Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!purdue!decwrl!ucbvax!ENEEVAX.UMD.EDU!eugene
From: eugene@ENEEVAX.UMD.EDU (Eugene Day)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sgi
Subject: converting from raster to vector ??!!
Message-ID: <8809230217.AA02355@eneevax.umd.edu>
Date: 23 Sep 88 11:02:25 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
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X-Unparsable-Date: Thu, 22 Sep 88 22:17:22 ]Io


	Date: Sun, 18 Sep 88 18:42:27 ]Io
	From: Russ Byrne 
	To: info-iris@BRL.MIL
	
	Subject: Pix file to HP-GL file conversion (for plotting)
	
	I neglected to specify what I meant by "pix" file format, as
	Phil Dykstra pointed out.  I mean the format used in the BRL
	tools, i.e., the 24 bit per pixel color image format read by such
	utilities as pix-bw, etc.  The files are called file.pix usually.
	
	What I'd like to be able to do is plot (on a large HP plotter) an
	image (mostly vectors) displayed on the IRIS screen, without recoding 
	my graphics to use other plotting primatives discussed in the libplot 
	documentation from BRL.  I've got a utility that will dump the screen 
	into .pix format, and then laser print on an Imagen laser printer 
	(using pix-bw and bw-impress), but what about a nice big color plot?
	
	Has anyone done this?  The main step is to convert the file from raster 
	to vector format...
	
The HP plotter is a vector device, and your original data is vector format.
"derasterizing" is not straight forward, although there are image scanning
systems which sort of do it with manual cleanup. I would strongly suggest
diverting the data toward hard copy at an earlier stage in the process (before
displaying to screen).