WMFAPMF.EXE

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Does Aldus ring a bell? I found this when Googling for the file:

5/8/95 S15287 WMFAPMF.EXE SAMPLE: Read & Write Aldus Placeable Metafiles

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I was cleaning out some old and unwanted Start Menu entries today and I came across this one: WMFAPMF.EXE. I’m quite sure that it has to do with Windows Metafiles, but beyond that my mind is blank. When I try and run it, I get an error. So, can someone enlighten me as to what this little program does, what this Error indicates and any suggestions as to providing a fix.

Jeff

EDIT: I found a fix for the error and now the program runs.. see here: Fix for this Error I would still like to know how to effectively use this program. hehe

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According to this newsgroup thread,[indent]

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There’s a tiny, old, unsupported MS app called WMFAPMF.EXE that allows pasting the copied vector objects on the clipboard, then saving as .wmf.

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[/indent](The author Alan might be our resident freeware search engine )

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Hans,

Could you or someone else possibly give me a practical example of how to use this thing? I know that many of Office’s “Clipart” objects are .wmf type files. So, using this program to copy/paste them wouldn’t be to any advantage when/if you can copy/paste them in the regular way. Sorry if I’m being overly dense.

Jeff

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I had never heard of this utility before you mentioned it

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I peddled this app a few times here Jeff. See post 315,536 and the associated link. Believe me, at 10KB it’s a keeper!

The main thing I’ve used it for is as an easy way of saving a drawing in an application (XL chart, hand-drawn schematic in Word etc.) to a standalone WMF (a scalable vector graphic format). I used it for in the past as a quick & dirty way to extract the graphics from RTF documents and replace them with references to the WMFs thus created. The problem back then was that the Windows Help File Compiler would choke easily on big files, but not groups of smaller files that used links, as opposed to embedded objects.

Further back still, when the WMF format was a new format, Aldus developed its own sub-format, called a “placeable metafile”. This was seen as an improvement to the format, so lots of developers adopted it as the standard in their own software. Consequently, such software would often cough at WMFs that didn’t conform to the Aldus standard. A group of MS developers, frustrated by what they saw as a spanner in the works, got together one weekend and knocked up WMFAPMF.EXE – an unsupported utility for converting between placeable and standard WMFs. A handy by-product of this was that they (perhaps unintentionally) also provided a free means of saving a bunch of vector objects to a bona fide vector file format.

Alan

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Doesn’t tell me much more than this little application has something to do with Windows Metafiles (graphic format). A couple of years ago I grabbed this little thing and even used it. But senility has set in and I simply can’t remember what I used it for. In fact, it might have been a thread in this forum that got me onto this program.

Jeff

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