Images and printing....

[Scott Raney]

On Sat, 10 May 2003 "David Bovill" <david at anon.nu> wrote:

What's with the "annon.nu" address?

> I'm doing some work on printing from MC for the first time and got some
> questions:
> 
>     it seems that MC prints images at a higher resolution that screen if the
> image has such a resolution - which is great. The question is what
> resolution is used when... I'm working through this so getting some answers
> but still in the grey here.
> 
> If an image is imported and resized, then the higher resolution is still
> printed but exporting the image results in a file that corresponds to the
> dimensions of  the image - is that right?

Unless you paint on the image, it's the exact same data you imported.

> So MC stores all the info somewhere and uses this to display the image at
> different sizes - not sure if there are any circumstances where it saves a
> lower resolution and loses the higher resolution data?

After you paint on it.  Or maybe set the imageData.

> Also is there any way to get the size / resolution information stored with
> images so that they can be resized when placing them in MC - MC imports them
> all at a size corresponding to 72dpi which can make pretty large images if
> they were stored at 300 dpi or above.

IMHO it's a bad idea to think in terms of "X dpi" when working with
images because there is no inherent size to them.  The effective DPI
is a function of the resolution of the output device and the ratio of
the images "rect" property and the width/height of the image data.

> I've also come across some problems with printing JPEG's from a Sony Digital
> camera... it seems that PictureGear which comes with the Viao range of PC's
> saves the images in a way in which MC can display them but not print them. I
> only used PictureGear to rename the files but the original prints fine the
> renamed files result in blank cards (only the border prints), and using
> something like Graphic Converter on the file which would not print fixes the
> problem.

No explanation for this, though we do know of problems displaying and
printing very large images (larger than 4096 pixels in width) on MacOS
systems.  This is due to a fundamental limitation in the QuickDraw API
and not anything we can easily work around.

> Anyone know what is going on and how to get MC to work around this - perhaps
> you can get MC to import and then re-export an image to ensure that it can
> be printed properly?

You can certainly do this by setting the paintCompression property to
"jpeg" and then painting on the image.  Note that this will force the
image to be whatever size you've got it displayed on the screen.
  Regards,
    Scott

********************************************************
Scott Raney  raney at metacard.com  http://www.metacard.com
MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that...