February 16, 2005

This is the first version of pix2pcx.  There is no license, you
are free to do anything you like with this code.  There is also
no guarantee that this software will work as advertised, so
use it with care.

I had an old technical report I had written using Wordstar with
PIX graphics for graphs and equations.  When I tried to migrate this
report to newer word processors (Open Office and Word) I found
that the linked graphics files were not imported.

I looked for some available (free) translation program without
any luck, so I decided to write one.  This is it.  The source file
contains a brief version of the PIX format spec for reference.

This programs reads an Inset PIX file and writes it out in PCX
format.

To install the source, untar the pic2pcx.tar.gz file in the
directory of your choice.  All the files will go into a
subdirectory named pix2pcx.

In this directory will be the source, a Linux build script, and a 
converted example file: fig1.pix -> fig1.pcx.  An executable file 
will also be here which was built on my Slackware 10.0 Linux 
distribution.

To build in Linux, change to the pic2pcx directory and execute the
build script as "./build".  The GCC compiler is invoked by the 
script, although the code is plain vanilla and should compile 
pretty much anywhere.

In the directory visualc are all the Visual C++ 6.0 files for
compiling under Windows.  The example files are also located in
the visualc/pix2pcx/Debug directory for convenience.  The Visual 
C++ project files are in the visualc/pix2pcx directory so they 
can be used for a build in Windows.

To use the program execute the command "pix2pcx filename.pix"
and the program will create a filename.pcx output file.

Known Limitations:  Right now the program handles pix files
which consist of horizontal tiles only.  No vertical tiling
except exactly one is handled.  If an input file with more than
one vertical tile is processed, an error message is printed and
execution is aborted.

I don't have a pix file with more than one vertical tile, so
I couldn't implement this feature.  If somebody is willing to
send me one, I'll fix the problem.

Also, the program is designed to process bit mapped graphics files.
If a pix text file is used as input, the results will be bad.
 
Ed Crenshaw
egc@netcarrier.com

