Reference > Known Problems

General

In general, metafiles produced by DPlot and copied to the Clipboard may be pasted into any application that supports the metafile format. For example, DPlot-produced metafiles may be pasted into any of the Microsoft Office products, usually without any significant problems. DPlot-produced metafiles will always work in applications that simply play back the metafile in its entirety. On the other hand, graphics-oriented applications that manipulate individual metafile records (MS PowerPoint and Corel Draw, for example) are more likely to mishandle portions of the metafile. If this is the case with your target application, please contact us with specific information on the problem (see the Technical Support topic.) Until the problem is resolved, you can probably get around the problem by saving the plot to disk as a metafile (using the Save As command on the File menu) and importing the metafile into the target application using the appropriate menu commands. In MS PowerPoint, for example, you can import a metafile using the Import Picture menu command.

Text in metafiles overlaps the surrounding border

This problem is due to a limitation on the sizes of available fonts. When a metafile is played back in a target application (e.g. a word processor or presentation graphics application), the font sizes originally chosen are scaled to the size of the picture, as is the rectangle surrounding this text. However, while the rectangle can be scaled to any size, the corresponding font size may not be available (Windows selects the closest size available). For best results, select the desired size of the metafile using the Copy Dimensions command or Extents/Intervals/Size command before copying a plot to the Clipboard or saving as a metafile. This is in general much less of a problem when working with enhanced metafiles than standard Windows metafiles, assuming the target application supports that format.

Microsoft Office 97-specific problems

DPlot copies both enhanced metafiles and standard Windows metafiles to the Clipboard for most 2D plots. The default format when pasting into a target application will usually be an enhanced metafile, assuming that the target application supports this format. However, Office 97 products in some cases do not interpret enhanced metafiles correctly, and very often cut off the right and/or bottom side of a plot. This is not a DPlot issue, but a problem with older Office products. If you are using Windows 95 and Office 97 or older Office products and run into clipping problems when pasting DPlot enhanced metafiles, use the target application’s Paste Special command instead of Paste and choose the Picture format rather than Picture (Enhanced Metafile).

Microsoft PowerPoint

In many versions of PowerPoint, the default format when using Paste will be a standard metafile rather than an enhanced metafile. With standard metafiles you may notice text placement problems, particularly if you make use of DPlot's subscript and/or superscript features. To paste an enhanced metafile rather than a standard metafile, use Paste Special rather than Paste, and select Picture (Enhanced Metafile).

Printing

Grid lines do not print

One or more grid lines may not be printed if your printer must simulate color using patterns of dots and the line width selected for the grid lines (using the Symbol/Line Styles command on the Options menu) is so small that the dithered pattern used by the printer driver produces all white dots. The grid line width is set to 0.01 inches (0.254 mm, 0.72 points) by default. If one or more grid lines are not shown on your printed output, try increasing the grid line width to a larger value.

Rotated text with HP LaserJet 4/4M

The HP LaserJet 4/4M printer driver, version 31.1.1.8 or earlier, does not place rotated text correctly. The LaserJet 4/4M printer driver, version 31.V1.50, places rotated text correctly but in some cases drops characters from rotated character strings.

To fix either of these problems:

Use the HP LaserJet 3 driver distributed with Windows. Although this solution will fix the problem, output is limited to 300 dpi.

Use the HP LaserJet 4/4M PostScript printer driver. This driver is usually included on 3-1/2" disk with the printer.

Obtain an updated driver (L4WIN3.EXE) from Hewlett Packard. Driver updates are available on the World Wide Web at http://www.hp.com or from the Hewlett Packard Download Service at (208) 344-1691. If this does not fix the problem, it may be necessary to select "Raster" Graphics Mode and check "Print TrueType as Graphics" in the Print Setup dialog box. Note, however, that these print options result in a much larger printer spool file, and printing speed is considerably slower.

Colors

Although each document may have a unique color palette, on 256-color displays it is the active document's palette that will be used on all visible documents. The only alternative to this behavior is to stop using the Windows palette management and show dithered colors to simulate your color selections, which is, at best, ugly. This is not a problem on 16-, 24-, or 32-bits/pixel displays.

Limited Help functionality on older Windows versions

The DPlot Help file and the Help files for all plugin modules distributed with DPlot use HTML Help. HTML Help is known to have problems on Windows 2000 and earlier versions: attempting to display a HTML Help file using the HHCTRL.OCX function HtmlHelp results in a crash. To get around this problem, on Windows 2000 and earlier versions DPlot launches the Help file in a separate process, which works on all Windows versions. The main limitation of doing this is that context-sensitive help in dialog boxes (popup windows displayed after clicking the question mark button in the title bar) is disabled.

Display Problems

Fill Between Curves

The built-in hatch patterns (horizontal lines, vertical lines, etc.) are not drawn correctly on systems equipped with ATI Mach32 (and possibly other) graphics adapters. The user-defined pattern, however, does work properly.

Problems and/or suspected bugs not referenced in this topic should be reported to the author as described in the Technical Support topic.

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