Xref: utzoo alt.fax:561 comp.dcom.modems:5333
Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!aplcen!uunet!van-bc!jtc
From: jtc@van-bc.UUCP (J.T. Conklin)
Newsgroups: alt.fax,comp.dcom.modems
Subject: Re: Fax Standards Question
Message-ID: <208@van-bc.UUCP>
Date: 27 Feb 90 07:00:46 GMT
References: <8456@cbnewsh.ATT.COM>
Reply-To: jtc@van-bc.UUCP (J.T. Conklin)
Followup-To: alt.fax
Organization: Wimsey Associates
Lines: 32

[Followup to alt.fax]

In article <8456@cbnewsh.ATT.COM> wcs@cbnewsh.ATT.COM (Bill Stewart 201-949-0705 erebus.att.com!wcs) writes:
> ... Anyway, is it possible to generate correct
>G3 fax for which the source bitmaps are always the same width?
>I'm trying to find efficient ways to translate ASCII to fax, and
>this would let you store a font as a collection of G3 output bitmaps,
>so you could output the characters directly instead of generating a
>bitmap from the text and then bit-hacking it into G3.

In short: it's possible, i've done it, and it's not worth it.

I encoded a font into a series of counts representing the white 
and black runs within the font.  When the row was concatenated,
a proper G3 row resulted.

I abandoned this approach for several reasons:

  1. Compared to a simple bitmap, the font encoding was huge.

  2. I can put the character glyphs wherever I want.  They
     can even be rotated, inverted, etc.

  3. With a good bit-blt routine, the overhead of blitting 
     is about the same as concatenating the mini-g3 bitmaps.


  --jtc

-- 
J.T. Conklin
	...!{uunet,ubc-cs}!van-bc!jtc, jtc@wimsey.bc.ca