PICT support in OSX

Question

Level 2

237 points

PICT support in OSX

I recently upgraded to Office 2008 and found that support for PICT export of graphs from Excel had disappeared. Thus there appears to be no way to export vector graphics in a format that can be interchanged by various drawing programs. When I questioned this on the Mactopia support site, I was informed that "Microsoft is trying to follow Apple's lead in letting PICT die." If so, we would be left without a vector graphics (or mixed vector/bitmap) format supported across Mac applications. My fear is that this goes along with Apple no longer selling or providing any drawing applications anymore (I fondly remember MacDraw, Clarisdraw, Appleworks, etc.). So my question is:
1. Is it true that Apple is letting PICT die?
2. Is there a replacement format that has the same capabilities?

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.5.6)

Posted on Jan 29, 2009 3:14 AM

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Answer 1

Tom Gewecke

Level 10

115,952 points

Jan 29, 2009 6:41 AM in response to David Knecht

1. Is it true that Apple is letting PICT die?

Nobody here knows what Apple's plans are, but certainly PICT is still a format which can be opened and saved-to by Preview. Apple's own spreadsheet, Numbers, exports to PDF rather than a graphic format.

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Answer 2

etresoft

Level 8

46,360 points

Jan 29, 2009 7:17 AM in response to David Knecht

David Knecht wrote:
2. Is there a replacement format that has the same capabilities?

Actually, PDF is much better than PICT. Excel can save as PDF and export charts as PDF. PDF is much more compatible than PICT ever was.

Microsoft Office has very good support for PDF, much better than Apple's iWork (Pages & Numbers) or Adobe (Photoshop) - both of which have the same silly PDF clipboard bug.

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Answer 3

David Knecht Author

Level 2

237 points

Jan 29, 2009 8:51 AM in response to etresoft

pdf is a great format, but it is not vector graphics. With a true pict output from excel, I can open a graph in a drawing program, ungroup the graph and edit individual lines, symbols text etc. to create effects that cannot be done in Excel. You can't do that with PDF.

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Answer 4

etresoft

Level 8

46,360 points

Jan 29, 2009 10:36 AM in response to David Knecht

David Knecht wrote:
pdf is a great format, but it is not vector graphics.

It is in that it scales correctly, without the jaggies.

With a true pict output from excel, I can open a graph in a drawing program, ungroup the graph and edit individual lines, symbols text etc. to create effects that cannot be done in Excel. You can't do that with PDF.

That is not a limitation of the PDF format. Perhaps some of the more expensive vector image processing applications can edit PDF files. I know the free Inkscape program can do it, but only in X11.

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