Have you ever wondered if a picture is version1 or version 2? If you have all the fonts that the picture was originally created with? Or what kinds of QuickDraw objects the picture contains?
With System 7 Apple has provided a new and easy way to get information out of a picture called the Picture Utilities Package. PICT Informer is simply an implementation of GetPictInfo, the main call in that package. PICT Informer will open PICT files or PICT resources and show the picture in a window. To see the PictInfo information, just choose Show Info from the File menu or double-click in the picture’s window.
Using the Palette menu, you can also choose how Picture Utilities will create the window’s palette. The two choices are Popular Method and Median Method. (System Method just lets Picture Utilities make the choice and it will usually choose Popular Method.) You probably won’t see a difference between the palettes created by the two methods unless the picture you are displaying has more colors than the current screen depth.
PICT Informer will request palette sizes based on the current screen depth. Therefore, if you want to see how Median chooses 16 colors, set your screen to 16 colors. If you want to see how Median chooses 4 grays, set your screen to 4 grays.
If you have your own picker method you can try it out by installing it as a ‘cpmt’ 128 resource. If PICT Informer finds a cpmt 128 at startup it will enable the Custom Method item in the Palette menu.
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Miscellaneous Notes:
If the windows occasionally seem to be placed strangely that is due to System 7's automatic window staggering. If it is too annoying you can use ResEdit to change the placement of the WIND 1000 resource to None or Center.
The Open… dialog filters for files of type “APPL” or “rsrc” but you can drag and drop any type of file into the application.
Of course PICT Informer requires System 7 or above.
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PICT Informer is not public domain, however it is free for your use and may be freely distributed as long as this Read Me file remains with it.
