?).  You can FTP just these files
from me at

sam.cs.cmu.edu:/afs/cs/user/vac/photo.tar.Z


Also, pgmtops can do run length encoding so that the postscript file
is smaller (for my file it was about a factor of 4) but the printer
was so slow at decompressing that it was better to send the file
without this even with a 1 KB/second serial link to the printer.

Below is the head of the file that "pgmtops -rle" produced.  Are 
there any postscript hackers than can recode the "readrlestring"
so that it runs faster?  


      Vince Cate
      vac@cs.cmu.edu


%!PS-Adobe-2.0 EPSF-2.0
%%Creator: pgmtops
%%Title: r240.ps
%%Pages: 1
%%BoundingBox: -7 -9 619 801
%%EndComments
%%EndProlog
/rlestr1 1 string def
/rlestr 128 string def
/readrlestring {
  currentfile rlestr1 readhexstring pop  0 get
  dup 127 le {
    currentfile rlestr 0  4 3 roll  1 add  getinterval
    readhexstring  pop
  } {
    256 exch sub  dup
    currentfile rlestr1 readhexstring pop  0 get
    exch 0 exch 1 exch 1 sub { rlestr exch 2 index put } for
    pop  rlestr exch 0 exch getinterval
  } ifelse
} bind def
%%EndProlog
%%Page 1 1
gsave
-7.59399 -9.90759 translate
627.188 811.815 scale
2040 2641 1
[ 2040 0 0 -2641 0 2641 ]
{ readrlestring }
image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