Tech Note: Printing Bitmap Files in .GIF or .JPG Format

Products: PrintOMatic Lite MX, PrintOMatic Lite Xtra 1.6.5, PrintOMatic MX, PrintOMatic Xtra 1.6.5
Platforms: all

PrintOMatic offers limited support for printing bitmap file formats from disk. The reason for this limitation is simple: Director offers a rich wealth of import filters that PrintOMatic can already utilize.

The basic strategy is to create a "dummy" bitmap cast member, whose contents are imported as "linked to file" (when you import the cast member graphic). It doesn’t really matter what file you link to initially.

Then, when you want to print an image from disk, you load the image into your dummy cast-member using Lingo:

set the fileName of member X = "myimage.jpg"

Once the member is loaded utilizing Director’s import plugins, then you can append the member to your PrintOMatic document, or simply print it directly:

print member X