--- Start of Idrisi List message Dear Idrisians Thanks to everyone who replied! This generated one of the biggest responses of any questions, so it must be a common problem. Many and varied ingenious solutions have been found, and I copy below those ones which I consider to be most practical and widely applicable. I'm sad to hear that (according to one account) map printing is worse in V3 than V2!; I can't comment, as I haven't tried V3 yet Cheers, Eric SOLUTION ONE; SEEMS TO BE SIMPLEST, IF YOU HAVE CORELDRAW If you are using Idrisi32, export as a metafile and bring that into CorelDRAW. Vector and raster objects will be layered. SOLUTIONS TWO AND THREE: SCREEN DUMP; PROBLEM; REDUCED RESOLUTION It's convoluted but seems to work -- 1. Put together your map composition with legend, title, scale bar (in some round number such as 1000 to fit the situation). 2. Save as map composition. Keep it right on the screen. 3. In the Environment menu -- click off the status and tool bars. 4. Screen dump to clipboard. 5. Open up Corel's Photo-Paint or another such program in which you can edit pieces of what is now considered to be a bitmap. 6. Delete all the text from Idrisi. Move stuff around if you like. Then save as a gif or tif. Keep it on the screen. 7. Copy the whole thing to the clipboard. 8. Open up Corel Draw or some such. Open up new graphic. 9. Paste the stuff from 7. above into your new graphic. 10. Type in all the legend title, etc. in the font and size you want. 11. Separately make up a North arrow and save it as gif (which you will use over and over). You can then paste the north arrow into any bitmap you are editing. 12. Save the whole thing twice -- in the format of your graphic program (CDR, for example) and as a gif or tif or jpg or ??. This way you can edit the first if you need or want to. 13. Good luck with the above!! 1. Use IDRISI/Map composition to create a map with the raster layer, vector layers and palettes you like. (Watch out: scale bars, north arrow, or text may get distorted and corrupted during bitmapping, especially stretching.) 2. Save Composition/Screen dump Map window to clipboard. (NOT "save as BMP file") 3. Paste into Microsoft PowerPoint. (Edit/paste special/ Device Independent Bitmap.) Reproduction is good. Even text looks OK. 4. Now you can resize, frame, add text boxes, etc in PowerPoint. These are central functions to PPT, so they are relatively easy and reliable. To rescale, avoid dragging the frame. Instead, use Format/Picture/Size with aspect ratio fixed. Actually, I usually do all the annotations in PowerPoint. You can switch fonts, rotate text and move individual annotations around quite freely. You may have to fudge the scale bars & north arrows a bit. One way is to create them in IDRISI, cut and paste the whole composition, and then patch over it. Use the corrupted scale bar and arrow as guides to make cleaner, crisper versions in PPT. then you use the ppt north arrow or scale bar with an opaque white background to patch and hide the IDRISI annotations that may not have traveled well. SOLUTION FOUR: PRINT MAP COMPOSITON AS A FILE TO POSTSCRIPT DRIVER. One of the common ways to export an output composite is by generating PS or EPS files. First you have to install a PostScript Printer Driver, such as the AdobePS 4.2. You can download such drivers from http://www.adobe.com/, or http://www.hp.com/, or http://www.apple.com, ... When installing, you have to specify the output as FILE, not a real printer. Each time you want to export something, selecting the driver you installed (like selecting a physical printer as you usually do), the output will be saved as an output file, with a file extension of *.prn or others. The output file will be a PS or EPS file, depending on the option you selected with the driver. If you want to read the PS or EPS file, you can use some programs such as GSview, ghostview, GV. For more information on GSview for Windows, refer to http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/ If you want to convert PS/EPS file to PDF file, see http://www.adobe.com/ The PS/EPS file can be easily inserted into some Word Processors, such as MS WROD. The real image may be not visible, but it is printable if using postscript printers. The output PS/EPS file is not impossible to edit. One of the commercial solutions is using "The Graphics Connection" program (http://www.square1.nl). SOLUTION FIVE: PRINT DIRECT FROM MAP COMPOSITION USING OCAD7 The good printing of map composition is a problem more in Idrisi32 than in Idrisi2. I've found a really good solution at www.ocad.com. I've used the demo version (limited to 500 objects) of OCAD7 and I think that Idrisi and OCAD should became one single thing, or someone should write a routine to export Idrisi vector files in OCAD format, or the DXF export routine should be upgraded to export also the attributes of the elements (lines. points, polygons). I think that for the moment OCAD7 is the best solution for a good printing output. ________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com --- End of Idrisi List message IDRISI-L is an unmoderated list. As a service to list users, please post a summary of useful responses to your questions. To post a message to IDRISI-L, send it to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscribe to the list, send an email from the address to be subscribed to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "subscribe" (without quotes) as the first line of the message body. 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