Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 81512
ChemDraw objects are pasted as low resolution bitmaps
Last modified: 2013-01-29 21:59:08 UTC
Description of Problem: When a chemical drawing is copied from ChemDraw onto clipboard, and then pasted into Writer, it get pasted as a low resolution bitmap. In Edit -> Paste Special menu the only option is "bitmap" (source "unknown"). Steps to reproduce the problem: 1. copy a drawing from ChemDraw onto clipboard (select -> apple+C) 2. paste into writer (apple + V) Actual Results: drawing pasted as bitmap Expected Results: drawing pasted as a high resolution object that can be can be later copied onto clipboard, then pasted back in ChemDraw and further modified in this program. How often does this happen? always Additional Information (OS patch level, drivers, library version, etc.) MacOSX, 10.4.10, OpenOffice Aqua alpha version (aquavcl01_20070630.) !same thing happens in the latest OpenOffice X11 version! I contacted ChemDraw about this issue and here's their answer: "I got some feedback on this from development. When a copy takes place from ChemDraw, we put a lot of different file formats on the clipboard. It is then up to the application in which you want to paste to get the correct format from the clipboard. In OpenOffice on Windows the default is bitmap when pasted but for OLE manipulation you need the enhanced metafile format. But at least on Windows you have the choice of doing this manually through the 'paste as' functionality. On Mac this functionality does not seem to be available and OpenOffice is not picking the desired format from the clipboard. It seems that this is a limitation on the side of OpenOffice and there is not much we can do about that. We suggest you contact the OpenOffice people and have a request entered to solve this problem. If they do require our assistance with regards to selecting the appropriate format for chemical structures from the clipboard they can always contact us. "
Created attachment 48185 [details] ODT document with a ChemDraw drawing pasted as lowres graphic
Same problem as issue 14907. *** This issue has been marked as a duplicate of 14907 ***
Closing duplicate.
Are you sure that this is a duplicate? Issue 14907 is about an import problem in the metafile import; the current problem seems to be that the metafile import is not used at all. My question to the submitter: as you are using Mac OSX - what formats do you see in the "Paste Special" dialog?
To mba: I see only "bitmap" with source "unknown". There are no other options.
So this definitely isn't a duplicate. Reopening.
Now the interesting question is which formats ChemDraw provides to the clipboard. They claim to provide a MetaFile (EMF) but OOo doesn't offer it to the user. This leaves three possible explanations: (1) The ChemDraw developers didn't tell the truth (implausible ;-)) (2) OOo doesn't allow to paste EMF (3) OOo and ChemDraw use different identifiers to describe the format I don't have ChemDraw but I assume that pasting as metafile works on Windows. Would be nice to get that confirmed. So most probably it is a clipboard issue of the Mac port. Tino, do you think that this issue is something for the Mac porting team?
tra -> pantos, mba: I'm happy to have a look at this issue in general and the the formats that ChemDraw provides in particular but in order to do this I need first of all ChemDraw. Where do I get it? Is it Freeware?
No, I don't think that it is free software or even "free" software. What we could try to confirm first is whether pasting EMF works basically in the Mac version of OOo. Does anybody know about an application for MacOS that allows to browse through the clipboard and show all provided formats? Perhaps the submitter could use such an application to verify which formats are provided.
I doubt that EMF will be used as data format at all on Mac OS X. According to my experiences PICT or JPEG are the picture formats being used. But anyway its probably a good idea to let the submitter check what formats are in the clipboard. There is a tool pasteboardpeeker that could serve or purposes here. The binary is not that big so I will attach it to this issue. Its fairly simple to use. Just start it copy something to the clipboard from within chemdraw select paste in the menu of pasteboardpeeker. In pastboardpeekers main window you will see the raw content of the clipboard. Attach this to this issue please.
Created attachment 48664 [details] Clipboard content viewer (Mac OS X 10.4.x - Tiger version for Intel Mac). Unzip using bunzip2 and tar -xf <file> afterwards
In order to unpack the file: 1. Open a terminal window -> Applications - Utilities - Terminal 2. Change to the dir where the downloaded file resides 3. execute 'bunzip pbpeeker.tar.bz2' 4. execute 'tar -xf pbpeeker.tar' 5. Run pasteboardpeeker
Here's what PasteboardPeeker says about the ChemDraw graphics copied to clipboard: -> PasteboardRef: 3348368 ItemCount: 1 Index: 1 item ID: 1112493904 "com.apple.pict" "Apple PICT pasteboard type" 'PICT' P_____ 35796 X X ? CHMD 7 Gr ph bj "dyn.agk8ygvcmk2" "" 'CDIF' ______ 1346 VjCD0100 ChemDraw 11.0 {4 5 = "dyn.agk81g75xku" "" 'swsD' ______ 468 X Y Helvetica d 0 E E p X "dyn.agk81g75xkq" "" 'swsC' ______ 733 ChemDraw10030714382D 7 9 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0999 V2000E -0.6733 <-
tra: Ok from the attached PasteboardPeeker output it becomes obvious that on Mac OS X the only ChemDraw clipboard format that OOo can understand is PICT (the old Apple picture format). Actually Apple suggest that applications do no longer use PICT but unfortunately a lot continue to do so. Even worse some applications use PICT only as a container to transport more current formats like jpeg for instance. OOo has an own PICT filter which fails to work when PICT will only be used as container for other picture formats. For that reason in the OOo clipboard bridge we use the Apple QuickTime converter components to transform every PICT into a bitmap. This may obviously lead to quality losses. There is not much I see that OOo could do here to improve the situation at the moment. It might be possible that OOo's own PICT filter produces better results when importing a ChemDraw PICT but in order to make that work I need to integrate a type detection into the clipboard bridge which differentiates "real" PICTs from those that only serve as container for other formats and only convert the later ones to bitmap. This is what I wanted to do anyway as a developer from the Impress team fixed the OOo PICT filter for me recently but I'm not sure when I'll have the time to actually execute the plan. Atm I'm busy with implementing Drag&Drop for OOo.
The issue is very important to me and many other chemists. Currently, OpenOffice, Neoffice and MS Office 2008 can't insert or open OLE objects from ChemBioOffice under Tiger and Snow Leopard. iWork and MS Office 2004 (that I don't have and is no longer available) seem to communicate well with ChemDraw, so it must be doable. I can't really use iWork since they don't support odf and doc support is rather average. OpenOffice and Neoffice can display the drawing in the existing document created on Windows platform, just like under linux. The graphics are not anti-aliased and look fairly coarse but still readable. If I double click the object a get a "General error". Pasting of Chemdraw as OLE objects doesn't work (please fix this - this is so important). Openoffice inserts a tiny bitmap that can't be scaled up just as described. However the behaviour of NeoOffice is slightly different, and it inserts a huge diagram across the whole page that could be scaled down reasonable. No anti-aliasing is applied though. Under windows xp Openoffice can handle OLE well enough. ChemBioOffice is available as free trial from Cambridgesoft. I would love to have a fully functional OSS alternative package or at least built in support in OOO for cdx format. It really shows why proprietary software is evil. Please try to implement iWork style OLE support for Mac OOO port. I would be very grateful.
Hi Guys, CambridgeSoft, the makers of ChemDraw (now ChemBioDraw), have released a new version (12.0). The problem with OpenOffice still presists when it comes to pasting in Writer. I did the Pasteboardpeeker trick you suggested a while back and I got the following: PasteboardRef: 5471488 ItemCount: 1 Index: 1 item ID: 1112493904 "com.apple.pict" "Apple PICT pasteboard type" 'PICT' P_____ 15422 <> A m X X s CHMD Gr ph bj "dyn.ah62d4rv4gk8ygvcmk2" "" 'CDIF' ______ 1416 VjCD0100 ChemDraw 12.0 e_ 9q 5 = "dyn.ah62d4rv4gk81g75xku" "" 'swsD' ______ 542 X Y Helvetica d 0 D E} "dyn.ah62d4rv4gk81g75xkq" "" 'swsC' ______ 981 ChemDraw11130901332D 10 11 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0999 V2000E -1.4289 "public.jpeg" "" 'JPEG' PT____ 8497 JFIF X X tExif MM * > F i "public.jpeg-2000" "" 'jp2 ' PT____ 123725 jP ftypjp2 jp2 ijp2h ihdr colr "com.adobe.photoshop-image" "" '8BPS' PT____ 46572 8BPS 8BIM X X 8BIM lMM * "com.compuserve.gif" "" 'GIFf' PT____ 1173 GIF89a , H L "com.microsoft.bmp" "" 'BMP ' PT____ 1978038 BM . 6 F\ F\ "com.truevision.tga-image" "" 'TPIC' PT____ 39698 "public.tiff" "NeXT TIFF v4.0 pasteboard type" 'TIFF' PT____ 1978350 MM * . "public.png" "Apple PNG pasteboard type" 'PNGf' PT____ 20461 PNG IHDR pHYs \F \F CA IDATx :n P + { "com.sgi.sgi-image" "" '.SGI' PT____ 62120 "com.ilm.openexr-image" "" '' PT____ 10786 v/1 channels chlist I A B G "dyn.agk8ygvcmk2" "" 'CDIF' ______ 1416 VjCD0100 ChemDraw 12.0 e_ 9q 5 = "dyn.agk81g75xku" "" 'swsD' ______ 542 X Y Helvetica d 0 D E} "dyn.agk81g75xkq" "" 'swsC' ______ 981 ChemDraw11130901332D 10 11 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0999 V2000E -1.4289 Is this more helpful in finding a solution? Thanks! BTW loads of chemists would love to have this issue fixed. It prevents us from using OOo
This link may provide additional insight http://homepage.mac.com/swain/Macinchem/Reviews/chembiodraw_12/chembiodraw_12.html It looks like ChemDraw actually adds multiple formats to the clipboard, but only the PICT format contains the chemical information needed for round-trip editing.
Hi all, Just FYI, albeit without ChemDraw, for a while now there has been BkChem, a python based chemical structure drawing app. It will import and export files in several formats, including export to ODG format. The advantage of BkChem is that the ODG files are directly editable/copiable objects within Writer or Calc :-)), thus avoiding the problems with clipboard import. Alex