On 27 May 2005 at 18:08, Johannes Gebauer wrote: > David W. Fenton schrieb: > > >>Finale always supported two different native graphics formats, TIFF > >>and PICT. Eventually TIFF was included on the Mac platform as well, > >>as the Mac uses that, too. But as far as I know Pict is only > >>supported on the Mac platform. > > > > But PICT is a bitmapped graphics format, no? That means it's not an > > entirely new class of format to support it. > > No, it's not a bitmapped format. It works similar to EPS in that it > can include bitmaps, font characters (in outline) and outline shapes. > However, due to the limitations of Quickdraw it has a number of > shortcomings, which mean that the outline bit doesn't seem to work in > Finale (but fonts did when I last used this). Pict graphics produced > by Finale were never particularly high quality, yet Finale included > the format because it was standard for MacOs, just as PDF is now.
Ah, so PICT is a format like WMF (Windows Metafile), with a simple wrapper around the content that indicates how it should be handled. Just thinking about this, it seems to me that the problem for MakeMusic with PDF on Windows is probably that it has to be licensed from Adobe. Given that the PDF support on OS X is built in, and surely with a defined API, that means MakeMusic wouldn't need to pay license fees to Adobe to provide the support in FinMac. That's not the case with Windows, open-source PS interpreters like GhostScript notwithstanding. Support PDF on Mac and not on Windows would be a fairly major fork. Of course, it would probably not be as great as the fork required to support it on *both* platforms! But not supporting it on either means no code fork, and that seems to me to have been Coda/MakeMusic's goal since the 32-bit Windows release of Finale (WinFin97, if I'm remembering correctly). -- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
