Conference hydra::amiga_v1

    Yes. May be. It depends. 
    To clarify:
    1) CSIX convert perfectly well B&W IFF picture ( I did it many times
    	mostly converting digitized pictures ).
    2) Whatever you have on the screen can always become an IFF image
    	using GRABBIT
    3) I don't know if WP's produce IFF files !? It sounds strange to me.
    
    Brief note on CSIX B&W. I recently converted a picture taken from
    a photograph. ( you can see it on 
    	cesare::eng_area:[zabot.mail.temp.immagini]max.six )
    Il looks not bad on a VT340. But if I send it to the laser printer
    (ln03) it comes out fully black. Why ??
    ( conversion with no -arg ).
    marco

    
    The LN03 doesn't support the Color Sixel Protocol in a very nice
    manner.  If your picture was grey-scale rather than straight b&w
    (1 bit-plane) you will normally get an all black output.  I guess
    what is happening is that whenever any non-white pixel gets fired
    it ends up being black, so unless the picture has some actual white
    in it, it will be solid black.  Single bit plane pictures should
    print OK though.
    
    - steve    

Re: .0

>    Can I use CSIX for basic B&W pictures/files created from word
>    processors?

Probably not.

IFF isn't a single file format: it is a file protocol.

IFF files are divided into chunks.  Each chunk is self-identifying
and contains information about how large the chunk is.  Chunks
may contain sub-chunks which are also self-identifying.

The chunk ids are registered with Commodore, and Commodore publishes
documentation and code showing how to manipulate IFF files, and how
to interpret them.

The entire IFF format is designed so that different chunks may be
nested and chained together, and one of the rules governing programs
that manipulate IFF files is that if the programs come across a chunk
they do not understand, they should not halt, but instead they should
skip the unknown chunk and continue looking for chunks they do understand.

There are chunks defined for bit mapped graphics, sampled sound, animation,
musical scores, structured text, and lots of other things.  The chunks
representing these things look quite different.  However, some clever
things have been done:  An IFF animation file starts out with the first
frame of the animation stored as normal bit mapped graphics.  This
means if you load an animation file into a paint program, you will
get the first frame (even though the paint program has no idea about
what the stuff that follows the first frame is).

ProWrite uses IFF to store documents (as opposed to Wordperfect who
does not).  However, most of the chunks in the file are text chunks
giving text and font information.  If you embed a picture in the
document, the picture will show up as an IFF brush.

So, if the sixel program is aggressive about finding the IFF chunks
it can deal with, it might be able to print the graphics from your
wordprocessing documents.  However, I bet this isn't what you were
thinking of...

    
    I understand what IFF is. I guess that I did not know exactly what
    CSIX does.  I used to have IFF_SIX.EXE (I don't know where it is
    now.)  and I used GRABBIT to create an IFF file of the screen. 
    When I ran it through IFF_SIX, it was a B&W (one-bit bitmap, I guess.)
    display of the screen.
    
    Now my problem is that I can't find IFF_SIX.EXE anymore. That would
    probably take care of most of my needs.  I do not do color graphic
    pictures. Just simple screen dumps and unelaborate graphs.
    
    Can I use CSIX to do this, and if so how?  OR  Where is the program
    IFF_SIX???? 
    
    
    While I was thinking about that, I thought that since there are
    some WP packages that store information in IFF format, that CSIX
    might transform the information (text, fonts, bolding, etc. ) into
    a printable sixel format file.  I may be all wet on this one.  Just
    a random thought.
    
    (Side Note:  Do the WP packages work well with the LA50 driver??
    Esp. for the fonts, etc.)
    
    Thanks for the info,
    
    
    Mark

Re: .4

>    While I was thinking about that, I thought that since there are
>    some WP packages that store information in IFF format, that CSIX
>    might transform the information (text, fonts, bolding, etc. ) into
>    a printable sixel format file.

As is pointed out in .3, IFF chunks storing bit mapped graphics look
very differently internally to chunks storing text and font information.
Most of the utilities for converting IFF  to other graphics files (sixel,
postscript) only handle bit mapped graphics.  Thus, you probably
will not be able to take a word processor output file and convert it
to sixel.