Universal Filter

The Image Filter for the Amiga PageStream DTP Program

Introduction

The free Amiga Universal filter is for use with the commercial Amiga Desktop Publishing Program PageStream V3/4. The filter does add support for new image formats to your PageStream program. It also improves loading image formats already supported by PageStream.

Similar to ICS the Universal filter shipps with the IRW library currently supporting:

• BMP with 1, 4, 8, 16, 24 and 32 Bit, Windows V3 and OS/2 format, RLE4, 8, 24 compression
• DataTypes: OS 3.0 DataTypes
• DCX (only the first image is loaded by Universal filter)
• GIF (note: not available in all distributions)
• IFF ILBM including HAM, HAM8, EHB, CMYK
• JPEG: 8, 24 and 32 Bit JFIF, CMYK, progressive JPEG
• PCX: 1,2,4,8 and 24 Bit images
• PGM/PBM/PPM: P1-P6 types with up to 48 Bit
• PNG: 1-48 Bit, incl. interlaced
• Targa: supports all known RGB, RGBA types incl. compression
• TIFF: 1-64 Bit, RGB, RGBA, CMYK, YCbCr with None, PackBits, RLE, JPEG, G3, G4 and Next compression, Strips or Tiles, Packed or separate color (LZW compression not available in all distributions).

New Since Version 1.xx

• The Universal filter is now free to any PageStream user - But please report any problems you have with the filter to keep it free!
• The Universal filter V2 is now using the IRW library to load images. The IRW library is one of the basic components under development for color management applications. The IRW library allows reading basicly any type of color data (palette, images...) in basicly any color space. The library is also designed to handle all the extras that can be found in an image, including future additions.
• Now image data can be loaded with a palette and CMYK mode. So <8Bit data is not converted to 8 or 24 Bit anymore. This makes loading faster and requires less memory.
• The IRW library does support many new data types: CMYK, 16 Bit and such. Note that PageStream currently does not handle things like 16 Bit, ICC or IPTC support as offered by the IRW library. The filter automaticly converts data whenever possible.
• New image formats are supported. However, IFF DEEP support is currently removed until the old IFF code is rewritten and added to IRW. Similar, I haven't found the time to add 24 Bit OS 3.5/3.9 Datatype support yet. Keep using the V1 filter in case you must load IFF DEEP.
• PageStream does load all filters into memory during startup. Thanks to the image routines now being part of the external IRW library, the new universal filter requires nearly no memory unless an image is loaded and even than it now requires much less memory.
• The IRW library does allow reading a complete image into memory without require a prescan of the image like the old routines. This can dramaticly lower loading times.
• The filter currently does not use IRW library for adding new image formats for saving. Hopefully I (or someone else?) will find the time to add this feature to the Universal filter soon.
• Reliability is a major concern. Roughly 30 percent of the work involved was dedicated to error handling. IRW does detailed error messages including hints how to solve problems if available. The error messages are localized and often offer a Retry option where possible.
• All format specific details are handled by the IRW library. This allows adding new features and settings to the IRW library without requiring the Universal filter to be changed or updated. Also, IRW and Universal filter are written in a portable way. So we hopefully will see a version of the Universal filter for PC.

New Since Version 2.00

• HHV crashed as IRW library was called without enough free stack memory.
  IRW library now uses less memory and hopefully avoids these type of crashes until the PageStream distribution was changed.
• Color images with palette could cause PageStream to crash because a faulty palette size was reported by the filter.
• pnglib was updated to newer distribution
• Failures during BMP header access may not be reported to user (but correctly to application).

New Since Version 2.10

• Major speed improvement especialy with TIFF single strip images
• IRW: Possible Enforcer hit fixed when trying to load an unsupported file format.
• IRW: "MacBinary" files are now supported with TIFF, GIF and JPEG data.
• IRW: tiff/png code updated
  

For further questions contact the author Wolf Faust.

Download

Important: please note that german law applies on this site. Downloads from users outside germany are made on their own risk. It is up to the foreign downloader to respect his local law or customs.

Download Universal filter V2.20 from this german site.

Universal.lha (~850 KByte; software incl. english and german manual).

Also check the www.coloraid.de ring!