Re: CGM deployment? [was: Tables and Charts ]

Murray Altheim (murray.altheim@nttc.edu)
Fri, 7 Jul 1995 11:21:58 -0400

>In message <10955.9507071246@afs.mcc.ac.uk>, lilley writes:
>>> While you are at it you might want to standardize a vector drawing format.
>>
>>CGM (ISO/IEC 8632: 1992) is currently being registered as an Internet
>>Media Type.
>
>What sort of support for CGM is in various authoring tools? e.g. can
>I easily save FrameMaker drawings in CGM? How about stuff like MacDraw,
>etc.?
>
>Does anybody know how CGM interacts with fonts? If it has a nice clean
>font story, that would put it way ahead of EPS for this sort of thing.
>
>The consortium has been approached by somebody who's willing to give
>away source to a CGM viewer. If there were free CGM viewers available
>via w3.org, do you think it would take off?
>
>Dan

Dan,

I know that Canvas (both Windows and Mac versions) imports and exports CGM
format. I don't believe FreeHand does, at least not my version. I just gave
Claris a call, and according to the rep, MacDraw doesn't, but ClarisDraw
can export to CGM (no import). I wish Excel did, as I think with that you'd
be assured popularity. Anybody on FrameMaker? Our office would certainly
use CGM to display our metrics information, as client-side resizing would
be handled a lot better than with bitmaps, and of course document size
would shrink drastically.

I haven't played much with CGM, and I wouldn't know where to find the spec,
but on a quick check using Canvas I exported CGM and then reimported. On
comparison with the original:

a) it moved the top left of my graphic to 0,0
b) aspect ratio remained the same; overall size shrunk 3.3%
c) rotated text is now a bitmap; regular TrueType text is preserved but
resized smaller (more than 3.3%)
d) 8 bit colormap preserved

Just a spot test. Your results may vary...

Murray

__________________________________________________________________
Murray M. Altheim, Information Systems Analyst
National Technology Transfer Center, Wheeling, West Virginia
email: murray.altheim@nttc.edu
www: http://ogopogo.nttc.edu/people/maltheim/maltheim.html