jpa@colman.newcastle.ac.uk (John Aspden) (06/09/89)
I have a problem printing in Hypercard on a LaserWriter. Most of the cards in a stack contain lots of information in lots of fields, many of which overlap, but only a few are shown at one time, so when viewed in Hypercard they look tidy. When I print, I want to show all the information at once, so showing all the fields and using "print card" wouldn't work, as the overlapping would be a mess. What I do is to have a couple of special cards on the end of the stack with different backgrounds, and I copy the information from the card I want to print into the two print cards and then "print 2 cards". All of the fields have textfont Helvetica, and most of them appear PostScript-ish when printed, but some fields just appear as bitmapped text. Is this a bug? A known restriction? Configuration: HC 1.2.2, System B1-6.0.3, Finder B1-6.1, Mac IIx, lots of memory, HC partition size 1000K under MultiFinder. Several INITs. More information: On one of the cards, some of the information is symbolic - I display symbols to indicate some properties are present, and hide symbols to indicate absence. I do this by hiding/showing opaque (but empty) fields which cover the symbols, and which if visible, hide the symbols. I also have small fields below the symbols which may also be obscured by the opaque cover-fields. Thus, if a symbol is visible, its descriptive text is too; if hidden, no descriptive text is visible. I thought it may be a limit on the number of fields which can print properly, but when only symbol 5 is visible, its text appears bitmapped, but when only symbol 10 appears, its text is good. If all the symbols are visible, symbol 5's text is good! Any assistance gratefully received.
jpa@colman.newcastle.ac.uk (John Aspden) (06/09/89)
Oops, forgot the signature on the earlier query, and I think that 'replies' to that may get bounced. The correct address is below. John Aspden ARPA : jpa@newcastle.ac.uk Phone: +44 91 222 8069 UUCP : ...!ukc!newcastle.ac.uk!jpa ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "A satisfied customer - we should have him stuffed!" ... Basil Fawlty
zben@umd5.umd.edu (Ben Cranston) (06/10/89)
In January of 1988 I finally got fed up with the fact that it usually takes several weeks for our new timecards to appear (necessitating our manual tracking of hours until the idiots who run this institution get their printing contracts straight :-( ) and wrote a Hypercard version of our institutional timesheet. It was all pretty straightforward except for running into the 127 fields on a single card or background limit and the weirdness of the printing stuff. The 128 field problem I solved by having about 126 fields on the background and another 14 on the card itself. The only hassle is that when you make a new sheet (every two weeks) it takes about a minute to dynamically create those 14 fields and place them. One of the reasons I needed so many fields was because of the printing weirdness. I did play around with it for the several weeks it took for the paper sheets to come in, and the only correlation I could make is that when a text field overlaps drawing (i.e. non-white pixels in either the background or on the card) the text field was being put out as a bitmap instead of as postscript. As poster mentions, the differance is painfully obvious. There are several cases where I could use multiple lines of a single field to place static text, except that the ruling on the form would overlap the field and cause the field text to be done in bitmap form instead of pretty postscript. Here is (a facsimile of) one example: +----------------------+-------+--~~~~~ | Annual Vacation | | | Hours Used | | +----------------------+-------+ | Sick Time | | | Hours Used | | +----------------------+-------+ | Personal | | | Hours Used | | +----------------------+-------+ | Other Leave | | | Hours Used | | | +-------+ | | | | And Code | | +----------------------+-------+--~~~~~ I could have used a single text field for all the static information here, but the text came out in bitmap form because the ruling (drawing) would overlap the text field. Using four separate text fields solves that problem, but also exacerbates the problem of running out of fields. All this was under a very early Hypercard and I have not experimented around to find out if the problem is fixed in a later version (or in Supercard for that matter...) Q. What's the differance between a Macintosh and an Etch-a-Sketch*? A. You don't have to turn the Macintosh upside down to clear the screen. *Etch-a-Sketch is undoubtedly a trademark of a Japanese Zaibatsu by now. -- Ben Cranston <zben@umd2.UMD.EDU> (Kingdom of Merryland UniSys 1100/92) Copyright 1989 (you may redistribute ONLY if your recipients can).