Re: 3rd-party Drawing Tools for Diagrams in Framemaker

["Jeremy H. Griffith" <jeremy@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 24 Mar 2002 12:29:50 +0200, "Donna Taragin" <donna.t@sapiens.com> 
wrote:

>I agree with you that much can be done with Frame's drawing tools.  We have
>made very sophisticated syntax diagrams and all sorts of block diagrams
>showing how the various parts of our products relate to each other, etc.
>with Frame.  

Yes, we like Frame's tools too.  They seem to hit the 80/20 point very
well.  A few little glitches here and there, like dashed polylines, but 
mostly just fine.

>However, when we started exporting our Frame files to HTML via
>Frame and now via WebWorks Publisher, the problems began.  Any drawing done
>in Frame is "converted" to gif  automatically.  Sounds nice, but the
>conversion is pretty awful.  Objects are all over the place and often
>missing etc.  

We do such conversion with Mif2Go, using Frame's graphic export filters,
and have never seen this problem.  If you want to .zip up a .fm file
that shows this, and email it to us, we'd be happy to check it out.
(We use an entirely different process from that used by WWP.)

>We are now moving our figures to Visio, saving as gif, and
>then importing the gif as a referenced file.  The export to HTML keeps the
>referenced gif and all is well.  But, I would prefer not to have to go to
>another package to do the perfectly nice drawings that Frame does.  

A perfectly reasonable request... ;-)

>Has anyone else had this problem? What have you done?

We'd be curious to know too.  In addition to export as bitmaps via
Frame's filters, we convert Frame native graphics to vector WMFs
(using our own code) for our RTF outputs.  You could then use a
third-party batch converter to produce GIF, JPEG, or PNG from the
WMFs.  We provide a considerable amount of fine-tuning control
for the WMF output, so that might be a more effective path for you.
At least you could still use Frame's drawing tools, and the two
conversions are button-press operations...

-- Jeremy H. Griffith, at Omni Systems Inc.
  (jeremy@omsys.com)  http://www.omsys.com/

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