From Newsgroup: comp.sys.mac.system
urbanfox:
Thanks for your response to my post:
in article
de1e300f.0307240538.5e760694@posting.google.com, urbanfox at
urbanfox@postmaster.co.uk wrote on 7/24/03 2:09 PM:
Henry,
Thanks for your response.
My pleasure.
You have helped me to see that the problem is not the clipboard but
probably freehand(7)s inability to interprete the contents of the
clipboard.
That would be my best guess. You might want to explore Freehand's plug-ins
(or equivalent) to see if you can discern what "input filters" (or
equivalent) it ships with. They might be visible somewhere in the install folder.
Up until now the problem I described seemed to be
intermitant, with similar problems when cutting and pasting from
Photoshop: sometimes it works, sometimes not. I may re-install my old (classic) versions of word and photoshop until I can afford to upgrade Freehand.
Do you mean "intermittent" with respect to material or with respect to instance? That is, sometimes copy-->paste of (say) a 500 x 500 Photoshop selection succeeds and of a different size (or even content) fails, and so
on? Or if you do 20 identical copy-->paste operations at different times,
some fail and some succeed? Or...?
You raise an interesting question, I assume you are not a freehand
user (it is similar to illistrator).
I use AI 10.
I tried Freehand at one point, I think, and found the UI very difficult, but this is purely a matter of personal preference, and the point is equally
valid: a professional tool will beat Word every time.
There are a number of projects that could be done in either word or
freehand - wherever there is a mixture of text, graphics and/or
photo's on a page.
Until very recently, Word has had totally inadequate drawing tools. So bad
that in the distant past I've actually done sketches in PowerPoint because
that environment was more friendly, and transferred the artwork to Word.
Yes, Word's drawing facilities have improved recently --they now look much
more like those in PowerPoint-- so I _might_ consider doing some sketches in Word. Overall, I find Word generally very fragile, so I avoid doing
anything I don't have to in Word.
Still, Illustrator is a much superior environment. Note: I probably use
less than 10% of the functionality, and I like the idea of having that "headroom".
Another data point: Just yesterday I transferred a project I was
maintaining in about 15 Illustrator files to InDesign 1.5 running in
Classic. I have complaints about the speed and stability of InDesign 1.5,
but the transfer to InDesign was very smooth -- on the surface. The pages looked identical, but the transfer seems to have interfered with some bulk attributes. For example, entire paragraphs become multiple text objects, or maybe even bitmap -- not generally editable.
I'm currently working on a kind of marketing booklet. Even though I'm not doing very sophisticated work, I simply would not attempt to do this booklet
in Word -- I have no confidence in Word's capability to do it.
(Hmmm, I'm going to have to send a copy of this to a friend who is a staunch user and defender of Word's capabilities to do anything. Let's see if he
can throw together something like this in Word.)
My preference is to work in freehand as I have much more control over layout and my graphics render as vectors rather than bitmaps.
Amen. Professional tools.
My reason for using word in the process described is that the
freehand spell-check is in US english and word gives me the choice of
UK english.
I'm surprised that you can't get a UK dictionary for Freehand or modify your dictionary to proper UK English.
Lastly the above raises another question, for some projects eg. a
letter combined with a letterhead (including logo) it would be
convenient for me to use word if I could import the letterhead graphic
into word without loosing quality by converting it first to a JPEG,
ie. maintaining it as a vector drawing. Is this possible?
In the past year or so I've noticed that Word's capabilities to properly
render such imports has improved significantly. "Rendering quality" to me means that you get reasonable results on the screen, in a generated PDF, and --of course-- on at least one printer.
About two years ago I was struggling with AI --> Word and it seemed that the
PS filter was simply not being used. After I removed all the extensions and put them back, the PS import suddenly began working, and continued fitfully.
More recently, almost all AI --> Word transfers I've checked (not too many,
to be sure) have rendered reasonably well. I guess the "filters" have improved and perhaps grown in number during recent updates.
Over the long run, it seems to me, people who use Word have not pushed it
very hard to do good integration of graphics and rendering of same.
Take your letterhead+logo case. I suspect a small proportion of attempts to
do a reasonable job actually succeed. But people generally have a backup -- they paste up the graphic, take it to the printer, and come back with a box
of pre-printed letterhead stationery.
Uncle Bill hasn't been in much of a hurry to improve Word's capabilities. I don't know if this is the cause or result.
Cheers,
Henry
henryn@zzzspacebbs.com remove 'zzz' antispam
thanks
urbanfox
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