KNOWLEDGEBASE - ARTICLE #78

Why do vertical text and curves from Prism for Macintosh graphs appear grainy when printed from MS Word or other programs?

Prism 4 for Macintosh - angled or vertical text is corrupted or grainy
 
Users of Prism 4 for Macintosh sometimes experience problems when exporting or copying graphs with angled or vertical text into other programs. Most often, this is because these applications don't interpret Apple's PICT format correctly.
 
Prism allows you to set default preferences for how angled and vertical text will be treated in the export process.

1) If you select "Fonts" in Prism Preferences or the Export dialog, Prism puts the attributes for any angled or vertical text as comments inside an intermediate PICT file that it creates as part of the copy/export process. When this PICT is opened in (or pasted from the Clipboard to) another program, that program applies these attributes to the angled text, enabling you to edit it. This method produces the highest quality results. Some programs, however, don't handle these embedded attributes correctly, resulting in corrupted or distorted text.

2) If you select the "Bitmap" choice in the Prism Preferences or the Export dialog, angled and vertical text is included as bitmaps (arrays of bits), inside of the PICT image. This type of text cannot be edited. For the best results, choose a higher resolution (up to 1200 dpi) for these bitmaps. Note, however, that this will create somewhat larger files.

Summary: If you experience problems with angled text, first make sure that you have selected "Fonts" in the Prism Preferences or the Export dialog. If this results in corrupted text, select Bitmap, and increase the resolution of the bitmap export as necessary to improve the quality of the images.
 
Prism 4 for Macintosh -- ragged-looking curves

This was sometimes a problem with Prism 4.0a for Macintosh. Prism 4.0b and later fix this problem. Free updates from Prism 4.0a are available here.

Prism 3 for Macintosh -- angled text is grainy and/or curves are ragged
 
When Prism 3 creates a PICT file to export to another program (as a file, or via the clipboard), it converts vertical text to a bit map at a screen resolution of 100 dots per inch. Since laser printers have resolutions of 300 or 600 dots per inch, the vertical text appears grainy on the printout. Prism Mac has the same problem with curves. Curves are defined as a series of line segments, and Prism must use screen resolution to define these line segments within a PICT file.

Workaround: Make the graph very large in Prism, then reduce the size in the other program. To copy enlarged graphs, pull down the Edit menu and choose Graph options. Then choose 3-, 6- or 12-fold enlargement. When exporting a PICT file from Prism 3, you can choose to enlarge the graph ad part of the Export dialog.

Prism 2 for Macintosh

With Prism 2, you need to work a bit harder to copy an enlarged graph. Use the File.. Printer setup to choose a large custom page size (say two-feet square). Then stretch the graph to fill the "page", copy, paste into another program, and then shrink it to a reasonable size.

Finally, one Mac user reported a problem with poor quality of printouts of graphs pasted into Microsoft Word 2001 for the Macintosh. It was resolved by updating Word using release SR-1, available at Microsoft's web site.



Keywords: poor quality irregular jagged low resolution y axis y title axis title grainy ragged angled vertical export Word

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