*.8BF File Format

[Don Boston]

Greets, I am in the process of creating a utility which will have many
handy features for the end user, who uses Photoshop and works with HTML.

Did that make sense? Hrmmm

Anyways, I am trying to "decompile" the Plugin format, in an effort to
pull the name of the filter. Part of the program that I am writing is a
plugin manager. I could gather the info manually, and compile an ini
file, but I would rather read the users plugins directory and gathering
the information real time.

If anyone has any suggestions, I would greatly appreciate it. BTW, I
have the SDK sitting right next to me, if you wish to quote page ref's
etc.

Thanks
Don Boston
lone...@landmarknet.net

[Chris Russ]

Don,

you wrote:

> Anyways, I am trying to "decompile" the Plugin format, in an effort to
> pull the name of the filter. Part of the program that I am writing is a
> plugin manager. I could gather the info manually, and compile an ini
> file, but I would rather read the users plugins directory and gathering
> the information real time.

The format for the *.8bf files is a DLL. Basically, you can load it like a
DLL and check the PIPL and PIMI resources.

The format of each of those resources is really well documented in the
Adobe *.PDF files.

resfile = LoadLibraryEx(thing,NULL,LOAD_LIBRARY_AS_DATAFILE))
{
//My own routine to walk the list of PIPLs and PIMIs and figure out
what's there. 8BF's can have both...
ParsePIPLResources(resfile, ...);
ParsePIMIResources(resfile, ...);

//Free it when you're done
FreeLibrary(resfile);
}

-Chris Russ

[Reko Turja]

In article <3713CE84...@landmarknet.net>, lone...@landmarknet.net
says...

> Greets, I am in the process of creating a utility which will have many
> handy features for the end user, who uses Photoshop and works with HTML.

> plugin manager. I could gather the info manually, and compile an ini

> file, but I would rather read the users plugins directory and gathering
> the information real time.

Well I just renamed a plugin.8bf to plugin.dll and used system quickview
to it. Seemed a plain dll to me.

-Reko

[Roy Anderson]

Reko Turja wrote:

>
> Well I just renamed a plugin.8bf to plugin.dll and used system quickview
> to it. Seemed a plain dll to me.
>
> -Reko

What'd system quickview? Where do we find this? I've never looked inside
a .dll before. It might be interesting to explore some of them.

[Reko Turja]

In article <3716CD7B...@mindspring.com>, royan...@mindspring.com
says...

> What'd system quickview? Where do we find this? I've never looked inside
> a .dll before. It might be interesting to explore some of them.

Just rightclick on a .dll (or .exe) file. In the list of options there is
one called Quick View. Selecting it tells some rudimentary info about the
executable.

-Reko

[aardvarko]

In article <MPG.118149ff3...@news.kolumbus.fi> , rtu...@pp.htv.fi
(Reko Turja) wrote:

>> What'd system quickview? Where do we find this? I've never looked inside
>> a .dll before. It might be interesting to explore some of them.

> Just rightclick on a .dll (or .exe) file. In the list of options there is
> one called Quick View. Selecting it tells some rudimentary info about the
> executable.

... and if that doesn't appear, install it via the Add/Remove Programs
Control Panel (Setup tab) ... Windows 9x (maybe NT4).

-aardvarko
aardvarko at geocities dot com
(Macs are cool)