© 1999 Michael J. Hammel
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Impress Follow-up
more musings...


Impress Follow-up

Chris Cox dropped me a note to clarify a few points from my Impress article last month:

My permanent email is cjcox@acm.org, not ccox@acm.org (hope ccox@acm.org doesn't get too much mail).

The Dinosaur is Steve Cowden's dinosaur he did using Aldus Freehand.  It's copyrighted....I tried to contact him about using it....hope there's no problem.  In the impress_complete package there's a tool called epsfilt and one called pstoedit (you can actually download the latest copy from its home site....it has my mods already).  You can take EPS to Tk using these tools:

$ epsfilt <myfile.ai >myfile.eps  # imperfect tool, may have to hand edit!
$ pstoedit -f tk myfile.eps myfile.tk
Then just open the myfile.tk in ImPress.  ImPress doesn't handle clipping regions though....so the neat dithering stuff you find in commercial packages won't work.

Larry Ewing's penguin was converted to Postscript by somebody (?).  I have since imported a better one by using Adobe Streamline running under Wine to convert the actual raster penguin to vector format.  The postscript one scales better than the one converted from the raster image though.

Another thing you might want to try (though people question its practical implications) is to download the Tcl/Tk plugin from www.scriptics.com and install it into a Netscape browser under Linux.  Then edit the plugin.cfg file as indicated in the documentation to allow you to load a tclet from www.ntlug.org and you can then execute the demo showing a document being retrieved off the web for editing inside a web browser.  It can be saved to any local disk (which could be a samba mounted area for example).  (there are some Netscape bugs which prevent "saving" from working real well)

Thanks for taking the time to look at it,
Chris Cox
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© 1999 by Michael J. Hammel