__/ [Logan Shaw] on Monday 19 September 2005 21:48 \__
> sreekant wrote:
>> I am at the moment toying with the idea of storyboarding using my Palm
>> M150. I am using the notepad program that comes with it.
>>
>> Is there a way of converting all the data from notepad to individual
>> images of some sort! It seem to be stored in a pdb format single file. I
>> am hoping there is some program , preferably linux prog, that allows me
>> to convert this multi image pdb file to individual standard image format
>> files i:e; jpeg, tiff, pnm, gif or similar.
>
> Someone else already gave a way to do this, and I don't have a better
> idea, but I would like to make a comment about the suitability of JPEGs
> for this purpose.
>
> JPEG is particularly ill-suited to compressing "line art" images like
> you will get from the notepad (1-bit images where the majority of
> the pixels are white). JPEG will have to convert the 1-bit image to
> an 8-bit greyscale image, and then after that it will compress the
> 8-bit image using its lossy algorithm, which is particularly bad on
> sharp transitions, which the 8-bit image will be full of. So, you
> will get bad quality and large file sizes. :-)
>
> TIFF would probably be the most efficient format, because TIFF can
> support a CCITT compression standard that is used on fax machines,
> and a fax image has basically exactly the same characteristics as
> your image (except it also has more noise).
>
> However, TIFF is not as widely supported as PNG, and PNG will likely
> to almost as well as TIFF, so PNG is probably your best bet. GIF might
> do as well as PNG, but even though it's no longer patent-encumbered,
> its past problems with patents have made it less widely supported.
>
> By the way, it's a good bet that the data inside that PDB is a standard
> Palm bitmap, or some kind of record with the title and stuff followed
> by a Palm bitmap. If you're handy with C or Perl or something, it
> wouldn't be too huge a project to write a program to decode the PDB
> directly. It's unlikely, but you might even use be able to use the "par"
> program to extract the PDB's individual records to files, and then use
> an image format conversion to convert those to PNG or whatever.
If you are on Linux, as you suggested you are, use 'import' from the
command-line (the front line *smile*). With the Note Pad viewer somewhere
in sight, call:
import mynote.png
Then, draw a recangle around the memo. Like Logan correctly pointed, out
JPEG's suit natural images better -- images containing a variety of tones
with some aspect of continuity.
Roy
PS - I try to never use Note Pad because it does not contain textual
information in a proper form. it is not indexable, searchable, or
re-usable. The only exception, for me at least, is doodling of maps.
--
Roy S. Schestowitz | Y |-(1^2)|^(1/2)+1 K
http://Schestowitz.com | SuSE Linux | PGP-Key: 74572E8E
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