[aus.mac] High quality drawing

scott@gestetner.oz (Cyberspace Cosmonaut) (03/09/90)

We are currently trying to use a Mac for precision drawing and not having much
luck. The drawing involves an arc and lines readiating from the arc.
ie:                           /
                             / <- this is the line
                            /
                           ( <- this is the arc
                            \
                             \
                              \ 
We have tried using MacDraw II 1.1 but even though the arc and line (drawn at
45 deg.) were drawn with the same 'pen' and appear to be the same thickness on
screen, when we print it (to a PostScript printer) the arc appears thinner than
the line!
ie:                          //
                            //
                            (
So we turned to Claris Cad and were able to verify the same problem (fortunately
before we bought it).
My last resort is to turn to you, if anyone has had a similar problem/need and
was able to get the job done, what did you use ?
Please reply and I will summarise to the net. (Please... I stuck my neck out
and said that the mac was perfect for this sort of thing, now who looks bad ?)

Thanks, Scott.
(P.S. If anyone out from Claris can set me straight I'd love to know, I like
Claris products and was extremely dissappointed when your products didn't
work.)

  __/  Scott Seaton        Hardware Group        Gestetner R & D     (02)9750555
 / /\  scott@gestetner.oz(Cyberspace Cosmonaut)|Gestetner is not responsible for
| /___ "...remember, it's a different game at  |anything I may or may not have
 X__/  the game..." - The Black Rat - 2MMM FM  |said, done or thought about.

tom@wcc.oz (Tom Evans) (03/13/90)

In article <434@gestetner.oz>, scott@gestetner.oz (Cyberspace Cosmonaut) writes:
> We are currently trying to use a Mac for precision drawing and not having much
> luck. The drawing involves an arc and lines readiating from the arc.
> ie:                           /
>                              / <- this is the line
>                             /
>                            ( <- this is the arc
>                             \
>                              \
>                               \ 
> We have tried using MacDraw II 1.1 but even though the arc and line (drawn at
> 45 deg.) were drawn with the same 'pen' and appear to be the same thickness on
> screen, when we print it (to a PostScript printer) the arc appears thinner than
> the line!

It's not a bug it's a feature!

Examine your lines with a magnifier. You'll find that whereas an arc
(or a circle) is drawn with a pen that remains radially oriented (so
you get a flat end on the end of an arc), a line is drawn with a
"square" pen. The ends of a line segment (especially if it is a thick
line) look like:

           ___
          /  |
         /  /
	/  /

Thus diagonal lines are about 1.4 times as thick as horizontal or
vertical ones. Presumably this is to allow lines to meet at neat
right-angle corners, which is not what you want. You could try a
custom line thickness of .707 for diagonal lines.

See if you can find something that lets you define the SHAPE of your
line-drawing pen. The only problem with this is that you'll end up
with round ends on your lines.

You could of course paint the lines with a round brush-tool, but it's
not quite the same.
			    ---------
Tom Evans  tom@wcc.oz.au        |
Webster Computer Corp P/L       | "The concept of my
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