I Deron:

I've just come back from a trip and decided to use PgS to
tittle my digital images of the trip. I have other software
that would do the job but, of course, I'm more familiar with
PgS. I have discovered a few issues.

- Border

I would place the graphic (image) on a new document, size to
fit. Place a frameless text on the image, group and export
graphic as a JPG. The new image now has a 2 or 3 pixel
(meaning very narrow) border on the top and left edge. Very
minor problem.

- program error after a while?

I had a lot of images to be labeled. I would complete the
steps as described above, then close the document, open a
new document and go through the process again with a new
image. Then when the graphic was exported PgS would take
several minutes. The resulting JPG would have the whole
image squished into a very narrow band. It was unpredictable
as to how many images could be worked before this happened,
but I soon learned to quit PgS and restart it after every
image, even then the odd one would fail. I could tell if the
image was go to be ok by watching how long it took to export
the graphic.

- Corrupted PGS file.

I took pictures of some maps. On these I did considerably
more labeling. One map had several drawn tracks (objects)
and bubbles with descriptions. Because of complexity I would
save regularly as a native PSG file. When I exported the
graphic the image was processed so that just a small portion
of the bottom right corner was left and it was place in the
upper left corner of a blank (white) image. As a PgS file it
looked fine but wouldn't export as a graphic properly, I
even tried it as a BMP.

I spent considerable time trying to remove diferent object
types to find which one was causing the problem. I found
that all the objects had to be removed before the bitmap
would export properly.

I finally solved my problem by opening a new document in PgS
while the corrupted one was still open; Importing the
original map image and placing it on the new document;
moving to the old document and selecting all of the objects
except the map and copying and pasting them into the new
document. The new grouped image exported fine.

- Prefs.

One annoyance - When a graphic is exported as a JPG the
option is provided to set the X-Y resolution and the JPG
percentage/compression. PgS provides default settings. I
wanted something different but couldn't fine where to change
the default, so I had to input my prefs for every image --
all one hundred of them. Most other software remembers your
last setting, or has button so you can tell it to remember
the settings.

Working on Dell Laptop running windows ME.

Peter Martin

>- program error after a while?
>- Corrupted PGS file.

These both sound like something was getting corrupted. Have you had a
similar problem with older versions?

>- Prefs.
>
>One annoyance - When a graphic is exported as a JPG the
>option is provided to set the X-Y resolution and the JPG
>percentage/compression. PgS provides default settings. I
>wanted something different but couldn't fine where to change
>the default, so I had to input my prefs for every image --
>all one hundred of them. Most other software remembers your
>last setting, or has button so you can tell it to remember
>the settings.

Thanks. I went ahead and implemented this.

>Peter Martin

Deron Kazmaier - support@grasshopperllc.com
Grasshopper LLC Publishing -http://www.grasshopperllc.com
PageStream DTP for Amiga, Linux, Macintosh, and Windows

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

PageStream Support wrote:
>
>>- program error after a while?
>>- Corrupted PGS file.
>
>
> These both sound like something was getting corrupted. Have you had a
> similar problem with older versions?
>
I haven't worked with exporting bitmaps before. The closest
I've gotten is exporting objects in PgS's default mode,
which are then used as drawing components.

I can't remember as far back as version 3, but version 4
certainly does fail after some time, but the behavior is
different. With version 4 the first indication of a problem
is the disappearance of the icons on things like the align
requester. Normally I could be using the program heavily and
still expect to get half a hour out of it before the problem
appeared. I would save regularly and when the problem showed
up I would quit PgS without saving, restart the program and
continue. Usually after a couple of hours it's time to
reboot windows. I run Memturbo on my systems and after a few
PgS restarts I scrub memory, that seems to help a bit.

As to bitmaps -- the issue was with printing to postscript,
and I don't believe that was completely fixed. When a file
has a bitmap image in it, I change the printer driver from
postscript to bitmap. I haven't tried printing one of these
files with version 5. --- As a matter of fact, before we
left on this trip, in early Sept., my wife went through the
travel books and picked out section she wanted copied. I
scanned the pages, importing the scanned images into PgS to
fix up little booklets for each area. I was placing two
resized images on each side of an 8 1/2" x 11, landscape
page, and stapling everything down the middle. Some of these
booklets were 30 or 40 half sized pages. I couldn't seem to
get signature printing to work right so I just organize the
pages my self and printed them odd number first, turned them
over and then printed the even side. I prefer to print in
Postscript as the result is slightly better. When I would
print one of these booklets the occasional page would print
correctly, but on most pages one image would print and the
other would be missing. To fix that problem, I opened a new
blank page and 'move to page' the image that hadn't printed,
and fed the print page back through the printer to get the
second image. As I got short of time I eventually switched
the printer driver to bitmap, and everything printed fine.

It certainly is nice to be able to save objects to bitmap. 4
years ago, when packaging my images after a trip, I setup
the tittle page in PgS, printed it and the photographed the
resulting page. This time I went back and retrieved the same
file, made some small changes and them exported it as a JPG.

Peter Martin