101 things you (maybe) didn’t know about MacVector: #6 – Getting Graphics Out of MacVector

MacVector’s Map graphics can provide highly detailed views of individual sequences in linear or circular format, or of the results of many analyses. You can print these to a printer with no loss of detail, even if blown up to many magnifications. However, it is often more useful to insert these graphics into other applications such as Microsoft PowerPoint or Adobe Illustrator, or perhaps to save in a suitable format for publishing on a website or a blog.

By far the simplest way to accomplish this is to make sure your graphic is sized appropriately within the MacVector window, then simply choose Edit | Copy. There is no need to make any selection in the window – Edit | Copy will copy the entire graphic to the pasteboard, including any areas that are not currently visible. The data is copied in “PDF” format. This is the popular Portable Document Format more typically associated with document files, but is also used internally by the Mac OS X pasteboard to transfer high quality vector graphics between applications. Once copied from MacVector, you can then directly paste the high quality vector graphics data into most modern graphical applications, including TextEdit, Preview, MS Word, MS PowerPoint, Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, Pages, Keynote and many others.

If you would prefer to have the graphical data saved to a file in a particular format (e.g. jpg, png, tif etc) the simplest way is to perform Edit | Copy as described above, then switch to Apple’s Preview.app. This is installed on every Macintosh and can be found in the /Applications/ folder. From Preview, choose File | New From Clipboard and the copied graphics will appear in a new window. Finally, choose File | Save As… and you can choose from most of the common graphics file formats;

SaveFromPreview.png

This is an article in a long running series of tips to help you get the most out of MacVector. If you want to get notified every time a new tip gets published, follow us @MacVector on twitter (or check the feed for the hashtag #101MacVectorTips) or become our friend on Facebook.

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