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From: biswa@janus.Berkeley.EDU (Biswa Ghosh)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.apps
Subject: Re: Figures in Word 4.0
Summary: Would Canvas be better than MacDrawII ?
Message-ID: <40548@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 23 Jan 91 23:42:40 GMT
References: <0B010004.nzeiah@outpost.UUCP>
Sender: usenet@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: biswa@janus.Berkeley.EDUNewsgroups: comp.sys.mac.apps
Lines: 42

In article <0B010004.nzeiah@outpost.UUCP> peirce@outpost.UUCP writes:
>
>In article <1991Jan23.081259.17025@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>, johnsone@uxh.cso.uiuc.edu (Erik A. Johnson) writes:
>> 
>> biswa@hoff.berkeley.edu (Biswa Ranjan Ghosh) writes:
>> >Sorry if this has been discussed already, but I find inaccuracies in my
>> >laser printouts of pictures which are pasted into Word from MacDraw.
>> 
>> Do you mean MacDrawII?  If so, read on...
>> 
>> [Explanation follows that MacDrawII picts are pasted in 72dpi resolution]
>
>The solution is to use EPS files.  MacDraw Pro (announced at MacWorld
>Expo) will support this format.  It can represent figures at higher 
>precision than can PICT.


Yep, it was MacDraw II all right. Sound's like there's no way to get
around it. Limiting myself to currently available software (is
MacDraw Pro out yet?), would Canvas be a good alternative, i.e., does
it use EPS format for Cut and Paste operations? I'm surprised software
companies haven't addressed this problem earlier, considering that
laserprinters have been out for so long, and the 72dpi limitation is
very obvious on laserprinter output.

I've noticed that kaleidagraph always asks me when I do a copy operation,
if I want to copy to Clipboard in high resolution Postscript format. I
guess this is EPS (?). Anyway, I then paste this into my Word document,
and my graphs look really sharp.

Second comment, even though the graphics from MacDraw don't look very
good, the text in it looks perfect. Someone asked about having both
letter and landscape format in the same document. I have a couple of
figures that are so wide, they must be in landscape mode. So what I do
is draw them in MacDraw horizontally with the figure captions below the
figures. Then I rotate it 90 degrees, then cut and paste into my Word
document. Prints out fine, that is, the graphics have the inaccuracies
that I complained about, but the text is just fine, including the
captions rotated 90 degrees. Wonder why the captions don't look ugly.
(they are 10 point size, would expect bimaps to be obvious at that size).

-Biswa