CompuServe Thread

Pro Page 1.3 bugs?

13 messages in this thread
#32766From: SyndesisApr 30, 1990 9:41 PM
My business partner has been having a tough time with one aspect of Pro Page 1.3, and I'd like to confirm the problem with other people… She says Pro Page 1.3 tends to "lose" boxes more often than 1.2, meaning the box disappears from in front of the page, and appears "behind" the page, which you can see if you make the page invisible, or delete the page altogether. She's running an A2000 with a CBM '020 board. This very rarely happened in Pro Page 1.2, but now it's a regular occurence. Does anyone confirm this, or know a fix for it?
#32771From: Mike SchillerMay 1, 1990 12:20 AM
Gee… I've been using PPage 1.31 for a while (although I'm not up to doing anything fancy with it yet – still learning) I've never had this problem. Is she using 1.3 or 1.31?
#32797From: SyndesisMay 1, 1990 9:48 PM
She's using Pro Page 1.31, the fixed version. She noticed another thing last night – maybe she was doing something wrong, but she used the Outline Fonts disk to generate all the PostScript downloadable fonts in the CGCache:PS directory. When she output a page to the printer, it appeared to download ALL of the PostScript font files in the PS directory, and not simply only the ones she used in the document! Is this supposed to work this way? On our old modem LaserWriter, it doesn't have the memory to hold all those fonts at once, and it hangs the printer. Nice feature. What are we doing wrong?
#32859From: Mike SchillerMay 2, 1990 8:40 PM
You probably noticed that the Golddisk CG fonts disks are the same 35 (11) fonts as most Postscript printers also have resident in them. I too made PS fonts out of all the CG ones, and also noticed that it seemed to be downloading lots of stuff (although my knowledge of PS is such that I had no idea that it was actually DLing all the fonts), and what I've done now was to move all the CG created PSfonts to a directory named and assigned PSFONTS and I also removed the .psfont from the font files, so that I can use these fonts with POST1.1 . I also have a CGFONTS:PS directory, and into it I will put any other PS fonts that I need that aren't resident in the printer, and thatway they'll be available to both ProPage & Post. As of right now, I don't have any additional fonts (although I will probably get some from Pixelations soon) so I don't know if this scheme will really work. Does this setup make sense to you? You folks are the ones that make the various format conversion programs right? Have you ever considered (or do you already) making a product to convert Amiga bitmapped fonts to either CG or PS fonts? There is a utility in the libs to take an Amiga font and download it (and convert it) to an HP compatible softfont, and it needs to use a font size of at least 30, so it probably makes fairly smooth fonts. Is this possible? Also is there a way to take Sculpt or other raytraced files and make them EPS? -Mike Schiller CIS: 76416,3065
#32861From: SyndesisMay 2, 1990 9:31 PM
With the Pro Draw module we ship with InterFont, you can actually convert a 3D object to a Pro Draw (or Aegis Draw) clip art, in a simple structured rendering similar to what you get in Sketch mode, without any shading. There's an example in the Syndesis library in the Vendor forum, if you're interested. As for your font setup, it sounds like it would work… It doesn't make a lot of sense to convert a bitmap font to a PostScript font. It can be done, but they hog a lot of printer memory, which is the exact problem we were having with Pro Page and the CG/PS fonts. There's no comparable way to convert a bitmap font to Compugraphic fonts, they are strictly outline-based, as compared to PostScript, where you can make them from bits or strokes. I've love to make some font conversion or creation programs in the future, but the market drives me.
#32899From: Mike SchillerMay 3, 1990 12:03 PM
Well, perhaps the market might drive you. In the CO tonight it was verified that the CG fonts that are used by gold disk will be the same format as the CG fonts used in a future upgrade to WB2.0! I'd imagine that many people that have some real nice fonts would love to have them as CG fonts too. -Mike Schiller CIS: 76416,3065
#33081From: Wayne ColeMay 7, 1990 12:38 AM
And the same CGFonts as are in the HP LaserJet III, I hear! wmc
#32866From: Bob NaffzigerMay 2, 1990 10:09 PM
John Update your file psfont.alias with the data from Page 12 of your cg outline font manual. This will fix your download problems. I have had the same problem with boxes going behind my page. I think that it happens when I remove a box and the click on a box that is not active. Hope this helps. Bob Naffziger – Vivid Copy
#33055From: Tom CattrallMay 6, 1990 3:06 PM
I haven't had the null pointer "delete" problem for quite a while. Perhaps it went away when I switched to postscript from CGFonts. Or perhaps I'm not making some mistake any more. Talking to GD support guy the other day and he said that they found and fixed the problem and that the fix will be available in the new release due out in a month or two. The new release is a new features release rather than just another bug fix release. As they've been advertising 5x speed improvements for PDraw, I'm hoping they have used some of the same technology to speed up PPage. Tom
#32855From: Paul MacDonaldMay 2, 1990 7:02 PM
That has happened to me on occasion, although I have not been able to reproduce it. Cheers, Paul (WA1OMM)
#32856From: Paul MacDonaldMay 2, 1990 7:02 PM
I should add that I am using V1.31. Cheers, Paul (WA1OMM)
#33212From: Saul HoffmanMay 10, 1990 10:39 PM
I have definitely had the same problem with 1.3. It seems to happen randomly when I click an inactive box to make it active. Has anyone seen eerie "ghost boxes" on the screen after using 1.3 for awhile? They don't seem to hurt anything but are annoying. Also ghosting of menus though they still work fine. I do not have 1.31 yet, but this happens on both my 1000 and 2000.
#33223From: SyndesisMay 11, 1990 9:46 AM
It's the ghost menus that always bugged me… they've got some bug in their menu handling that makes them lose bitplanes, making the menus semi-transparent. Of course, they claim it's an Intuition bug, but that's quaint, because I've never seen another program act this way, beyond Gold Disk products. Sorry if I seem like I'm in a bad mood, but I'm just now composing something in Pro Page 1.3, and discovered another bug: I put some objects on the background, in order to save the page and move it to another document, by loading it as the new current page. So I leave the graphic on the backdrop, delete all the pages, and then say "save page", and it saves something to disk, but when I reload it as a new page in another document, suddenly the page size is something like 9999 inches wide.