Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!gatech!uflorida!haven!umd5!zben From: zben@umd5.umd.edu (Ben Cranston) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hypercard Subject: Re: Field print quality on Laserwriter using PostScript fonts Summary: Overlapping fields and graphics causes bitmap printing. Message-ID: <4992@umd5.umd.edu> Date: 9 Jun 89 18:11:32 GMT References: <4564@cheviot.newcastle.ac.uk> Reply-To: zben@umd5.umd.edu (Ben Cranston) Organization: University of Maryland, College Park Lines: 58 In January of 1988 I finally got fed up with the fact that it usually takes several weeks for our new timecards to appear (necessitating our manual tracking of hours until the idiots who run this institution get their printing contracts straight :-( ) and wrote a Hypercard version of our institutional timesheet. It was all pretty straightforward except for running into the 127 fields on a single card or background limit and the weirdness of the printing stuff. The 128 field problem I solved by having about 126 fields on the background and another 14 on the card itself. The only hassle is that when you make a new sheet (every two weeks) it takes about a minute to dynamically create those 14 fields and place them. One of the reasons I needed so many fields was because of the printing weirdness. I did play around with it for the several weeks it took for the paper sheets to come in, and the only correlation I could make is that when a text field overlaps drawing (i.e. non-white pixels in either the background or on the card) the text field was being put out as a bitmap instead of as postscript. As poster mentions, the differance is painfully obvious. There are several cases where I could use multiple lines of a single field to place static text, except that the ruling on the form would overlap the field and cause the field text to be done in bitmap form instead of pretty postscript. Here is (a facsimile of) one example: +----------------------+-------+--~~~~~ | Annual Vacation | | | Hours Used | | +----------------------+-------+ | Sick Time | | | Hours Used | | +----------------------+-------+ | Personal | | | Hours Used | | +----------------------+-------+ | Other Leave | | | Hours Used | | | +-------+ | | | | And Code | | +----------------------+-------+--~~~~~ I could have used a single text field for all the static information here, but the text came out in bitmap form because the ruling (drawing) would overlap the text field. Using four separate text fields solves that problem, but also exacerbates the problem of running out of fields. All this was under a very early Hypercard and I have not experimented around to find out if the problem is fixed in a later version (or in Supercard for that matter...) Q. What's the differance between a Macintosh and an Etch-a-Sketch*? A. You don't have to turn the Macintosh upside down to clear the screen. *Etch-a-Sketch is undoubtedly a trademark of a Japanese Zaibatsu by now. -- Ben Cranston (Kingdom of Merryland UniSys 1100/92) Copyright 1989 (you may redistribute ONLY if your recipients can).