J.Pearce@ucl-cs.UUCP (01/17/90)
From: J.Pearce@uk.ac.ucl.cs Recently a colleague and I have been trying to draw some simple diagrams in MacDraw II 1.1v1 and transfer the results to a variety of programs including MS Word 4.0 and TeXtures 1.01e. The problem seems to be when we join two perpendicular straight lines using the arc tool. Everything looks OK in MacDraw and you can zoom in 3200% and the lines and the arc line-up OK. The problem occurs when you select the diagram and copy it to the clipboard - there seems to be an erratic problem that causes misalignment between arcs and straight lines. This can be seen immediately if you select show clipboard in MacDraw. If you paste the clipboard into another application the distortion remains, and also appears on any printed output. I contacted Claris and they are aware of the problem and were able to suggest a partial work around. The problem can be aleviated by setting the divisions to 72 per inch which seems to help. However, this means you need to zoom in several times to align every object (although this can be simplified by using the set view command). As I understand the problem the clipboard/QuickDraw is unable to transfer the high precision offered by MacDraw II/Postscript ???? This problem has come as rather a shock as I understood the Macintosh offered a relatively integrated environment for the exchange of text and graphics. As long as you stay inside MacDraw II everything is OK. We seem have to run into this problem relatively easy - so I doubt we can be alone. Does anyone else have any experience/solutions. Our ultimate destination is TeXtures which can handle EPS files - so does anyone know anyway of translating MacDraw files to EPS ? John R. Pearce jpearce@uk.ac.ucl.cs Computer Science Department, University College London, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT, ENGLAND.