PICT Printing Limitations

One of the Newton 2.x OS Q&As
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This document was exported on 7/23/97.

PICT Printing Limitations (6/9/94)

Q: My large pictures cannot print on my LaserWriter. Is there a maximum size Newton picture?

A: The current PostScript printing system in the Newton ROMs is unable to print extremely large individual bitmap frames, the kind of pictures created using the NTK Picture editor or the GetPictAsBits routine. This is because in order to print these, the Newton must copy the bitmaps into an internal buffer. Thus the GetPictAsBits case fails (current limitation is a 168K buffer, but do not rely on a specific number for other Newton devices).

Using the GetNamedResource(..., 'picture) routine, you can use PICT resources to be drawn in clPictureViews. MacOS PICT resources often contain multiple opcodes (instructions). For single-opcode PICTs, compression is done for the whole picture. You can check Inside Macintosh documentation for specifications of the PICT format. If you are using very large bitmaps which you will print, you should use PICT resources composed of many smaller 'bitmap copy' opcodes because they will print much faster and more reliably on PostScript printers. This is because very large PICT opcodes printed to LaserWriters must be decompressed on the printer. The printer's decompression buffer is sometimes too small if the opcodes represent large bitmaps. Check your MacOS graphics application documentation for more information on segmenting your large PICTs into smaller pieces. For some applications, you might have two versions of the PICTs, one for displaying (using GetPictAsBits for faster screen drawing), and a large tiled PICT for printing.

Starting with Newton 2.1 OS, color PICTs (PICT 2) are supported. Colors will be interpolated into gray values.