[comp.sys.mac] MacDraw II bug with Page Setup

gould@pilot.njin.net (Brian Jay Gould) (05/19/89)

I stopped using MacDraw in favor of MacDraw II as soon as I discovered the
wonderful things I could do in Draw II.  Now I've found that Draw II can't
take advantage of the "page reduction" feature under "page setup."

In MacDraw, when you reduce the page, you can continue to use the remaining
space for other things (like borders).  But in Draw II, you never see the
blank area of the page except on the printed copy.

Bug?
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krazy@claris.com (Jeff Erickson) (05/19/89)

From article <May.18.22.44.49.1989.12296@pilot.njin.net>, by gould@pilot.njin.net (Brian Jay Gould):
> I stopped using MacDraw in favor of MacDraw II as soon as I discovered the
> wonderful things I could do in Draw II.  Now I've found that Draw II can't
> take advantage of the "page reduction" feature under "page setup."
> 
> In MacDraw, when you reduce the page, you can continue to use the remaining
> space for other things (like borders).  But in Draw II, you never see the
> blank area of the page except on the printed copy.

What blank area?  When you set the "page reduction" to 50% under MacDraw II, 
that effectively doubles the size of the page for drawing purposes.  When you
print, you larger page is shrunk, by 50%, to fit on your piece of paper.

Or do I misunderstand you?  I thought it worked this way in MacDraw Classic
as well.

-- 
Jeff Erickson           Claris Corporation  | "MacWrite II is both sexy and
408/987-7309          Applelink: Erickson4  |   effective."
krazy@claris.com         ames!claris!krazy  |                -- MacWeek 4/18
         "I'm a heppy, heppy ket!"          | 

gould@pilot.njin.net (Brian Jay Gould) (05/19/89)

Exactly.  When you reduce the page in MacDraw classic, the working page
size is larger, giving you room to work if the page was full.  In MacDraw II
you set page reduction (lets say 80%), and the page still looks the same
on the screen.  On paper you get a drawing at 80% with white space on the
lower and right sides.

So I guess Claris is confirming that its a bug. Do you know when a fix is 
coming?
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stevem@hpvcfs1.HP.COM (Steve Miller) (05/20/89)

Brian Gould writes:

>In MacDraw, when you reduce the page, you can continue to use the remaining
>space for other things (like borders).  But in Draw II, you never see the
>blank area of the page except on the printed copy.

>Bug?


Probably not.  Whenever you change the size of a page or the reduction
factor you have to do a drawing size command to adjust MacDraw II's drawing
area.  It doesn't automatically adjust the drawing area like MacDraw does.


   -Steven Miller
    Vancouver Division
    Hewlett Packard

krazy@claris.com (Jeff Erickson) (05/20/89)

From article <May.19.09.33.47.1989.20997@pilot.njin.net>, by gould@pilot.njin.net (Brian Jay Gould):
> Exactly.  When you reduce the page in MacDraw classic, the working page
> size is larger, giving you room to work if the page was full.  In MacDraw II
> you set page reduction (lets say 80%), and the page still looks the same
> on the screen.  On paper you get a drawing at 80% with white space on the
> lower and right sides.

You do?  I just tried my own copy of MacDraw II 1.1, and this problem most
definitely did NOT occur.  Everything worked exactly as expected.  I don't
remember the problem being in MDII 1.0, either, but maybe it was.  If so, 
and that's the version you have, call Customer Relations at 408/727-8227
and those nice folks will send you a new copy.

> So I guess Claris is confirming that its a bug. Do you know when a fix is 
> coming?

If it happened, then it was definitely a bug, and it's definitely already
been fixed.

-- 
Jeff Erickson           Claris Corporation  | "MacWrite II is both sexy and
408/987-7309          Applelink: Erickson4  |   effective."
krazy@claris.com         ames!claris!krazy  |                -- MacWeek 4/18
         "I'm a heppy, heppy ket!"          | 

kk@mcnc.org (Krzysztof Kozminski) (05/20/89)

In article <May.19.09.33.47.1989.20997@pilot.njin.net> gould@pilot.njin.net (Brian Jay Gould) writes:
>Exactly.  When you reduce the page in MacDraw classic, the working page
>size is larger, giving you room to work if the page was full.  In MacDraw II
>you set page reduction (lets say 80%), and the page still looks the same
>on the screen.  On paper you get a drawing at 80% with white space on the
>lower and right sides.
>
>So I guess Claris is confirming that its a bug. Do you know when a fix is 
>coming?

Actually, the response I saw indicated rather that the fellow from
Claris did not understand what was your problem.  Anyway, this is no
bug.  Go to the Layout Menu, select Drawing Size item to get a dialog.
Click in the small white rectangle in the left upper corner of a large
grey rectangle.  Watch the numbers that tell you the drawing size
increase. You now have a full page at your disposal.  All this is quite
logical: while you told the program to change the scale of your drawing
in the Page Setup, you *did not* indicate that you want more drawing
area - and there is a separate command to do this.  The working space
did increase, you just forgot to tell the program to show it to you.

Note: a similar thing happens if you select 'larger drawing area' in
laserwriter options dialog.

Now, the old Mac Draw had it's own brain damage; if I remeber
correctly, by changing the page setup from portrait to landscape and
back, you could get your drawing size to increase to the max possible
limit.  (Which was apparently due to the fact that MacDraw used to
round up the drawing size after each Page Setup operation).

If somebody from Claris is reading this, here's a suggestion:

If the Page Setup command makes the drawing size *not* to be an exact
multiple of the page size, ask the user whether the drawing boundaries
should be adjusted to coincide the page boundaries. In order not to
annoy the users with these dialogs, make the default behavior (one of:
display dialog, adjust automatically without a dialog, do nothing)
settable by the user.

KK

gillies@p.cs.uiuc.edu (05/20/89)

My favorite MacDraw II bug is that once you change the arrowheads, you
can never get them back to the original setting.  I've tried for 25
minutes trying to recreate them, but it seems impossible.  The only
workaround is to make a fresh document & copy all your figures to the
new document.

My main wish for the program is:  Support sub/superscripts.  It is
hard to label technical figures without the ability to type in
subscripts.  It is INCREDIBLY tedious to do these by hand, by
positioning the subscripted characters manually.

gould@pilot.njin.net (Brian Jay Gould) (05/21/89)

Thanks for the debate about whether pasge setup refusing to increase the
drawing area was or wasn't a bug.

I was contacted directly from someone at Claris.  The facts:

1) It was a bug in release 1.0

2) It has been fixed (I have 1.1 on order)

3) A workaround has been suggested -> selecting drawing size and resizing
the page.

Thanks to all who replied.
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bcase@cup.portal.com (Brian bcase Case) (05/23/89)

>My main wish for the program is:  Support sub/superscripts.  It is
>hard to label technical figures without the ability to type in
>subscripts.  It is INCREDIBLY tedious to do these by hand, by
>positioning the subscripted characters manually.

I use the very nice text handling features of FreeHand to do this:  it
has a baseline shift... dialog.  You can select text and shift its
baseline by typing in a number of points.  It works great.  I don't see
how anyone can get by without FreeHand (or maybe Illustrator ...).
FreeHand costs maybe twice as much as MacDraw II (but it's less than
twice, isn't it?), but you get much more than twice the value.

Just one person's opinion.