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From: nebel@wam.umd.edu (Chris D. Nebel)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Better inter-application graphics handling in System 7
Message-ID: <1990Feb13.182140.11139@wam.umd.edu>
Date: 13 Feb 90 18:21:40 GMT
References: <1128@dutrun.UUCP> <5711@blake.acs.washington.edu> <1129@ux.acs.umn.edu>
Sender: usenet@wam.umd.edu (USENET Posting)
Reply-To: nebel@wam.umd.edu (Chris D. Nebel)
Organization: University of Maryland at College Park
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In article <1129@ux.acs.umn.edu> clarson@ux.acs.umn.edu (Chaz Larson) writes:
>In article <5711@blake.acs.washington.edu> ramsiri@blake.acs.washington.edu (Enartloc Nhoj) writes:
>>In article <1128@dutrun.UUCP> johan@dutnak2.UUCP (Johan de Haas) writes:
>>>I find that the current Macintosh graphics handling is often 
>>>quite lousy. Let me illustrate that with two examples:
>>
>>Still just a beginner in the mac world, and one who isn't familiar
>>with IGOR or MacDrawII, my guess is that the clipboard
>>doesn't accept objects... a clipped object gets converted
>>to bitmap.  What Word gets is a bitmapped image of your
>>object from IGOR...  then your printer does a 72 dpi job on
>>an otherwise beautiful graph....
>
>I think the problem is that the Clipboard translates all graphics data
>it receives into PICT format, which deals rather poorly with things like
>patterns and line styles.  I've also run into this problem with MacDraw II
>and Word; it's a real pain.
>
Actually, PICT deals very well with objects, fill patterns, and line
styles.  The one big ugly with PICT is that it has a resolution of 72
DPI.  This means that all distances will be rounded to the nearest 1/72";
so fine detail may be (and frequently is) lost.  Chaz is correct about
graphics being stored in the clipboard as PICT, but it's the application
that the graphic came from that does the <internal format>-to-PICT
translation.  So while PICT is capable of representing objects, line
styles, &c., the application is under no obligation to do it that way.
It could, for instance, turn the whole picture into a bitmap and give
that to the clipboard. (Never heard of anyone actually doing that, though :)

Note that most apps only turn stuff into PICT when they're going to paste
into another application; otherwise they use a special internal clipboard to
make sure no information is lost.

So there are two things that could mess up your picture when copying and
pasting it between applications: one is the 72 DPI nature of PICT itself,
the other is applications not supporting all of PICT's capabilities.

There has been talk for some time (mostly in the CAD area) of making a
"high-resolution PICT" standard, but nothing (to my knowledge) has ever
materialized.


Chris Nebel
nebel@wam.umd.edu