When I print from my beloved PaintBrush program, which has features so-called better programs don’t have (like you can shrink and grow but on all the others I know of youhave to drag borders, and this does not result in the same interesting effects), usually it prints perfectly the image on my screen, but it puts thin straight lines all over the picture when it comes out. Sometimes it doesn’t but it usually does. It can’t be the printer because when I print from the internet or from Word Perfect it prints fine with no added strange lines.
My Paintbrush has been taken from my originalcomputer here at work and put on subsequent computers that Ikeep getting because there is something wrong with all of them, such as the horizontal disk thing doesn’t work that plays cd’s, on one of them the internet and e-mail thing didn’t work, etc.
On the last computer I had the Paintbrush program made an automatic black block sometimes and other times strange lines right on the screen when I would “reverse horizontal” the image! Once in awhile it wouldn’t do this but it did it most of the time. Then there was another computer I had when my Paintbrush, also imported to that one with all my files as usual, sometimes placed light blue dashes in “capture” instead of black dashes. The difference that made was the captured blue box wasn’t transparent over whatever I moved it to, whereas the black dotted outline box was, whichis the way it was supposed to be.
Any suggestions to get rid of the latest computer adding lines all over my drawings when they are printed?
I remember this way back from the days of DOS 2.0. It is caused by Paintbrush’s inability to properly rescale pictures. Print them at precisely 100% and the effect should disappear. Don’t shrink images inside Paintbrush, it will also cause this effect.
Paintbrush is long dead. Get a new paint program. Like something written within the last decade, at least. If you were still using a computer as old as Paintbrush, it would be an IBM PC with an 8086 processor. My dishwasher has a more advanced CPU than that.
Thanks, I’ll try that. However, what graphics programs will shrink and grow? I mean you can capture something on the screen, then press shrink and grow and then make your mouse make a rectangle or square either larger or smaller than the original picture, and it will print it to that size.Whereas the other programs I’ve seen you have to DRAG BORDERS, which DOESN’T GIVE THE SAME EFFECT.
Also, there are other features LOST after PaintBrush was no longer used. For instance it had an option when you went to print the picture where you could press what per cent you wanted the print to be, and 137% was perfect, for instance, and always worked fine.
In addition, it was not until this fourth computer they’ve given me that the PaintBrush makes these lines when it prints. It makes them whether I enlarge on print or not. What kind of circuitry could possible be in there to make these lines most of the time, but sometimes not, and sometimes make them all across the whole picture, sometimes just all along the top and bottom but not in the middle of the picture, and so forth, as if there were a mind in there. (Ie., I’m always curious when a computer seems to be doing something completely capriciously, since caprice is supposed to be only for humans and some of the more imaginative animals. To do something one way one time and not the next and another way the third time without my changing any settings strikes me as very mysterious).
Look, I can’t really help you further, you’re beating a dead horse here. I assure you that modern graphics programs have all the features you need, and more, although they probably don’t work in the way you like them to. But that is a good thing, graphics technology has progressed considerably since the heyday of PC Paintbrush in about 1983. I haven’t used Paintbrush since I ditched my PCjr in about 1984.
I suggest you head over to tucows.com or some similar place, and search for a new paint program. There are plenty of cheap or even free programs that have all the features of Paintbrush, and more. You deserve a better graphics program than Paintbrush.
Not that mysterious. The old PB code probably has difficultly handling certain types of picture data. I’m still not groking why a decent modern image editing program won’t let you scale the size of the printed picture? There are lots of programs that will do this and I have used them for this.
What specifically can you do with paintbrush that you can’t with say, Adobe Photoshop. What “effect” are you getting with PB that simply scaling the image size to a desired print size won’t give you in an image editing program.
I will admit that a simple way to scale print size is lacking from some of the higher end programs and you have to go through several steps to get the picture sized and centered correctly.
There is a good, mid-level Microsoft image editor with a nice feature set that has a very simple, flexible and intuitive print scaler and centering tool. It’s a “hidden” program on the MS Office 2000 disk and you have to go under install options for the “office tools” section of Disk 1 to find it and install it. It’s called Microsoft Photo Editor. It’s not the giant MS Image Editing program on the last two whole CDs of the full Office 2000 set. It takes just a second to install. I use this when printing digital images because the print scaling and centering adjustment features are so easy to use.
I’ll look for the suggested programs. The “Shrink and Grow”
option applied repeatedly to a drawing in various widths and lengths created interesting distortions and simplifications that could be enlarged yet again. One result was the magnification of the pixels of an original picture that made an abstract pattern that was more interesting than the original. It could do things with lettering that were visually interesting. Two programs they put on for me at work here had no Shrink and Grow option, just boundary dragging and for some reason this doesn’t give the same results… Plus dozens of experiments in aesthetics, not to put too fine a point on it, are in my files and what becomes of them in going to a new graphics program?
I just never realized I guess and can’t face up to the fact that whatever you do or have or get used to on a computer is actually not forever in the same way as in the days of typewriters and paper. The overall gain over typewriters is actually zero when you list all the good features of computers and then subtract the bad ones, such as unreliability, breakdowns, having to have an enormous book that tells you how to work them, constant change as if Mao tse tung were in charge and wanted to shake everybody up at all times, high expense, need for programs to be put into something I think should already be there, too many options I have no interest in that raise the cost and lower the usability of the machine etc.
But I can’t complain because PaintBrush was very easy to use precisely because it didn’t have so many options that they just confuse anybody except somebody interested in computers as a challenge.
However, I see your point, and thanks for the help.
PaintBrush needs a new printer driver for the printer you are using.
There are some third party printer drivers programs that are nice like Superprint that correct these things.
don, I think the “interesting effects” you like are actually the result of errors in the algorithms paintbrush uses to shrink and grow. I don’t understand your aversion to dragging borders though. The patterns you get in paintbrush are probably moire interference patterns, which more modern software eliminates because they are generally undesired effects.
Why don’t you look up “moire interference pattern” in a search engine, and see if the effects are what you were describing.
I would suggest a great free image manipulation program (the Gimp), but the learning curve is quite steep, and you don’t seem to be interested in learning new programs.
On the bright side, the files you already have will probably be able to be read by any more recent image editing program you get now. Paintbrush deals mainly with .bmp files, which any similar program should be able to handle.