PC Tech: A Word on Fonts (Continued)

Factual Questions
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      • Uh, this is rather complicated, but sometimes brilliance is like that. Often idiocy too, but anyway:
  • To edit images that contain text, I have been printing out a copy of a Word document and then scannning it back in at 600 dpi. This seems to work best, but it is rather wastful of paper. The image editing program I am using (Paint Shop Pro) has a screen capture feature that I’ve tried, but for text it don’t work so hot: if I set the font size in Word to a small size, like 12 or 14 (so that I can get normal paragraph widths) the text is antialiased when captured. Then when I reduce it to 2-color, it looks all chunky. (Actually, for some fonts this adds a rather interesting effect: especially to fancy calligraphy-style fonts. Gives a kind of techno-look.) If I set the font size real big, the resolution of the text looks much better but I can only get ten or twelve letters per line, so that’s no good either.
    -The twist here is that I can print out a copy of a document at a regular size of 72 dpi, and then scan it back in at 600 dpi, and the text looks good. I cannot, however, use the screen capture to capture the document on-screen at 600 dpi, only at its “current at the time of capture” resolution of 72 dpi. See?
    -I tried using Word’s “print to file” feature, but it sends to a .prn file, which Paint Shop Pro won’t open.
    ~ Okay, here’s the question(s): Are there any free programs out there that can directly create an image file from a .PRN file? And if there is, will the .prn file be a vector file or a bitmap (or other raster) file? [A vector file would be just peachy, for enlargement purposes] And I should have Photoshop within a couple weeks- can Photoshop do this (convert from a .prn file)? - MC
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AFAIK, the .prn extension really doesn’t denote a file type of any sort, that’s just the extension windows uses when you print to a file. The exact file format depends on what printer you specified.

I’ve done this a couple of different ways. In each case, I created a dummy printer under windows, then printed to that printer (but redirected the output to a file). Since I knew the format the dummy printer used, I knew the format of the resulting prn file.

For example, if you have an image editing program that can interpret postscript, create a dummy postscript printer (I think I used HP LaserJet4/4M PostScript the last time I did this). Now, every time you print to this “printer”, the print driver converts your image into postscript, and saves it into the file you specify. Even though it uses the .prn extension, it’s really postscript, and should have a .ps extension. There free programs on the web to convert postscript files to other formats, such as Adobe PDB and bitmaps (Ghostview is one).
If you can’t use postscript format, another option is HPGL, understood by HP laser printers. Some graphics software can convert from HPGL to other formats (such as bmp, etc.). Create a dummy HP LAserJet 4L printer, and print to it.

A handy trick for converting documents to pure text is to create a text-only dummy printer- choose “Generic, Text only” under the add printer wizard in Windows.

Arjuna34

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Why are you reducing to two color anyway?
And seems you really need software that adds a pixel or two of black to imitate anti-aliased sections, smoothing them.
In fiddling around with The GIMP right now, I found that a fuzzy image became static when reduced to b&w. But pushing it up to rgb again, then doing a despeckle, then reducing to b&w again worked quite nicely.
Dunno what would work best in your case, but all this printing in scanning seems like more trouble then it is worth…

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FWIW, Adobe Photoshop can read postscript files.

Arjuna34