FrameMaker bug in Windows: Rotating large graphics or anchored fr ames results in truncation

[Walter Crockett <walter -dot- crockett -at- informix -dot- com>]

	Thanks to Rick Kirkham on techwr-l for the solution to this mystery.
FrameMaker running on Windows NT will truncate any large graphics after you
rotate them. You can't see the truncation in Frame, but it appears when you
print or create a PDF. I have verified Rick's experience that you can bring
the file into Frame on UNIX and print or create a .ps file that is not
truncated. This is a work-around for those who have Frame on both NT and
UNIX.
	The other workaround, of course, is to rotate the graphics before
bringing them into Frame. My problem is that I wanted to paste them directly
from a Word document because the resulting OLE image is far superior in
resolution to any importable graphic image, including .wmf. There is, sadly,
only one workaround for this: reducing the size of the image to 85 or 90
percent after rotation. It is also important, as he points out below, to
make sure after you reduce the size that it prints correctly, which may or
may not be a function of its placement on the page, I'm still not sure.
	This is a little-known and, as far as I can find, undocumented bug.
But if it ever happens to you ... now you know the rest of the story.  

Original message:
From: Rick Kirkham <rkirkham -at- seagullscientific -dot- com>
Date: Fri, 17 Nov 2000 12:14:55 -0800
X-Message-Number: 38

I had the same problem at a previous job. 

We used Windows NT workstations, but we had one Unix workstation running the
Unix version of Frame. We discovered, that we could call up and print the
problem files just fine on the Unix machine. (So we never bothered to pursue
a better solution.)

This, combined with the fact that the problem is with the printed image (or
PDF), instead of the on screen image, is a strong indication that the bug is
in the Windows postscript printer drivers. (When you convert to PDF, part of
the process uses a postscript printer driver.)

We had such drivers from Adobe, the printer manufacturer, and a third
source, but the problem was identical with all three. Moreover, applications
that did not use any of those drivers, such as Paint, could print the
graphics just fine. 

I don't have a solution, but here are a few more symptoms that might help
you narrow down the cause and its resolution: 
(1) It only happened to us on rectanglar images. 
(2) I found that the width of the part that DID print was exactly equal to
the width of the short side of the rectangle (given the size of the
rectangle when it was originally imported). (It was as though the printer
drivers thought the image was a square.) 
(3) We found that shrinking the image so that the whole thing fit within
that square would make all of it show up. 
(4) If we slid the image so that it was partly in and partly outside that
invisible square, only the parts that were inside the square would print. 
(5) It only happened on images that were fairly large in surface area, but
they weren't necessarily very large in megabytes. (None were in color.)
(6) Converting the images to formats that are small in bytes (we found *.png
to be the smallest) did not have any effect. 

Please keep this list, and Framers, posted on anything you discover, even if
it is less than a full solution, so that people will find this info in the
archives in the future. In particular, I'd love it if you could
independently confirm items (2) through (4) above, or disconfirm as the case
may be.


-----Original Message-----
From: Walter Crockett [mailto:walter -dot- crockett -at- informix -dot- com]
Sent: Thursday, November 16, 2000 1:56 PM
To: TECHWR-L
Subject: Frame question: rotated graphics truncated


I have not been able to get an answer for this question from the FrameUser's
list, so I am escalating it to techwr-l in hopes that someone can help me.

Here's the problem:

I am importing a bunch of large model graphics by copying them from Word and
pasting into Frame and then rotating the anchored frame so that it fits on
the page, which is 8.5x11.  (I normally import graphics by reference, but
these graphics are models created in Select and then pasted into Word
documents. When I paste them into Paint Shop Pro and then save them as .tif,
or .wmf, the text quality isn't nearly as good as if I just copy them in
Word and
paste them directly into Frame, where they appear as OLE2.)

My problem is that even though the graphic fits in the anchored frame, which
fits in the text frame; and even though I can clearly see all parts of it on
the page in Frame:
a. the top and bottom are truncated when I print
b. the top and bottom are truncated in precisely the same way when I make a
PDF


If I scale the size to 90 percent, I can see the whole graphic, and it
doesn't matter how close to either top or bottom margin I place it. 

If I create a new landscape page with identical margins and copy and paste
the graphic, it prints just fine. It's only when I  rotate it that it gets
truncated after a certain size. And it doesn't matter whether I rotate the
anchored frame or the graphic within it, it happens either way. 

What could be causing this problem? Is there some size limitation on rotated
graphics? 
These are complex database model diagrams, so I want the text to be as
legible as possible.

It has been suggested that I rotate the graphic before bringing it into
Frame, but you can't do that in Word or Select and when I do it in Paint
Shop Pro I can't seem to find any way of saving the graphic that doesn't
pixelate it too much.

Any ideas?




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