[comp.sys.mac] MACDRAW II 1v1 & LWII SC

J.Pearce@ucl-cs.UUCP (06/19/89)

From: J.Pearce@uk.ac.ucl.cs


I have recently upgraded to MacDraw II 1v1 and seem to be
having a problem with rotated text on my LaserWriter II SC.
Any rotated text, including that at a vertical orientation,
seems to be a very poor quality bitmap. None of the page setup
options seem to improve the quality. Any horizontal text
in the allowed fonts (times,helvetica,courier,symbol) is still
O.K..

I don't use rotated text very often, but I seem to remember
better quality with my old version of MacDraw.

I am using System 6.0.3 (LWII SC Driver X1-1.1) on a MacIIcx.

John R. Pearce

jpearce@uk.ac.ucl.cs

Computer Science Department,
University College London,
Gower Street,
London,
WC1E 6BT,
U.K.

casseres@apple.com (David Casseres) (06/28/89)

In article <303@ucl-cs.UUCP> J.Pearce@ucl-cs.UUCP writes:
> I have recently upgraded to MacDraw II 1v1 and seem to be
> having a problem with rotated text on my LaserWriter II SC.
> Any rotated text, including that at a vertical orientation,
> seems to be a very poor quality bitmap. None of the page setup
> options seem to improve the quality. Any horizontal text
> in the allowed fonts (times,helvetica,courier,symbol) is still
> O.K..

> I don't use rotated text very often, but I seem to remember
> better quality with my old version of MacDraw.

When you do rotated text, MacDraw II draws the text in an offscreen 
bitmap, makes a rotated version of this bitmap, and prints the rotated 
bitmap.  (This method is necessary because unlike PostScript, QuickDraw 
doesn't support direct imaging of rotated text.)

The LaserWriter IISC, like other Apple printers, provides a way for the 
application to find out the actual resolution of the printer and do its 
imaging at this resolution, i.e. 300 dots/inch.  The original version of 
MacDraw II did this, and so the rotated text looked very nice.  However in 
the new version of MacDraw II, Claris has chosen to disable this 
capability and the bitmaps are therefore drawn at the default resolution 
of 72 dots/inch.  As a result the rotated text looks very crummy.

This is a bug introduced by Claris.

David Casseres

Exclaimer:  Zowie!