🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <28996@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>, munson@renoir.Berkeley.EDU (Ethan V. Munson) writes:
> About two months ago I posted a message to the TEXHAX mailing list for
> help on how to include Macintosh generated illustrations in TeX documents
> which use the psfig macro package.  Many events have intervened, but I
> think that I finally have an answer that is sufficiently correct to
> post publicly.  I know of four basic approaches of which I consider
> only three effective.  They are:
 
> 1) MODIFY THE LASERPREP FILE (Ineffective): Several people reported
> success with this method, but I couldn't duplicate their results.  You

We've done this here in order to print out Mac drawings on our
UNIX(R) system, but it doesn't seem to solve our big problem in
incorporating them into troff documents using psfig, which is that
psfig needs a bounding box.

What we're trying to do is to find a relatively idiot-proof way of
incorporating MacDraw II drawings into troff documents with a
minimum of work.  The artists are not especially computer literate,
so the ideal would be to find a program that would convert the
drawings to a psfig-compatible format.

> 2) USE PS-FROM-MAC (Close but no cigar): PS-from-Mac is a Mac
> application which converts MacPaint and MacDraw files into plain
> printer-independent PostScript.  It was written by Alec Dunn of the
> University of Sydney.  He sells it for a reasonable price.  In
 
I'd like more information about this if you have it.  The problems
you mentioned seem like they would make it not useful for our
applications, but I would like to contact the author and ask some
questions.

> 3) CRICKET DRAW PLUS SOME GYRATIONS (Effective but many steps):
> Cricket Draw allows you to save a drawing as a PostScript file using
> its own printer-independent prologue.  Unfortunately, there is still a
> fair amount of massaging required.  The steps are:
> 
> Well, this series of steps is a pain, but frankly, most of it doesn't
> take that long.  Also, Cricket Draw is not very expensive and is
 
Too complicated for what we need.  Our artists don't care much about
computers beyond being able to use them to create drawings.  They
don't want to know anything else about them.

> 4) USE ADOBE ILLUSTRATOR (Effective and easy):  Adobe Illustrator
> files are PostScript files.  You construct your figure and save it.
 
Our artists generally find Illustrator too complicated to learn.
MacDraw II fills their needs very well, and there was a minimum of
training involved in switching from LisaDraw.

One possibility that intrigued me was using DrawOver, which comes
with the Illustrator 88 package.  Unfortunately, it seems to choke
on large drawings, dropping all the text (which DOES show up in the
preview you get).  The other problem is that smoothed lines within
MacDraw II are converted as straight lines.  Is Adobe aware of this?  
(Glenn?)
 
> I think that most of the file editing on the UNIX box can be automated, but
> a run of bbfig will always be required.
 
I haven't been able to get bbfig to run on our machine for some
reason, but I'm still trying.

Another option that occurred to me was to take Glenn Reid's
DistillPS/still.ps combination and use that.  Unfortunately, when I
print out the returned file, I get nothing BUT the text (now if only
I could combine the text from DistillPS with the output from
DrawOver....)

There are a couple of other options.  Aldus Freehand opens PICT
files directly, and can export to EPS format.  However, polygons
come out smoothed when they're opened by Freehand.

There's a program called The Curator which is supposed to catalog
drawings and transfer between formats.  I haven't been able to get a
demo of this yet.  Does anybody have any experience with how well
this works?

And if anyone at Apple is still reading this at this point, is there
a reason that LaserPrep doesn't provide Bounding Box information?
Is this changed in LaserPrep 6.0?  If not, are there any plans to
change it for any future release?

Sorry to go on at such length, but this problem has occupied a great
deal of my time for the past four of five months....

Ralph Brandi, contracted to
Tech Pubs/Commercial Arts/High Tech Publishing
AT&T, Middletown, New Jersey
-- 
Ralph Brandi    [most gateways in the known universe]!att!lzfme!ralph

Work flows toward the competent until they are submerged.