laser-lovers@uw-beaver (08/06/85)
From: Neal Holtz <holtz%cascade.carleton.cdn%ubc.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa> I have only recently started using MacDraw, producing output on a LaserWriter using the version 13 LaserPrep very kindly forwarded by Brian Reid several weeks ago. It is truly wonderful. Well, almost. There are at least two aspects of the Laser output that are indescribably ugly; diagonal lines and arrow heads. Diagonal lines are drawn at different widths than horizontal and vertical lines of supposedly the same width. Presumably this is fixable by minor changes to the appropriate defs in the laserprep file, but will this break anything else? I assume that the authors of laserprep (not BR, I assume) would not commit such an atrocity without some sort of reason (and BR's comments in laserprep also imply this). For example, will gaps then appear in polygons, or will straight lines not merge with curves (they don't all that well, anyway)? Has anyone done this? Arrow heads are simply short, squat and wrong. They are drawn as filled segments of circles (whereas the simplest attractive arrowheads are isosceles triangles with base 1/3 of height), and they align with the edge of the shaft, not the center. Unfortunately they are output as postscript commands to draw an arc, not to draw an arrowhead. They are so ugly that I am seriously tempted to hack the definition of the arc routine to recognize small partial arcs as arrowheads and draw them as something else (!!!). Is there a better way?