I’m new to Freeway, evaluating it on the demo 30 days as a potential replacement for iWeb. I have encountered a problem (on both Express and Pro [v6.1.2]) that’s a bit of a show-stopper for me. I have reported it to Softpress but I guess, as a non-customer, I’m not a priority for a reply so I wondered if anyone here can offer any advice.
I have a PDF-format image on the clipboard (it’s a graph from Numbers) that, if I paste it into a Freeway graphic, has two problems: it renders onto a black background (so making its black text disappear) and adds a black surround. If I group it with a white rectangle as background before copying in Numbers, I get the graph OK but I still get the black surround.
If I paste it into Preview (new document from clipboard), copy from Preview and paste into Freeway, both problems go away (it’s still PDF at that stage). This makes me think that Freeway is rendering onto an incorrectly sized black background while Preview is exporting a white background of the correct size. Can I control the background colour?
The graph is something I update daily (and has always been fine) so routinely going through Preview would be a chore.
I would simply import the PDF as an image (in other words, don’t copy and paste). Draw a graphics box on the page where you want the image to appear, choose File / Import from the main menu, and select your original PDF. Freeway Pro can use just about anything you can open in Photoshop as an image directly. Express is more limited in its import formats.
This is coming about because of the choice in Apple’s applications to treat black as the transparent color. You will see this behavior in a lot of non-Apple applications when you paste an image sourced from an Apple (iWork or iLife) app. These same applications will never have a problem importing the image directly.
Walter
On Apr 2, 2014, at 1:30 PM, Command_F wrote:
Hi,
I’m new to Freeway, evaluating it on the demo 30 days as a potential replacement for iWeb. I have encountered a problem (on both Express and Pro [v6.1.2]) that’s a bit of a show-stopper for me. I have reported it to Softpress but I guess, as a non-customer, I’m not a priority for a reply so I wondered if anyone here can offer any advice.
I have a PDF-format image on the clipboard (it’s a graph from Numbers) that, if I paste it into a Freeway graphic, has two problems: it renders onto a black background (so making its black text disappear) and adds a black surround. If I group it with a white rectangle as background before copying in Numbers, I get the graph OK but I still get the black surround.
If I paste it into Preview (new document from clipboard), copy from Preview and paste into Freeway, both problems go away (it’s still PDF at that stage). This makes me think that Freeway is rendering onto an incorrectly sized black background while Preview is exporting a white background of the correct size. Can I control the background colour?
The graph is something I update daily (and has always been fine) so routinely going through Preview would be a chore.
I would simply import the PDF as an image (in other words, don’t copy and paste). Draw a graphics box on the page where you want the image to appear, choose File / Import from the main menu, and select your original PDF. Freeway Pro can use just about anything you can open in Photoshop as an image directly. Express is more limited in its import formats.
This is coming about because of the choice in Apple’s applications to treat black as the transparent color. You will see this behavior in a lot of non-Apple applications when you paste an image sourced from an Apple (iWork or iLife) app. These same applications will never have a problem importing the image directly.
Walter
Hi Walter,
Thanks for the quick response.
By going through Preview, I am effectively creating a PDF file so you’re right that that is a workaround, hough it is more steps to perform manually. I don’t otherwise have the image as a separate file since it’s embedded in the Numbers spreadsheet.
I believe the image to be a vector item as it leaves Numbers so it doesn’t have a background at all, just an absence of objects in some places. So the background colour is created by any renderer that does not retain the transparency of the non-object space.
I tried changing the graphic field to PNG before doing the paste (unlike JPEG, PNG does support transparency) but Freeway stubbornly changes it back to JPEG. I think that supports the theory that Freeway’s renderer is creating the background; I suspect it’s black for no better reason than the “empty” image the PDF is being rendered into is set to all zeroes (being the internal representation of black).
The black margin when I add a background in Numbers remains a mystery too
