>>>Hi
>>>
>>>We are capturing signatures on handhelds carried by delivery drivers - we are currently exploring exporting these as a text file and converting to bmp in the receiving system - anyone have any experience of conversion to image files in this way?
>>
>>Download Print2Pdf (look here or on the wiki) and then change the parameters for the ghostscript call from "use pdf driver" to "use png driver" (or jpg) - just save yourself some space and don't go bmp, that's using too much diskspace even by today's standards.
>>
>>Alternately, there are print drivers which print to fax or tiff - some come with Office, you may use those.
>>
>>In an app to distribute worldwide I may think twice about what's installed on users' machines, but if these machines are under your control, then you may make sure necessary pieces are installed. The first solution is a freebie.
>>
>>[update]
>>Now that I've seen the textfile, it should be a breeze to convert that into a short and sweet PostScript text that you could store, and convert into whatever you want via GhostScript - bitmap image, vector graphics, PDF.
>
>Thanks a lot for your reply - I'll give it a go
>
>I need also to be able to do this conversion from within VFP - is that possible?

How else? :)

Print2Pdf is a Vfp class written by Paul James, and it's basically a wrapper around the task of printing into a postscript file using the supplied freebie driver from Adobe (needs some setup) and then passing that file to GhostScript to make a pdf out of it - but GS can output many other formats, and can take .ps files generated by anything. Few years ago I was writing .ps straight from VFP, using textmerge, and then GS exported them into png files - with the intent to have personalized graphics for a webpage generated on-the-fly. And the speed was just fine then; now it would be a snap.