Here is another one

Legacy Intaglio
1

Download the following file:

http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~mjr/Cranky_UG_test.intaglio.zip

Look inside the blue circle, on the left, at Temple station.

That’s not right, the District Line (green) should be touching the Circle Line (yellow), and I’m sure that arc was OK when I first spliced it in.

Use the Point Selection Tool (white arrow) to take a look at the control handles on the points of arc. The handle right next to Temple Station on the District Line (green) should be horizontal. It’s not, and that is forcing down the District line, so shift-control the handle to get it back to horizontal, then select that point and nudge up a few pixels to get the line back to parallel and touching the Circle Line.

Now save and reopen. Ho hum, back to how it was before.

The way I fixed this was to cut out the arc segment and splice a new one in. So, for some reason, that particular part of the curve had got corrupted.

IMPORTANT: the problems can be fixed, but it takes/wastes time, and I can only fix problems that I see. This one was spotted because the non-parallel lines made it obvious, but are there other lurking problems that I have not spotted yet because they are less obvious.

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2

Max Hi,

On 22 Oct 2008, at 11:48, Max Roberts wrote:

Download the following file:

http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~mjr/Cranky_UG_test.intaglio.zip

Look inside the blue circle, on the left, at Temple station.

That’s not right, the District Line (green) should be touching the Circle Line (yellow), and I’m sure that arc was OK when I first spliced it in.

Use the Point Selection Tool (white arrow) to take a look at the control handles on the points of arc. The handle right next to Temple Station on the District Line (green) should be horizontal. It’s not, and that is forcing down the District line, so shift-control the handle to get it back to horizontal, then select that point and nudge up a few pixels to get the line back to parallel and touching the Circle Line.

Now save and reopen. Ho hum, back to how it was before.

Repeated your procedure. Handle was horizontal already but the line was not aligned.
I selected the point. Shifted it up by one pixel, saved and closed.
When I reopened things were as before.
Your problem has been reproduced.
Intaglio 3.0.1, Mac Pro, OSX 10.5.5 Leopard
Best wishes
Julius

http://juliuspaintings.co.uk

3

Le 22 oct. 08 à 12:48, Max Roberts a écrit :

(…) Now save and reopen.

All that I have done

Ho hum, back to how it was before.

No ! Everything is OK, how I have modified it !

¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿???

jacques

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4

Your problem has been reproduced.
Intaglio 3.0.1, Mac Pro, OSX 10.5.5 Leopard

I cannot reproduce the problem !
Intaglio 3.0.1, IMacG5 10.4.11 Tiger, Logitech mouse with grey cord

jacques

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5

On 22 Oct 2008, at 20:48, Jacques Villars wrote:

Your problem has been reproduced.

Intaglio 3.0.1, Mac Pro, OSX 10.5.5 Leopard

I cannot reproduce the problem !
Intaglio 3.0.1, IMacG5 10.4.11 Tiger, Logitech mouse with grey cord

jacques

Perhaps a quick list of who can and who cannot?
so far then
Max has the problem with
10.4.9 to 10.4.11. Both computers are Intel Mac Mini, 2GB
Julius has same with Mac Pro, OSX 10.5.5 Leopard

Jacques No Problem with
IMacG5 10.4.11 Tiger
and the gray tailed Logitech mouse
Ian No Problem but don’t know the machine

Julius

http://juliuspaintings.co.uk

6

Julius—I have a similar setup to yours; G5 iMac 1.5gb ram, OS 10.4.11.

I opened the map in the v3.01 demo, which can’t save in the Intaglio format, but can save EPS and PDF files. When the EPS and PDF versions were opened in v2.9.8, the lines could be modified, locked, saved and re-opened without any problems.

There was a shift, but it wasn’t in the drawing. When the EPS was opened in Intaglio, some of the station names had moved. Blocks of names were in the same text box, aligned left and spaced vertically with leading. Moorgate, Bank and Monument were in one text box, with Temple and Embankment in another.

Did Intaglio do this during the conversion to EPS?

Believe it or not, when the same EPS was opened in Preview, all the station names appeared in the correct positions…

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7

Ian Hi,

On 23 Oct 2008, at 00:59, IanB wrote:

Julius—I have a similar setup to yours; G5 iMac 1.5gb ram, OS 10.4.11.

I opened the map in the v3.01 demo, which can’t save in the Intaglio format, but can save EPS and PDF files. When the EPS and PDF versions were opened in v2.9.8, the lines could be modified, locked, saved and re-opened without any problems.

Intaglio was able to recover all the structural information from the EPS and PDF files?
Wow! See below.

There was a shift, but it wasn’t in the drawing. When the EPS was opened in Intaglio, some of the station names had moved. Blocks of names were in the same text box, aligned left and spaced vertically with leading. Moorgate, Bank and Monument were in one text box, with Temple and Embankment in another.

I don’t know how they were designed to be but all the stations you mention came through to me as separate entities, i.e. in their own boxes.
I have just saved as eps and read it back in.
The whole thing looks like one graphic.
This does not surprise me since eps produces a postscript file which is just a set of directives to be executed by a printer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encapsulated_PostScript
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostScript
Ditto the pdf converts into its own format
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Document_Format

Upshot of all this is that most Intaglio formatting information should have been lost.
That Intaglio is able to recover (earlier in your text) looks to me like it must be clever stuff but then I don’t have direct experience of working with postscript so all my assumptions must be wrong.
I note that EPS is designed so it can be embedded in postscript files so perhaps it is also able to save the structural information… This line of thought of mine makes no sense to me. But wait, it appears that eps formed basis for adobe illustrator artwork so the structural info might well be there. So it goes.

Did Intaglio do this during the conversion to EPS?

Believe it or not, when the same EPS was opened in Preview, all the station names appeared in the correct positions…

Yes but the Preview was reading it as an EPS file and I guess that Intaglio was reading it as something to be converted into Intaglio format?

It is very difficult for me even to guess at what might be happening to cause the errors described by Max. This is especially so since I am a recent user of Intaglio and I only use it to produce rough diagrams to document the graphic operations I am implementing computationally. The most complex thing I do with it is group and ungroup! I also work at A4 size which I doubt puts any stress on memory usage.

It could be something as simple as a difference in resolution in the arithmetic. It is possible that for some reason Intaglio performs a variety of floating point to integer to floating point etc convertions and the cumulative rounding errors produce the difference. On my machine it was a very small one pixel error.
The file I received was zoomed to 400% and possibly the zoom operations had an effect.
The thing is that without knowing anything about the logical structure of intaglio it is impossible to say other than that the error has shown itself to exist (or at least one part of the error has - since I have not explored further) on three different machines and two different operating systems.

I guess the thing to do is to make a bug report containing all the information gathered so far.

All the best
Julius

http://juliuspaintings.co.uk

8

I don’t get the problem either by saving to pdf, so it is something about writing to an Intaglio file that is not being done properly. A cache not being updated properly or something like that? So that although the change is registered in memory, for whatever reason it never makes it to an Intaglio file.

Of course, it would be nice if the objects did not get corrupted to begin with, but not being able to correct them is frustrating.

Just for the record, here is a screen dump of what the second test file should look like when open (I changed colours so that the cpntrol handles would be more visible.

privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~mjr/mjr.png

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9

Max hi
On 23 Oct 2008, at 09:45, Max Roberts wrote:

I don’t get the problem either by saving to pdf, so it is something
about writing to an Intaglio file that is not being done properly. A
cache not being updated properly or something like that? So that
although the change is registered in memory, for whatever reason it
never makes it to an Intaglio file.

Of course, it would be nice if the objects did not get corrupted to
begin with, but not being able to correct them is frustrating.

Just for the record, here is a screen dump of what the second test
file should look like when open (I changed colours so that the
cpntrol handles would be more visible.

privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~mjr/mjr.png

I include two png images of what the file you sent me looked like.
Notice the first differs in the colour of the control points plus the
existence in yours of a blue and white control point in the
rectangular station indicator beneath the m in Temple.
The second reproduces (but smaller) what you sent exactly but only by
my holding down the ctrl key as I clicked on the places where the
points were/should be.

Who would one file a bug report with if one were to do so?
Presumably Intaglio people keep an eye on the message boards so I’m at
a bit of a loss to understand why they have not yet joined in the
discussion.
Ditto regarding a little complaint I aired on these boards a couple of
weeks ago about my inability to copy and paste file names into the
save file box which to no reply received I.
So it goes.
Perhaps they’re all busy preparing 3.0.2 which will resolve all our
issues.

all the best
Julius

PS. I had to send again with much reduced images because the mailing
list complained about me sending a 100K or so of data.
Lets hope this one fares better.

http://juliuspaintings.co.uk

10

Hello Max,
here the file that I have modified, with a screencopy of the result ;
what happens on opening on your system ? does it remain how I have
closed it (cf. screen copy) or with a new bug ?
jacques

<your file, modified> on your e-mail box

Le 23 oct. 08 à 10:45, Max Roberts a écrit :

Just for the record, here is a screen dump of what the second test
file should look like when open (I changed colours so that the
cpntrol handles would be more visible.

privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~mjr/mjr.png

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11

That’s intriguing stuff, Julius, but your comments pose yet more questions!

As I’m not a programmer, the Wikipedia pages are tough going. ‘PDF…is a sub-set of the Postscript page description language…’; ‘The graphics commands that are output by the PostScript code are collected and tokenized;…’ It’s all very mysterious.

A possible solution to the moving text/graphics problem:

Save as an EPS, open in Preview and select Copy.

Create a new Intaglio document and select Paste.
To edit the map, select Ungroup and delete the grey box that covers the map.

When I used this procedure on the map, the graphics and station names didn’t move about.

Opening PS and EPS files directly in Intaglio isn’t easy. Some open but more often than not, you get an error message and hardly any Adobe Illustrator files open in either Intaglio or Preview. It would be helpful if this could be solved.
Incidentally, what’s the difference between the AI, PS and PDF formats? Does anyone know any tricks which might persuade stubborn files to open?

By the way, Copy and Paste to the Save dialogue box works here, both from Intaglio and the Finder.

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12

Ian,

Trouble converting to EPS and back to Intaglio is that I lose all the layers. Now, if Intaglio had a proper layer inspector (cf Canvas) it would be possible to select groups of objects via this window and relayer them quickly. This is because the PDF will still have all the objects stacked in the same order as the original, which means that similar-layered objects would be adjacent in the layer inspector window, if it could display objects that is.

Here is a quick tip. If the colours matter, in other words you have defined exact CMYK colours for your objects, never export as PDF, the colours will look similar but in fact their precise make-up will have been changed. Important if you are trying to match colour specifications (e.g. getting an Underground line in the corporate colour), very important if you want something printed in true black, 100%K, because the conversion process will take away some K and add in some CMY to it! That makes a complete mess of overprinting, black should always be set to overprint for anything going to repro, but only pure black can easily be flagged to overprint.

If you export as EPS, and then convert to PDF either by Acrobat or Preview, the colours don’t get changed at all, they all come out perfectly.

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13

Jacques,

Thanks very much. Whatever you did has fixed the file and that object is no longer corrupted.

Can I just confirm, when you opened my original file, it was wrong, but when you fixed it, it stayed fixed.

Ian,

You suggested some workarounds (e.g. align objects on my other post rather than move the line to the circles) but, for example, if you did move the line to the circles, did you get the return-after-save problem that I have?

The feeling I am getting from the posts is that this might be a problem for Intel Macs? Nice to have a comment from the gods on this one. I can reproduce the bug to order on my computer, but my house is rather a long way for Nick to travel!

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14

Ian hi,
I’ll deal with the last bit first

On 24 Oct 2008, at 01:16, IanB wrote:

By the way, Copy and Paste to the Save dialogue box works here, both from Intaglio and the Finder.

O.K. Thanks. It’s good to know the thing is local.
On Paste I get an alert box which says

Can’t complete this command
-25130

On copy I get no response and nothing goes into the clipboard.
Ditto on cut.

This is rather strange since I would suspect that Intaglio 3.0.1 is programmed using Cocoa, XCode and Interface Builder and therefore will call up the standard Save panel NSSavePanel which I believe to be the component used in all cocoa based saves all of which appear to provide a copy and paste facility as default.
For instance if I run XCode and create a new document based application this creates all the save etc facilities for me as default. If I now, without doing anything further, run this skeleton program, I am able to bring up the save panel and copy and paste into it just like that.
It is possible though I don’t know enough about it that 3.0.1 is written in Carbon and I believe OS 10.5 leopard has or is withdrawing support for Carbon because of it representing the start of apple’s move with Intel to 64 bit computing (the length of each machine code instruction which previously was either 16 bit or 32 and even 48 bit)

My references to these Mac programming software and tools are technical but save me writing lots of words.
http://developer.apple.com/referencelibrary/Cocoa/index.html
http://developer.apple.com/referencelibrary/Carbon/index.html
http://developer.apple.com/referencelibrary/DeveloperTools/index.html

But as I know to my cost, it having taken me about a year’s hard slog to get up to modest speed with Cocoa programming
e.g.
http://www.cocoabuilder.com/archive/message/cocoa/2008/5/18/207047
and
http://juliuspaintings.co.uk/cgi-bin/paint_css/animatedPaint/animatedPaint.pl

Cocoa is hard to get to know and so full of pitfalls that the cocoa mailing list goes out about 4 or 5 times a day with about ten or more messages each time. But all of the above is just guesswork.

That’s intriguing stuff, Julius, but your comments pose yet more questions!

As I’m not a programmer, the Wikipedia pages are tough going. ‘PDF…is a sub-set of the Postscript page description language…’; ‘The graphics commands that are output by the PostScript code are collected and tokenized;…’ It’s all very mysterious.

Ok. sorry to point you at technical speak and using it myself in my previous comments.
I’ll try to clarify as briefly as I can.

When a program sends a page to the printer for printing it first encodes it into a set of numbers which instruct the printer as to where to print black, or a colour and where not. That encoding is performed using a set of machine interpretable conventions that are referred to as a language, in this case a “page description language”. Some of these conventions aka languages are Postscript, EDS and PDF.

One feature of computer languages is that in the decoding process, statements in those languages tend to be translated into statements in other, simpler languages. More or less like when as I am doing now, I try to translate the computereese of the wiki page into something more human readable for this list. During this translation process the various grammatical units of the statements become replaced by other units sometimes refered to as tokes.

Now hopefully to convert the wiki sentence into english:

Often, the PostScript-like PDF code is generated from a source PostScript file. The graphics commands that are output by the PostScript code are collected and tokenized; any files, graphics, or fonts to which the document refers also are collected; then, everything is compressed to a single file. Therefore, the entire PostScript world (fonts, layout, measurements) remains intact.

PostScript-like PDF code = the statements written in the PDF language
generated from a source PostScript file = the input file written in Postscript
The graphics commands = the computer instructions used to generate a picture (on screen) or instruct a printer
are collected and tokenized = are translated into the common set of conventions being used but without loss of information, ie. one can in this instance translate both ways, reproducing the original in each case.
everything is compressed to a single file = compressed is just that, e.g. jpeg is a compressed graphic, .zip is a compressed text or binary file.
Therefore, the entire PostScript world (fonts, layout, measurements) remains intact. = the file still contains all the information contained in the original Postscript file.

In summary: A PDF file is an amalgam of data obtained from various sources including a Postcript file whose contents are included without loss of information, i.e. we can generate the original Postscript file from the PDF file.

Sorry. Can’t go on. This will have to do. Just hope it could be understood.
In future I’ll try to use standard English in my comments.

Best wishes
Julius

http://juliuspaintings.co.uk

15

Le 24 oct. 08 à 09:34, Max Roberts a écrit :

Whatever you did has fixed the file and that object is no longer
corrupted.

Can I just confirm, when you opened my original file, it was wrong,
but when you fixed it, it stayed fixed.

OK. But can you now properly change anything in the file I have e-
mailed to you ? or do you get a new bug ?

jacques

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16

Max,

Re: the loss of layers in PDFs, according to the Acrobat Reader Info panel, Intaglio PDFs are PDF Version 1.3 (Acrobat 4). An Adobe TechNote says; ‘Note: In PDF 1.3 files, layers and preview transparency aren’t preserved.’

A page on Adobe’s web site ‘About PDF Layers’, says:
‘To retain layers when you convert InDesign CS or later documents to PDF, make sure that Compatibility is set to Acrobat 6 (PDF 1.5) and that Create Acrobat Layers is selected in the Export PDF dialog box.’

To preserve layers, you’ll probably have to stick with the Intaglio format.

Re: Shifting/Alignment, apart from the moving text problem, I’ve had no problems with objects shifting after saving. I mix and match alignment methods. Sometimes I use the palette, sometimes the red guides.

Re: Colour, colour repro is a minefield. If you’re using outside repro and printing houses, it’s best to ask them what they need to do the job. Sophisticated design effects are pointless if the output equipment can’t reproduce them. The best way is to keep it simple.

Thanks for the tip about converting from EPS to PDF in Preview.

I must say that as well as being a very good drawing program, Intaglio is the most useful app for opening files.

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17

Le 22 oct. 08 à 23:25, julius a écrit :

Perhaps a quick list of who can and who cannot?

(…)

Jacques No Problem with
IMacG5 10.4.11 Tiger
and the gray tailed Logitech mouse

I have just tried : also no problem on iBookG4, 10.4.11 (the
mousetail is here light grey and there is no coffee cup on the desk)

jacques

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18

Le 25 oct. 08 à 13:48, Jacques Villars a écrit :

I have just tried : also no problem on iBookG4, 10.4.11 (the
mousetail is here light grey and there is no coffee cup on the desk)

And now my daughter has just tested the original file on MacBook
Intel Core Duo, Leopard 10.5.5 : the bug is there !

jacques

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19

Intel Macs, my hunch was correct. Thanks for everyone who helped track this down. Nick, over to you.

Max

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20

Thanks to everyone for looking into this. The problem is due to a very obscure byte swapping problem when running on Intel. For example, swapping the number 910.9999 then swapping it back produces 911.9999 (i.e., off by one). Apparently Intaglio’s method of swapping floating point numbers is incorrect in very rare circumstances. I’ll figure it out and post a fix.

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