Fantastic—I’ve written a QuickDraw PICT converter, but I focused narrowly on just extracting pixel data. The format is basically a way to encode QuickDraw drawing commands, and getting the original image back (in the general case) means reimplementing QuickDraw.
The old Mac game Avara used this format for levels. It was funky… you could place blocks in a 3D world, and control elevation and height by changing the corner radius of rectangles. You needed a QuickDraw image editor to make levels, like ClarisDraw.
By dietrichepp 3 hours ago
Opened a few PICT files I threw at it.
Looking for an Export… item but did not see that. I suppose one reason to open an old PICT file is to save it as a PNG or something that will be easier to open in the future.
By JKCalhoun 6 hours ago
Given that PICT is a vector format at heart, what'd be ideal would be a conversion to SVG. At one point I had part of a tool written to do that, but it didn't handle text very well.
By duskwuff 5 hours ago
Is it a vector format? It could capture pixels as well, and patterns.
It is, in one variant anyway, a re-playing (capture) of the QuickDraw drawing commands. It is one reason it is a hard format to decode without having the original Mac Toolbox QuickDraw code handy.
By JKCalhoun 5 hours ago
It was a vector format which could contain embedded bitmaps - which also neatly describes SVG. The format was fairly well documented in "Inside Macintosh: Imaging With QuickDraw", particularly appendix A ("Picture Opcodes").
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