- Real-time transparency is available only if there is a 3D acceleration card installed in your computer. If you do not have such card, use the included Adrenaline Rendering Engine to display transparency on still images.
- When exporting, you need to first select the Adrenaline Rendering Engine for transparency to show in images or movies.
- When using transparency on text, its effectiveness may vary depending on the text color. This will be fixed in a future release.
Using 3D objects
- When importing a 3DMF object into Charts Pro, the amount of memory required by QuickDraw 3D to handle the object can be from 2 to 8 times its file size. If you intend to work with 3D objects, we recommend a Power Macintosh with at least 64 MB of RAM.
- When importing 3D objects or texture files, Charts Pro may report that memory is full if there is not enough RAM to handle the additional object or image. You should save your work and then allocate more memory to the Mac OS by either quitting other applications or by increasing the amount of virtual memory. Removing a desktop picture can also free some important amount of memory.
- Tip: If you want to replace two or more data markers with the same 3D object, we recommend that you use the Command or Option modifier key to replace entire rows / series, instead of repeating the same operation for each data marker. In the first case, Charts Pro will keep one 3D object in memory instead of several identical ones, which is more memory efficient. This is also true when using the same texture or movie on many objects. More information on this topic is available in Chapter 6 of the User Guide, "The Graphic Elements of a Chart".
Using colors
- The color used to display selected objects is the color chosen in the Appearance control panel of your System.
- Charts Pro fully supports the Apple ColorPicker, including third-party products like Pantone OfficeColor Assistant and ColorWeb Pro. Please note that Charts Pro works and exports in a RGB color space.
- When you select a color attribute, Charts Pro will display shaded objects based on that color. To get the same solid color that is shown in the ColorPicker window, you must turn off all point lights and increase the ambient light to its maximum value. Please note that by turning off point lights, you remove all visual notion of depth in your chart.
Using textures
- If you have a 3D acceleration card, please make sure that the latest software drivers are installed in your System Folder, as several bugs related to card drivers have been reported. Please read the following section of this file for more information.
- When importing large images, Charts Pro may notify you to increase the amount of application memory in order to import the image. Increase this amount by one or two megabytes, and try to import the image again. Do not allocate unnecessary memory to the Charts Pro application, as it reduces the amount of memory available to the System and QuickDraw 3D.
- Tip: When using the QuickDraw 3D Interactive Renderer, textures are displayed more rapidly and more accurately when they are a power of 2 in dimension, for instance, 128 x 128, 128 x 512 and 64 x 32. If it's not the case, QuickDraw 3D will shrink the texture map down to the nearest power of 2 before it can upload it to the 3D accelerator card. For instance, a 31 x 64 image will be displayed as a 16 x 64 texture therefore losing considerable detail. This situation does not occur when using the Adrenaline Rendering Engine, where a texture will be displayed as is without any resolution loss.
Rendering
When using the Adrenaline Rendering Engine, please take note of the following information:
- When using the Rendering Engine, we do recommend that you use a Power Macintosh with at least 64 MB of RAM in order to give QuickDraw 3D enough memory space to handle the rendering process. Larger images will require memory. Keep in mind that a 800 x 600 image requires 4 times more memory than the default size of 400 x 300.
- The larger and more complex a chart is, the more time it takes to render the image. Adding textures, 3D objects and increasing the number of point lights require more time to render.
- When you increase the quality of shadows, the Rendering Engine requires more memory to handle higher-quality bitmaps.
- When using the Adrenaline Rendering Engine, flat text does not cast shadows. Flat text also cannot be rendered with transparency. We look forward to add these features in a future release.
- When you rotate a chart or do anything that initiates a screen refresh, Charts Pro will switch to the QuickDraw 3D Interactive Renderer to display real-time actions. This does not disable the rendering settings, if you previously selected the Adrenaline Rendering Engine. Simply select the Render Now command to render the image again.
Printing
- If you want to print your Charts Pro documents as part of a proofing process, we recommend that you select the QuickDraw 3D Interactive Renderer which gives fast and very good results.
- If you print your Charts Pro documents using the Adrenaline Rendering Engine, you will get a better output but it will take more time and more memory. We recommend a minimum of 64MB of RAM when using this setting.
- The more complex your work, the more time and memory it will take to print. We recommend that you allocate more memory to the System (Mac OS) by quitting other applications or increasing the level of virtual memory. You can also reduce the print resolution by going in the Preferences section in Charts Pro.
- If you print a Charts Pro document twice and the second attempt fails because of a lack of memory, it is because QuickDraw 3D has not released its unused memory space. To force QuickDraw 3D to purge its memory, you may save your document, quit Charts Pro and then re-open your document. To prevent this problem, make sure there is enough memory available by quitting other active applications or by increasing the amount of virtual memory.
Exporting
- Exporting in QuickTime format can take time depending on the number of frames per second and the complexity level of your work. Using the Adrenaline Rendering Engine also takes additional time, as better images are generated.
- When exporting in QuickTime with Adrenaline Rendering Engine selected, the QuickTime options dialog box may take several seconds to appear after you press the Options button. This delay is related to the creation of a thumbnail image that is used in the QuickTime settings dialog box. We hope to optimize this issue in a future release.
- Exporting in Photoshop format at high-resolution may take several minutes, depending on the complexity level of your work, the number of point lights and the presence of 3D objects or textures. We hope to optimize this issue in a future release.
Others
- When setting the camera perspective to the minimum level in combination with specific 3D accelerator cards, objects in Charts Pro may appear jagged. This is a Z-buffer configuration problem, and this issue should be fixed in a future release.
- Selecting labels in perspective may be difficult depending on the font size and thickness. You may zoom on labels to ease the selection. Another alternative is to select all objects (by choosing the Select All command) and change the 3D Aspect to Flat. This will allow you to easily select text objects and change their attributes. Simply change the 3D Aspect to Perspective when done. This is known issue and it should be fixed in a future release.
- Under certain conditions where active lights are shown, it may not be possible to select some objects like labels and legend. This is a QuickDraw 3D bug related to the way objects are sorted in 3D space, and should be fixed in a future release. To bypass this problem, simply hide the active lights and then modify the text attributes.
- Overlapping text objects may occasionally produce garbage. This is also a QuickDraw 3D bug.
Accelerator cards
IMPORTANT: If you have a video graphics accelerator card that supports QuickDraw 3D, or if you own a Power Macintosh G3, a 20th Anniversary Macintosh or any other model that comes with a third-party graphics card, please read the following:
Charts Pro and ATI cards
Users of ATI Rage II / II+ / Pro cards (also available in some Power Macintosh G3 computers) may experience various display glitches depending on the acceleration card and version of drivers used. To prevent those problems we highly recommend that you upgrade your ATI drivers to the latest version (available at http://www.atitech.ca/). Users with earlier versions of ATI drivers may notice the following problems:
- Unusual display when applying transparency and texture map to objects.
- Transparency may have no effect on flat text such as the title, legend and labels when using QuickDraw 3D Interactive.
- Unusual triangles may appear on transparent objects when using QuickDraw 3D Interactive (they will not show however when using the Adrenaline Rendering Engine).
- Flat text may appear white and you may not be able to change the color.
- Flat text may appear as black squares.
- Flat text may be displayed incorrectly when rotated 90°.
- Depending on the monitor setting, Charts Pro may not display textures on screen.
- When increasing the work area of a Charts Pro document, or when creating a second document window, transparent objects may suddenly appear solid. This situation is most likely to occur on cards with only 4MB of video RAM. In this case, the card has not sufficient memory to display the whole image.
- Cards with 4MB of RAM are also likely to lack memory to display charts with a lot of textures.
Charts Pro and iXMicro cards
Users of Mac Rocket, Pro Rez and Ultimate Rez (also available in some Power Macintosh G3 computers) may experience serious display problems with version 1.0 of iXMicro drivers. We highly recommend that you upgrade the iX3D drivers to the latest version (available at http://www.ixmicro.com/). The following problems have been seen with version 1.0 of the drivers:
- Flat text such as labels, legend and title cannot be displayed.
- 3D objects may intersect.
- Depending on the point lights positioning in Charts Pro, an object’s edges may look darker or lighter.
- Transparency is not supported by the hardware.
- When increasing the work area of a Charts Pro document, or when creating a second document window, transparent objects may suddendly appear solid. This situation is most likely to occur on cards with only 4MB of video RAM. In this case, the card has not sufficient memory to display the whole image.
- Cards with 4MB of RAM are also likely to lack memory to display charts with a lot of textures.
- In order to get 3D acceleration, your monitor must be set in millions (32-bit) of colors.
Charts Pro and Apple QuickDraw 3D Card
Users of Apple QuickDraw 3D card may notice the following display problems. These problems are linked to the Apple drivers and should be fixed in a future release (available at http://www.apple.com/)
- When a texture is applied to an object like the background or data markers, it may appear smeared on one half of the object.
- Another known bug with this card relates to the way text is displayed on screen, where in certain cases characters may appear duplicated at certain font size.
- Small white gaps may appear when printing or exporting from Charts Pro.
When running a script that uses the Adrenaline Rendering Engine, the Charts Pro application needs to be opened prior to the script execution. We hope to fix this issue in a future release.
Other issues
Adrenaline Charts Pro 1.0 can read files generated by Adrenaline Charts SE 1.0. However, it is not compatible with files generated by Adrenaline Charts 1.0 (part of the Adrenaline Numbers & Charts product). The original Adrenaline Charts uses OpenDoc's Bento files, a composite format that contains data from many different OpenDoc components. This data compound cannot be interpreted by non-OpenDoc applications.
Some of the files generated by beta versions of Charts Pro may not be read by the final version.
Charts Pro supports Apple Navigation Services.
Charts Pro supports Apple's WorldScript technology, allowing you to use the different available Language Kits within Charts Pro.
Charts Pro conflicts with Adobe Type Reunion 1.2 on some systems. The font list may appear in Charts Pro pop-up menus that are not related to font attributes. This problem has not been seen with Type Reunion 2.0.
Enhancements in release 1.0.3
Version 1.0.3 fixes an early expiration issue when using the tryout version of Charts Pro.
Version 1.0.2 brings a fix to the way the cursor was displayed during certain actions.
How to buy Charts Pro
There are 3 easy way to order:
1. Call today, at 1.877.7CHARTS (toll free anywhere in North America, Monday to Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.) or at 1.418.658.9909.
2. Fax today, by printing and filling out the purchase order available in the folder "How to buy Charts Pro" and faxing the form to 1.418.658.9919.
3. Order on-line today, by filling out a form on our secure server at http://www.chartspro.com/
Getting updates
News of updates to Adrenaline Charts Pro are made available at http://www.chartspro.com/
If you register your software with your e-mail address included, you will be notified automatically of any updates.
Technical support
Technical support is available to all registered users who bought Charts Pro. Locate the file Tech Support Form in the Charts Pro folder and use it as a form to describe your problem. Once completed, send the form to <support@adrenaline.ca>.
