This information was provided by Claris Corporation on 16 March 1998, and incorporated into Apple Computer's Tech Info Library.

Certain actions, such as enlarging a document window or increasing the number of colors in the Control Panel while a MacDraw Pro document is open, can cause MacDraw Pro to need more memory than is available to it. When this happens, MacDraw Pro 1.0 will display the following warning message: "Warning! Different colors or patterns may appear in some windows because of memory limitations." MacDraw Pro will automatically switch to a video mode with fewer colors to compensate for the shortage of memory on the application and allow for the desired operations to be performed. This is a feature, since the alternative would be to not allow the change in window size or video mode at all.

The changed video mode is not indicated in the Monitors Control Panel. You can see the current video mode by selecting "About MacDraw Pro" from the Apple menu. The line "Available colors: xx*" will be followed by an asterisk. Below that, you will see: "* Currently limited by memory."

MacDraw Pro will drop to the next lowest video mode. If that is insufficient, it will drop even further if necessary. The lower video mode that MacDraw Pro selects may be a video mode that is not selectable by the Monitors CDEV. For example, it may drop from "millions" of colors (24/32 bit) to "thousands" of colors (16 bit), even though "thousands" may not be an option in the Monitors Control Panel. This can happen, for example, with the Apple Macintosh Display Card 8*24.

To use all the colors that are selected in the Monitors Control Panel, make more memory available to MacDraw Pro.

Note: The video mode will not affect printing. Also, this information applies to version 1.0 only. MacDraw Pro 1.5 does not change the bit depth of the video to free up RAM. Instead, MacDraw Pro disables the offscreen buffer (drawing directly to screen/video RAM).