Lotus Manuscript graphics

Latest revision as of 04:06, 28 December 2023

Lotus Manuscript was a word processor for DOS. It apparently had native .BIT and .RLE raster graphics formats.

[edit] File structure

This section is based on educated guesswork, from observing the behavior of ART2WP and TGL+.

Files have a 9-byte header. Byte order is little-endian.

Offset  Size  Description
------  ----  -----------
0       1     ASCII 'B' for BIT format, 'R' for RLE
1       2     Dots per inch (don't know if x or y)
3       2     Dots per inch
5       2     Height in pixels
7       2     Width in bytes. Multiply by 8 to get width in pixels.
9       var.  Image data

RLE image data uses a simple pixel-oriented format. Each byte encodes a run of white or black pixels. The high bit is the color. The low 7 bits are the number of pixels, with an encoded value of 0 meaning 128.

[edit] Software

• The Graphics Link Plus v2.00a - DOS utility that can read and write BIT format
• ART2WP v1.7 - DOS utility that can write BIT and RLE formats
• ART2WP v2.1 (RLE support seems broken in this version)
• PixEdit/PixView - Commercial software that claims to read .BIT format
• Deark

[edit] Sample files

• dexvert samples — image/lotusManuscriptGraphic

[edit] Links

• Wikipedia: Lotus Manuscript