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To: Nate Williams <nate@mt.sri.com>
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Subject: Re: HPGL format 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Fri, 12 Sep 1997 11:51:21 CST."
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Date: Sat, 13 Sep 1997 03:25:37 +0930
From: Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au>
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> > > Does anyone know how to convert this to something a bit more standard?
> > 
> > Like what?
> 
> Gif, or some other image.

Ok, so you want to rasterise it.

> > MS Word for Windows 2.0 had a reasonable HPGL import 
> > module; it wasn't shipped with 6.0 but worked OK there too.  You ended 
> > up with a WMF embedded in your Word document, but couldn't do much more 
> > with it.
> 
> Hmm, could I cut/paste from it into something like paint-brush, and end
> up with a GIF/TIF from it?

You could take a screen grab of it, but not, AFAIR, at any other 
resolution.  ie. the rasteriser generated the image at screen 
resolution for display, and printer resolution for printing, but not at 
some arbitrary resolution for cut-n-paste.

> > Short of that, write your own HPGL parser; it's pretty trivial(*).
> 
> It'd be easier to print the darn thing and scan it, but we'd rather not
> lose the resolution in the process.

Understood.  How big is the image?  Various ugly thoughts come to mind 
(eg. write a parser in Tcl, render the image onto a canvas and then 
dump the canvas as Postscript), but many of them are a bit gutless.

Someone else here may have written an HPGL rasteriser of course.

mike