mac drawing programs

[Michael D. Baron]

Dear netters
Recently posted on info-gcg:

>In article <Lab_Mac_Hanson-180394091936 at 128.84.203.227>,
>Lab_Mac_Hanson at QMrelay.mail.cornell.edu (Hanson Lab) wrote:

> We have this problem... Does anyone else have a solution?  If one downloads
> a PUBLISH file from GCG (VAX), and then tries to import that file into a
> Macintosh drawing program like MacDraw Pro, the text begings to act
> strange.  If one tries to  box a segment of sequence, or bold a segment of
> sequence, or underline a segment of sequence within that file, although on
> the screen evrything looks great, when the resultant file is printed, the
> altered text has *moved* relative to the rest of the text.

To which J.Parkill at bham.ac.uk replied:

>There is a cure for this problem, but only for those using MacDraw Pro (I'm
>using version 1.5v1)

>Under the "Layout" menu, chose "Preferences..."
>Within the preferences dialog, choose "Printing".
>At the bottom is a pair of Radio Buttons for "Standard character placement"
>or "Precise character placement"

>Clicking "Precise character placement" should print the character exactly
>the way that they appear on the screen.

Having used Mac Draw II, Mac Draw Pro, Claris Works (versions 1&2) 
Claris Impact and Cricket Draw (version 2), all these programs seem to
give the same result, i.e. that a drawn object aligned with some 
characters on the screen does not print in the same relative position, 
unless the alignment is done at the nominal 100% magnification, 
or whatever zoom level the printer uses (e.g. my old PaintWriter uses 
250% as its base, condensing the result to get a better typeface). 
In some programs the effect is more marked than others. It does not 
seem to be related to printing, as you can get the same effect by 
zooming in, doing the fine placement of the box/line/arrow/whatever, 
and zooming out again to 100%: things won't look quite the same.
The problem also appears if you try to align characters in two text 
objects, especially at the right hand end of the text objects. I have 
had the same effect using Freelance-For-Windows, a PC program, so it 
isn't just Macs.

I would be *very* interested to know if there is a solution to this 
problem, which seems to be related to the way the programs "magnify" 
text.(BTW, True-type fonts were used in all my work, but I seem to 
remember having the same problem with the Mac years ago when I had 
System 6 and bit-mapped fonts; I also tried removing the TT fonts and 
forcing the programs to use bit-mapped fonts - it didn't help).

Neither Claris (according to the first posting) nor CA (who make 
Cricket Draw) had any idea; it's probably only us looney molecular 
biologists who try to do things like this.

Regards,

Michael D. Baron
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