I’ve just installed my ScanJet 4670, and pressing the scan button on the unit presents me with a dialog box that allows me to choose among all of the programs installed on my system that can interface with the scanner. So here’s the list:

• Canon ZoomBrowser EX
• hp scanning software
• Microsoft Office Publisher
• Photoshop
• Photoshop
• Photoshop
• Photoshop

First, the non-obvious. I have Adobe Creative Suite CS2 Professional. So then, why is Publisher listed, but not Adobe InDesign? And why is the rest of Office 2003 missing? Word, PowerPoint, Clip Organizer, Excel, and Office Imaging all support scanning, yet aren’t listed.

As for PhotoShop, since I upgraded from CS to CS2, some of these four on the list are CS, and some are CS2, but the dialog box doesn’t tell me which is which. And why four? I only have two versions installed here.

I’ll have to investigate this further, when I’ve taken care of higher-priority items.

Today’s task is something that should be simple–I have our radio club logo in vector form as an Illustrator CS2 image (with nothing but vectors, arcs, and text) and need to a scalable vector version that can be used in applications such as PowerPoint. Windows’ Enhanced Metafile (EMF) is the perfect choice for this, since it can support all of these drawing elements correctly, and with 32-bit precision.

WMF, the older 16-bit Windows Meta File standard from Windows 3.1, is not as capable, and is not capable of rendering the line joins correctly, and doesn’t even support arcs and circles. The Windows 95 version of WMF does support arcs and circles, but is still problematic.

Exporting the logo from Illustrator is easy enough, with the Export command. And using Windows XP’s Preview feature in Windows Explorer shows the result to be a perfect copy of the Illustrator file. However, when placing that EMF in Word or PowerPoint (Office XP), the line joins are incorrectly beveled, making the logo ugly and incorrect.

One problem with Illustrator is that it doesn’t let you choose between the two flavors of EMF–the original GDI based EMF from Windows 2000, or the enhanced GDI+ based EMF from Windows XP.

Since Windows XP’s image preview handles the EMF logo just fine but the Office XP applications don’t, I’m fairly confident that the problem lies with Microsoft’s code, not Adobe’s.

There needs to be a reliable way to include high-quality, scalable company logos in a wide range of software that design firms use in their communication and marketing efforts. For at least the Windows platform, this means EMF, so let’s get this right folks!

One of the tasks for the ham radio club I’m involved with is updating the membership “database”. Not updating in the sense of adding and revising records, but updating its structure from an Excel spreadsheet to a proper database. This has been actually been a multi-phase process.

The first time I got involved last year, it was because of the need to quantify the percentage of our members who are also current ARRL members (a requirement for club affiliation with the ARRL is 51% membership among the club members). Part one was straightforward–converting text entries of dates to date values, for example. But then adding all the data needed to be able to calculate paid/unpaid members, voting elegibility, and the other needed calculations proved difficult to do. I wound up adding 10 columns to the spreadsheet, each with complex formulas that resulted in either a 1 or 0 that could then be counted and used in other calculations. It wasn’t the right way, but the most expedient because the maintainer was most familiar with Excel and we needed to put more thought into our database needs.

We’re now in that phase, and I’ve been playing around with a trial copy of FileMaker Pro 8, expecting it to be a snatch to migrate the data and design a proper database. (The two members who will be maintaining the database already have FileMaker, so it’s the obvious choice.)
Hah! The first problem is that FMP imports all 65,484 rows of the Excel spreadsheet as records, even though all but a few hundred are empty. (Selecting and naming a range didn’t help, because FMP doesn’t let you specify ranges, named or otherwise.) Fortunately, deleting all of the blank ones only required 5 separate steps. Of course, FMP imports all fields as type “Text”, so you have to go re-define all the number and date fields that already had been marked as such in Excel.

After all of this nonsense, I decided to design the database from scratch, then import from Excel. Since my Excel and database field names are slightly different, FMP doesn’t get the mapping quite right. And although the import dialog allows me to reorder the fields, the design completely fails if I only need to fix one field, since dragging it into position forces everything below it that had been correct to be off by one. Talk about fencepost errors!

After working around all these problems, I have a rough database design that I like. I still have to fix some of the formatting (some membership numbers are showing up as 2.0001e+09), convert a few fields to a Boolean type, define pick lists, and restructure a few other fields, then I can enjoy the fun of figuring out how to do a mail merge in yet another application, and discovering if this FileMakre Pro 8 database will work with older versions.

I was experimenting with a new web service this morning for our local ham radio club, and the profile page requested an icon of a very specific size: 48 pixels square. Since I have our club logo as an Illustrator vector image, this should have been an easy, one-step process. Right?

Wrong. Although the Save for Web command in Illustrator allowed me to save the vector image to a PNG raster image directly, I could only resize the aspect ratio that Illustrator had chosen (48×30). Getting the simple square image desired required me to open the image in Photoshop, change the canvas size and specify on which edge(s) blank pixels were to be added to fill in the rest of the space.

Needing to save vector artwork to very specific image sizes is so common–in creating icons, Web ads, and many other tasks, that I’m amazed the ability to specify the export size and dimensions has not been a part of Illustrator for years.

Bear with me for a minute. I know this won’t seem like it’s CAD-related at first, but it is.

I bought a lucite sign holder with a pocket for tri-fold brochures at Staples yesterday, and while they had only the less-desirable one of the three variations in size and layout I was interested in, I bought it anyway, as I need a sample to begin prototyping a brochure presentation for one of the amateur radio events I’m involved with.
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Since many of the documents I view and create on my computer claim to be based on real-world sizes (drawings in inches or mm, text in points, etc.), I’ve decided to finally calibrate my computer’s monitor, using the built-in Windows display control panel features.

For my CRT, with its current settings, the correct value turns out to be 85% of normal size—82dpi. I determined the value by holding a tape measure up to the screen, and adjusting the value until the on-screen scale matched the real one.

This feature has existed in Windows as far back as I can recall (at least back to Win98, and probably Win95), but its existance is little known, and rarely used correctly by applications. My use of it will allow me to test any application that has a “show actual size” feature. I’m not expecting it to be pretty, but it is the only way you should ever expect such a feature to display your work in its “actual size”.

There are many problems with its implementation, all the way through Windows XP:

• The on-screen ruler is too short to be entirely accurate. It should extend the entire length of the screen, to ensure the correct value can be entered.
• Windows only allows you to set this value globally, even if you need a different value for each monitor.
• The Custom DPI Setting is also burried where few people will ever find it. You must open the Display Properties control pannel, select the Settings tab, press the Advanced button, choose the Custom Setting… from the DPI Setting drop-down listbox, and then have a ruler handy with which to compare the on-screen ruler agains.
• Although you can adjust the calibration using either the percentage drop-down listbox or by dragging the ruler, you can do so only in whole percentage steps—which is usually more than one pixel—so the result might not be as accurate as it should be.
• Many of Windows’ built-in display items, including system fonts and icons, are pixel-based and don’t scale well when you choose a DPI setting other than the built-in ones, which are rarely accurate.

So far, the problems I have found that appear to result from using the correct value include:

• Windows scaling of some icons and text (the icons in the quick launch bar and the task bar) to the point of being distorted, when they shouldn’t be scaled at all, since they are designed in pixels.
• Some text and hyperlinks in the Mozilla browser being cut-off incorrectly at the top, bottom, or in the middle.
• A similar problem with images, with multiple white horizontal lines tarnishing some images, some of the time. In either case, highlighting and un-highlighting the text or graphics displays them properly, until you scroll the page. I’ve not seen this problem in Internet Explorer yet, just Mozilla.

The USGS has collected some amazingly useful digital images. The problem is that some of the data is accessed via FTP sites or Web sites that are little more than alphabetical lists. Others are found in graphical web mapping interfaces that are perhaps the best proof of why the move to Web-based software is detrimental to usability and our society’s technical capabilities.

A further problem is that our tax dollars have already paid for the collection of this data, yet the USGS seems intent on making most of it available only for fees to be determined by the private companies that have access to the best data.

For this project, I need a color aerial photo of the Bayfront Park, and terrain data for the 4 kilometers surrounding the park (for RF propagation).

Confusingly, the USGS has numerous methods for downloading this data, including The National Map, the National Atlas, the EarthExplorer, and the Seamless Data Distribution System, with no clear indication of which system is the best for any particular purpose or data type. And with all of them, there is very little information about what each type of data offers; at least not presented in a way that is quick and easy to digest.

What is extremely troubling is that the USGS is about to delete vast amounts of data from its online database—the entire Digital Elevation Models (DEM) and Digital Line Graphs (DLG) data sets. While these are ostentiably being replaced by newer, better data, the removal of historical data is always troubling, not all current software can handle the new SDTS data format, and there is some question as to whether the newer data—specifically, the NED data set—is as good as the older data.

In the following posts, I’ll comment on how easy it is to download data in useful data formats from these sites.

For the countless time in my years using AutoCAD, I’ve had to change VIEWRES from its horrible default of 100 to a more reasonable 1000.

At the default setting, even small zooms cause circles to become polygons. Why does Autodesk insist on setting such a miserable default? Computers are fast enough today that it can’t be because of performance.

The SpaceBall 5000 USB that I received at AU impliments the USB HID (Human Interface Device) specification for a “multi-axis controller”, but because no software I have yet tried supports this cross-OS, cross-manufacturer standard for 3D input devices, I must install 3Dconnexion’s system driver and then a sub-driver for each program I’d like to use the controller with—AutoCAD, Photoshop, Office, and so-on.

Sometimes this is a good thing, because not all software vendors may not realize that their 2D application would benefit from a 3D mouse, but in most cases, it makes the configuration of the controller more difficult and less seamless than it would be if the app supported it natively. For any 3D design or viewing program—even the free ones—to not support this natively is as not supporting a 2D mouse natively.

When I first plugged the SpaceBall in, Windows XP informed me that it had found and installed a driver, and that my new hardware was now ready to be used. That should be all I needed to do, and the fact that it isn’t is the fault of CAD software vendors; not 3dconnexion.

With that preface out of the way, let me detail what I found installing the 3dconnexion driver. (Keep in mind that I’ll frequently disable it when testing software, to find out which applications support it natively.)

I was surprised when the installation program complained that Adobe Acrobat was running, and that I must stop it before continuing. At the time, I had no instances of Acrobat running, and the icon was not to be found in the system tray. So I was forced to hit Ctrl-Alt-Del to bring up the Task Manager, re-sort the list by application name, and end the Acrobat.exe process. Yuck.

After dealing with that, I chose the Custom install, and found that it had detected the following software installed and selected the appropriate SpaceBall plug-ins for them: Office, AutoCAD, Acrobat, and Photoshop. It then asked me if it should install and launch the system driver (3DxWare) on startup.

And then it proceeded to direct my browser to the 3Dconnexion Web site and a form asking me to register the product; magically selecting the applications it had found and installed plug-ins for. Unfortunately, it did so without launching a new browser window or tab, so it did so in my current window: this in-progress posting, just about wiping out all my input!

Note to the installation team: Opening new browser windows at the drop of the hat is annoying, but changing the current content of my browser window without permission or warning is far worse!

Launching AutoCAD 2005’s Communications Center for the first time, the configuration screen is disfigured in the same way as the Activation dialog:

After getting past that annoyance, the Communications Center is displayed properly, but presents me with a dilemma. The lightning bolt indicates that a maintainence update is available, and links me to Service Pack 1. Clicking on that link opens up Internet Explorer (not my default browser!) to a page that is blank because it contains “Active Content” that IE has blocked. Unblocking the content requires three mouse clicks, and displays a page that is labeld “Autodesk Live Update” and includes no obvious content that should be blocked.

But SP1 is also listed explicitly at the bottom of the dialog, and it opens to a page that has no such warnings, has no blocked content, and has much more useful information, such as links to all available language versions of SP1, their readme files, and a feedback form at the bottom. Annoyingly, it too opens with IE, even though my system default browser is Mozilla.

I’m further confused by the fact that the links for the actual SP1 download on the two pages are completely different URIs—which one is correct? With the hope that they are actually the same, I’m choosing the second one—the one without the needless “active content” page.