Try to solve this one.

I would like to take my project which is 5 pages long and make it into a
four and a half minute slide show to be shown on the internet.

Each page consists of about a minute of tiny (2 point dia) circles
representing one second of time per circle. If it were a slide show at one second per
picture, only one circle needs to show on each picture. when viewed as a
slide show it should appear as a moving object, moving one second at a time.

The total is 252 seconds long so I need to make 252 sequential pages and
turn them into pictures which could run as a slide show.

PageStream is the only accurate positioning program for placing these
circles. (Short of some expensive CAD programs). None of the animation programs
have such precision. A letter size landscape page is what I am using now and 100
points equals one mile is the scale. The distance to be shown is about 9 and
a half miles shown diagonally on the page.

That's 950 points diagonally on the page.

Any questions? How's that for exercise?

Len Kmiecek


************************************** See what's free at http://www.aol.com.

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

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Len:

No one seems to have responded, so I'll try to get the ball rolling.

> PageStream is the only accurate positioning program for placing these
> circles. (Short of some expensive CAD programs)....

It's always interesting to see how people find ways of using
PageStream's more obscure virtues. Kudos for that.

But I'm not sure what you're trying to do exactly.

> I would like to take my project which is 5 pages long and make it into a
> four and a half minute slide show to be shown on the internet.
>
> The total is 252 seconds long so I need to make 252 sequential pages and
> turn them into pictures which could run as a slide show.
>

I take it the "animation" is separate from the five-page project. Or
perhaps a better way to put it is, the animation is an alternative
method of presenting the five-page project.

"Animating" a circle in PageStream should be easy enough. I would use a
custom page size with an appropriate aspect ratio such as 1:1.33 or
1:1.78. Create the first circle in the start position, then use the
transform tool with appropriate offsets, set Copies to "251" and
Increment Page to "1," and your animation drawings are done, unless you
need them to move nonlinearly or in a curve. For that you'd need
scripting or a lot of patience. Or both.

The real problem will be creating a file in some format for display.
I've no idea what the options are here, but I can guess at some of the
problems. To get to the Internet, you might need some sort of bitmap
format. You animation is a structured drawing, so you'd have to convert
it to some common graphic format such as .PNG. If you can convert each
individual page as a bitmap image, you've got a start on that. If you're
on Windows and have SnagIt, you might even be able to set up screen
captures limited to just the page area. In fact it's just barely
possible you can automate the whole process and end up with your
animation done. But you're likely to have resolution issues because it's
the screen display that's being captured. I believe Tracker Software has
a program that uses a virtual printer approach to convert print output
into common bitmap file types.

If you want or need to stay in a structured drawing realm, then I would
expect you'd have to take a more complex approach to the animation
because your circle drawings don't contain any information about their
position within the page. So, after animating the circles, you could
create a rectangle on the first page that fills the page corner to
corner. It could be invisible by unchecking the line and background fill
boxes, or you could make it a filled rectangle with a color treatment or
whatever. You would then use the Transform function again with the
offsets set to "0" and Stack set to "In Back."; At this point I'm out of
experience, but I believe you can use the layers palette to merge the
two layers on each page. That gives you a full set of structured
animation frames with the data needed to "move" the circles. From there
you need to find a way to convert the drawings to a structured drawing
format that would be understood by an animation utility. And I'm useless
there.

One way or another, your first, and perhaps biggest, problem is getting
your pages out of PageStream and into a format that other programs can
handle. Also with your two-point circle, you'll have to consider what
the resolution of the users' displays is likely to be. I'm guessing
you'll need a lowest common denominator size such as 640 x 400. The
apparent size of the dot will differ from one display to another, but
you'll want a size that will fit on everyone's display and allows for
the screen space occupied by other graphic elements on the web page and
the browers' GUIs themselves. To some extent, the whole idea of
"precision" goes out the window when you move to the Internet for
display purposes. I don't know how you factor that into the equation.
I'll just leave it to you.

And, no, I'm not going to ask you why you're doing this or who the
audience would be. I'll just wish you good luck. I'm sure that, when
you're further along, someone here will be able to give you better, more
extensive advice.

HB

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Hi

I am creating an A5 leaflet, using PGS4.1.5.6 on an Amigaone, and
I have a problem with bitmap backgrounds.

Essentially, the leaflet is for club members to get a free games console,
either a PS3, an XBox360, or a Wii. I have downloaded some jpeg
pictures from the web to use for illustrative purposes.

Everything is laid out accross four pages, but on the front page I wanted
to put coloured shapes behind the pictures, to give them a splash, and thats
when I discovered that the jpeg's have a white backround.

I know this is probably a very simple solution, but how do I remove the
background, or make it transparent.

I have ImageFX 4.5 on my A1, but my default settings on that mailing list
are on a daily digest, and I need to wait until tomorrow for my pref changes
to take effect.

So by chance, I thought someone on this list might be able to help.

Thanks in advance

Peter Swallow (aka Swoop)

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.

peter wrote:
> Hi
>
> I am creating an A5 leaflet, using PGS4.1.5.6 on an Amigaone, and
> I have a problem with bitmap backgrounds.
>
> Essentially, the leaflet is for club members to get a free games console,
> either a PS3, an XBox360, or a Wii. I have downloaded some jpeg
>; pictures from the web to use for illustrative purposes.
>
> Everything is laid out accross four pages, but on the front page I wanted
> to put coloured shapes behind the pictures, to give them a splash, and thats
> when I discovered that the jpeg's have a white backround.
>
> I know this is probably a very simple solution, but how do I remove the
> background, or make it transparent.

Can`t be done with jpegs but if you convert them to .gif . . . . .



--
Tony Cooke
http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/tonyandgillcooke/
Wisdom consists of the anticipation of consequences. -Norman Cousins

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peter:

> ...Everything is laid out accross four pages, but on the front page I wanted
> to put coloured shapes behind the pictures, to give them a splash, and thats
> when I discovered that the jpeg's have a white backround.
>

You can try Object | Mask | Generate Mask. Trouble is this only wipes
out the white areas around the picture, not most of the white areas
within it. But, with the right image, it might work. In the meantime, it
would probably work well enough to allow you to work on the placement of
the colored shapes.

The sure fire way is to convert the JPEG to a format that supports
transparency. My personal favorite is PNG, if you have the option in
ImageFX to have it use white as the transparent color. My second choice
would be GIF. Also, PageStream used to support Deluxe Paint brushes on
the Amiga. I suppose you could turn the whole picture into a brush.

Also, don't forget that you can now set the transparency of objects
within PageStream. If it's acceptable to have color blend with the
graphics, you might be able to do something creative with that. It
wouldn't be the effect you're looking for, but it could be nice.

HB

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On Tuesday 12 June 2007, peter wrote:
> Hi
>
> I am creating an A5 leaflet, using PGS4.1.5.6 on an Amigaone, and
> I have a problem with bitmap backgrounds.
>
> Essentially, the leaflet is for club members to get a free games console,
> either a PS3, an XBox360, or a Wii. I have downloaded some jpeg
>; pictures from the web to use for illustrative purposes.
>
> Everything is laid out accross four pages, but on the front page I wanted
> to put coloured shapes behind the pictures, to give them a splash, and
> thats when I discovered that the jpeg's have a white backround.
>
> I know this is probably a very simple solution, but how do I remove the
> background, or make it transparent.
>
> I have ImageFX 4.5 on my A1, but my default settings on that mailing list
>; are on a daily digest, and I need to wait until tomorrow for my pref
>; changes to take effect.
>
> So by chance, I thought someone on this list might be able to help.

As far as I know jpeg doesn't support transparency and it certainly doesn't in
PageStream. If the white is just around the edge you can "make it
transparent" in PageStream by using a mask.

I let PgS generate a mask (for best results make sure the graphic is *not*
external). The automatically generated mask may not meet your needs (I've
described in detail previously on this list how the automatic mask generation
works) -- if that is the case select the graphic and choose "release mask"
from the menu. You can then edit the path as needed and re-mask the graphic
by selecting both the mask and the jpg and choosing "mask graphic" from the
menu.

If the transparency is not just the edges (e.g., the graphic is like a donut
with a "hole" in the middle) masking will not work for you. At that point you
have two options:

1. GIF. The gif image supports 1-bit transparency. Basically one of the
palette colors becomes transparent. The downside is gif is limited to an
8-bit palette which may not be enough if the graphic has smooth, continuous
tones.

2. PNG. The png image supports 8-bit alpha channel which allows feathered
edges, translucency, etc. Unfortunately printing a PNG image with
transparency from PageStream only works for bitmap printers: with a
postscript printer the underlying color is what is printed.

Tim Doty

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Tim and Peter:
> ...As far as I know jpeg doesn't support transparency...

No, it doesn't. I thought JPEG 2000 might, but from what I can tell it
merely supports an alternative lossless compression scheme. I suppose
the lossy compression might employ a different compression method than
the regular JPEG format, but I haven't looked it up on the web, so I
can't say.

> ...2. PNG. The png image supports 8-bit alpha channel which allows feathered
> edges, translucency, etc....

Some image conversion software allows you to specify a transparent color
as an alternative to the alpha channel in the PNG format. I don't know
what options are available in ImageFX. I have a very old ImageFX manual,
and PNG isn't even in the index. But that could easily have changed by now.

If PageStream supports the PhotoShop format (.psd), that's an
alternative as well. PSD is often a supported format in the Windows
world. It tends to be available as the "portable" format of choice for
graphics programs which, like it, support layers. I believe some Amiga
paint programs do support layers, so that may be available in ImageFX.

The question is, does PageStream support PSD. I don't think so. If not,
it should be noted as a feature request. For better or worse, PhotoShop
is the application of choice among professional graphics designers.
PageStream need not support the layers feature per se, although that
would be nice. You can always save the file as a merged image. But being
able to retrieve individual layers could be useful as well. My image
cataloging program can do that, and I can see uses for it.

HB

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AmerPilots%40aol.com">AmerPilotsaol.com wrote:
> I would like to take my project which is 5 pages long and make it into a
> four and a half minute slide show to be shown on the internet.
>
> Each page consists of about a minute of tiny (2 point dia) circles
> representing one second of time per circle. If it were a slide show at one second per
> picture, only one circle needs to show on each picture. when viewed as a
> slide show it should appear as a moving object, moving one second at a time.
>
> The total is 252 seconds long so I need to make 252 sequential pages and
> turn them into pictures which could run as a slide show.
>
> PageStream is the only accurate positioning program for placing these
> circles. (Short of some expensive CAD programs). None of the animation programs
> have such precision. A letter size landscape page is what I am using now and 100
> points equals one mile is the scale. The distance to be shown is about 9 and
> a half miles shown diagonally on the page.
>
> That's 950 points diagonally on the page.
>
> Any questions? How's that for exercise?
>
> Len Kmiecek
>
Hi Len,
One idea is to "print" to a gif bitmap. Each page will rendered into a
bitmap and given a name like "outputname.##.gif". I am sure a tool
exists to combine many gifs into an animation. Otherwise, simple html
can turn the page automatically but you can't be sure of the timing.

Deron

--
Deron Kazmaier - support%40pagestream.org">supportpagestream.org
Grasshopper LLC Publishing - http://www.pagestream.org
PageStream DTP for Amiga, Linux, Macintosh, and Windows

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