clipboards

[Henry]

urbanfox:

Thanks for your posting:

in article [email]de1e300f.0307230520.c42b1f1@posting.google.com[/email], urbanfox at
[email]urbanfox@postmaster.co.uk[/email] wrote on 7/23/03 6:20 AM:

> I have an old version of Freehand that I run in Classic and a new
> version of word that I run in OSX. Is there a way to copy and paste
> between these 2 applications (the only method I've sussed is to
> convert a word document to rtf; open it in TextEdit then save as, then
> open it in simple text and then copy it into Freehand!). Perhaps
> there is a clipboard utility that will help?

Sorry, it isn't clear what you are really trying to accomplish. Word does
mostly...words. Freehand does mostly...drawings (I guess, right?). Is your
major flow from Word to Freehand? Are you really trying to take significant
amounts of text from Word into Freehand?

Testing... I wrote some text "This may work" with "may" italicized, in Word
and copied it to the MacOS X clipboard. This text, with italics, is
visible in the Finder-->Edit-->Show Clipboard as "styled text". I then
opened a classic app so I can see the classic menu bar, and viewed the
clipboard. The same text is visible, but with no formatting, so it looks
like the italics (as an example of all formatting) doesn't survive the
transition to Classic. But when I paste it into the handiest Classic app
(Powerpoint), the formatting is preserved fully.

What I've found is that MacOS X apps put large numbers of data "chunks" in
alternative formats on the clipboard when you do a clipboard copy operation.
Other apps may view only those formats they like or (perhaps for business
reason) want you to have, or may offer you a limited choice. The app you
paste in may have limited capability to choose among those formats, and
limited capability to translate the contents. This would be very likely if
you are transferring from a newer app to an older app, I think.

I have a line on a MacOS X command-line utility that _may_ (repeat, _may_)
allow you to process contents of MacOS X clipboard chunks and put the data
back on the clipboard. Unless you are an adept scripter or programmer with
time on your hands, this might be very impractical.

Other than that, I don't know of any way of processing the clipboard in the
way I believe I understand you want to do.

Thanks,

Henry

[email]henryn@zzzspacebbs.com[/email] remove 'zzz' antispam

> Thanks
> urbanfox

[urbanfox]

Henry,
Thanks for your response.
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. 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.

You raise an interesting question, I assume you are not a freehand
user (it is similar to illistrator).
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. My preference is to work in freehand as I have much
more control over layout and my graphics render as vectors rather than
bitmaps. 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.

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?

thanks
urbanfox

[Henry]

urbanfox:

Thanks for your response to my post:

in article [email]de1e300f.0307240538.5e760694@posting.google.com[/email], urbanfox at
[email]urbanfox@postmaster.co.uk[/email] 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

[email]henryn@zzzspacebbs.com[/email] remove 'zzz' antispam

>
> thanks
> urbanfox