A few questions

[Warren Nagourney]

Hi Greg,

Thanks very much for getting back to me.

Oh, I see - I had forgotten about the menu item involving keyboards. For 
some reason, the concept of a "symbol" character set was so foreign to 
the idea of an international keyboard, that I didn't make the connection.

Couldn't I create an arc as a shape by entering the appropriate commands 
in my private shapes.graffleshapes file? I assume it would use "curveto" 
instead of "lineto", but I could use the existing shapes text file as a 
guide. I believe the commands are standard Cocoa drawing commands, such 
as those used in NSBezierPath (which I have experience with). Once I 
have an arc on a palette, I could modify its shape and orientation using 
standard OG tools.

The Vellum trimming tool (shaped like a stiletto) allows one to remove a 
line segment (or curve) between any two points defined usually by the 
intersection of other lines with the one being trimmed. This allows one 
to construct very clean diagrams out of simple connected shapes. Vellum 
has a brilliant user interface which has tools like this one and others 
involving "smart snapping" (called the Drafting Assistant).

Thanks again.

Warren Nagourney


On Monday, February 4, 2002, at 03:10  PM, Greg Titus wrote:

>
> On Monday, February 4, 2002, at 02:32  PM, Warren Nagourney wrote:
>
>> Thanks very much for the suggestion, but I am afraid it didn't help. 
>> Unless I need to login again after clicking in the Symbol box, nothing 
>> changed - it still rejects my use of this font. For what it is worth, 
>> there are a large number of other fonts (like Math1) which are also 
>> rejected by the font panel.
>>
>> I don't quite understand why Symbol is an "international" preference; 
>> but, then again, I don't understand why Apple took the very nice NeXT 
>> font panel (with font preview) and changed it considerably for the 
>> worse.
>>
>> Carbon apps don't seen to have this problem (they have others, though).
>>
>> Thanks again.
>
> Hi Warren,
>
> The reason why the International preferences enter into it is because 
> there are two different issues involved here: fonts and input methods. 
> A font determines how a particular character is displayed, while an 
> input method determines how a particular keystroke or keystrokes is 
> translated into a character.
>
> What you need to do is enable the Symbol input method (which you did), 
> and at that point (when you have more than one input method selected) a 
> flag will appear to the right of the menus in the menu bar. When you 
> want to enter symbols, switch the flag to the symbol input method, then 
> switch it back to the U.S. flag to use the English input method.
>
> What is really happening here is that all of the text entry in Graffle 
> (and in all Cocoa apps and most Carbon apps) is using Unicode and the 
> alpha character is _not_ the same as the "a" character in a different 
> font.
>
> When you switch to the Symbol font, and then type "a", if you are still 
> in the U.S. English input method, OS X thinks that you are still 
> intending to enter the character "a". The text layout machinery notices 
> that there is no way to display an "a" in the Symbol font, so it 
> switches fonts back to Helvetica (a font that does know how to display 
> an "a").
>
> The opposite happens when you switch to the Symbol input method. Then 
> when you type the key labeled "a" on your keyboard, the Symbol input 
> method knows that you really intend alpha. The text layout machinery 
> notices that there is no way to display an alpha in Helvetica (or 
> whatever your current font was), so it switches fonts to one that does 
> contain an alpha character: the Symbol font.
>
> It is fairly annoying for the specific example of Symbols (which could 
> be solved if the Symbol font had a character for "a", even if it still 
> _looked_ like an alpha), but this implementation does have huge 
> advantages for entering text in multiple languages, and for having 
> multiple input methods for a single language (traditional and 
> simplified chinese input, for instance).
>
> Quick answers to your other questions:
>> One of the things I would like is to draw a circular arc and haven't 
>> found any of doing so. I suppose I could enter an arc as a text item 
>> (shapes.graffleshapes) using the existing ones as a guide. I thought 
>> there might be a slightly easier way of doing this.
>
> Nope, sorry. We've talked about having a "bend" tool for line segments 
> and polygon edges, but nothing implemented yet.
>
>> Are there any ways of setting global preferences for default 
>> behaviors? For example, I usually don't use shadows on my shapes and 
>> would like to avoid clicking on the box every time.
>
> Yes. Open Preferences, click on "Drawing Tools", and select the box, or 
> line, or whatever tool. Then modify it using the normal Info panes. 
> (e.g. click on the shadow checkbox to remove the shadow). The icon for 
> the drawing tool should change to reflect the lack of a shadow (or 
> whatever other changes you make).
>
>> I assume there is no way to cut a section of a shape out? In Vellum 
>> there is a stiletto tool to do this; I think it is called "trimming".
>
> No, but I'd be curious to hear more about this feature. How does it 
> work? What do you use it for?
>
>> The "rotate" tool is very fast and nice, but is there any way to set 
>> the pivot point?
>
> Nope, sorry.
>
> Hope this helps,
> 	--Greg
>
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