Background:

I am in charge of maintaining a database of product spec sheets which contain a technical detail drawing. The drawings are created in Freehand MX and cut & pasted into the FM container field. The database (FM ver. 5.5) is currently running in OS9 classic mode with no printing quality or pdf export quality issues.

The issue:

When I run the database in OSX (either FM 5.5 or 7) the drawings pasted into the container fields will not print with the same quality that they do from OS9. Instead of crisp vector graphics I get distorted bitmap images. The same issue occurs when exporting a pdf of the spec sheet.

I've experimented with a variety of graphic file formats but none print with the same level of quality & detail I was getting by cutting & pasting the drawing into the field. Until I get by this issue, my department must continue to run the database in classic mode. I suspect that this is an OSX issue more than a FMPro issue.

Has anyone experienced (and conquered) a similar issue? Any and all help will be greatly appreciated, thanks!

Hi,

At my last job, we had a large database containing lots of large sized images. These needed to be high quality images and were originally created in Illustrator. However, we could not produce the same quality images in FileMaker, so we settled for large high quality JPGS. These obviously were still not par with the original Illustrator files but that was the best we were going to get.

I researched this subject for quite a while, and was not sucessful on a direct solution. FileMaker can not store the images as vector because it uses raster formatting, and thus you lose quality when you copy and paste. Again, I was not able to find a solution on this, and it was crucial to our project at that time.

I've had some problems along these lines with FM versions prior to 7 but never with 7 itself. Prior versions would _sometimes_ give bitmapped results. Not always, just sometimes. 7 has been rock solid.

I'm using Freehand MX as well, so I think I can help here - my usual workflow is-

- Export from the Freehand MX file as Macintosh EPS (CMYK, RGB, include fonts checked in export options)

- Import into Filemaker 7 container field

Files print at their native resolution with no problems; just this year I've probably sent close to a half million pieces to print in this fashion (we specialize in variable data). What is your workflow compared to mine? (Let's talk about versions 7 and up here- prior vers. are problematic)

Tony