steve@violet.berkeley.edu (Steve Goldfield) (10/19/88)
I've had some bad experiences with PageMaker not printing what it shows on the screen. Two examples: (1) I tried to draw jagged lines with bullets at the nodes. The bullets were significantly moved in the printout and nowhere near the lines. (2) I moved a flow chart from MacFlow into PageMaker to scale down its size and one corner of a box refused to print. When I phoned Aldus about this, they admitted it was a problem and claimed it was not possible to fix. My fix in the second case was to copy the document into MacDraw, from which everything printed fine. This raises a few questions. First, is Aldus right? Is it inherently impossible to have a WYSIWYG program on the Mac as the Next reportedly has? Could someone implement a PostScript version of PageMaker? Second, having had the painful experience of moving a page through three of more kinds of software to get everything I wanted into it, it seems there would be a good market for an integrated piece of software which would be both convenient to use and offer combined features. If something like that exists, I'd like to know. If not, maybe someone would like to make their fortune by writing it. Steve Goldfield
casseres@Apple.COM (David Casseres) (10/26/88)
In article <15691@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> steve@violet.berkeley.edu (Steve Goldfield) writes: >... is Aldus right? Is it >inherently impossible to have a WYSIWYG program on the Mac >as the Next reportedly has? It's easy to answer this one: just try drawing and printing the same thing with some other application such as MacDraw, MacDraw II, etc. I think you'll find that there's nothing inherently impossible about WYSIWYG, with one important caveat: since the Mac screen is nominally 72 dots/inch and the LaserWriter is 300 dots/inch, the positions of objects and parts of objects are subject to roundoff errors. But these errors should be small. Another kind of error can come up when you mix text elements with graphics and want everything to fit together in an exact way. Here the problem is that the text on the screen is from a bitmap font at a certain size, while the printed text is either from a bitmap font of a different size, or from an outline (PostScript) font that the screen font was trying to approximate. All the fonts are supposed to scale exactly but they often don't really. As a result the positions of characters in the printed copy can be off from what you saw on the screen. I imagine that this problem is much easier on the NeXT system, since it uses PostScript at both ends of the process. David Casseres
khb%chiba@Sun.COM (Keith Bierman - Sun Tactical Engineering) (10/26/88)
In article <141@internal.Apple.COM> casseres@Apple.COM (David Casseres) writes: >In article <15691@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> steve@violet.berkeley.edu (Steve Goldfield) writes: > >>... is Aldus right? Is it >>inherently impossible to have a WYSIWYG program on the Mac >>as the Next reportedly has? > > deleted; points out 72dpi <> 300dpi >Another kind of error can come up when you mix text elements with graphics >and want everything to fit together in an exact way. Here the problem is >that the text on the screen is from a bitmap font at a certain size, while >the printed text is either from a bitmap font of a different size, or from >an outline (PostScript) font that the screen font was trying to approximate. >All the fonts are supposed to scale exactly but they often don't really. As >a result the positions of characters in the printed copy can be off from what >you saw on the screen. I imagine that this problem is much easier on the >NeXT system, since it uses PostScript at both ends of the process. > MacII AU/X users can use NeWS. Display postscript predates Mr. Jobs and his merrie band. NeWS is a windowing system created by my employer, but licensed to others. NeWS is a windowing system, which employes postscript on the screen. Now if Mr. Jobs will license his objective C libraries we can see whose box is best :> Keith H. Bierman It's Not My Fault ---- I Voted for Bill & Opus