Moving vector image files from Windows to OS X

May 24, '04 09:33:00AM

Contributed by: victory

First off, I'd like to state that this is somewhat of a Windows-related hint (and not an entirely new one, at that). It concerns a rather obvious method of moving printed output from a Windows 2000 PC over to OS X. Recently, I needed to move a bunch of map data from a Win2k PC to my Mac for editing with Macromedia FreeHand. The map data was from a GIS database product that ran only under Windows. What's more, the included viewer app was just that, a viewer app -- that didn't offer any way to export the image data. Yet the viewer did allow the maps to be printed, and it dawned on me that all I needed to do was find an appropriate Postscript printer driver for Windows, do a 'print to file', and I'd have a generic Postscript-encoded file of my maps. Since GIS and CAD apps work with vector-based data (usually with output to a plotter in mind), I made the assumption that if a Postscript driver were chosen, any vector-images printed through it would probably still contain line-based drawing primitives, rather than a rasterized bitmap. In short, I'd have a vector-based drawing of my data that could be easily resized and edited in any Postscript-capable drawing app. The following worked remarkably well:

  1. On a Windows PC, install the 'MS Publisher Imagesetter' virtual print driver, included with Win2K and later. See here for specific settings.
  2. When ready to print, select the aforementioned driver, enable the 'print to file' feature (in the standard Windows Print dialog), name the output file with a .ps extension, then print.
That's it! Now you have a generic Postscript file that can be moved over to OS X and loaded into a drawing app such as Freehand or Illustrator, or opened with Panther's Preview.app, perhaps for subsequent conversion to PDF. Please refer to this excellent article by Amir Herzberg for specific details on how to install and configure the Windows driver -- most of this hint is based on the information found there.

Read the rest of the hint for some helpful notes on the process...

Notes:

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Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20040521014126311