PC VS Mac Platforms

Re: PC VS Mac Platforms

Mike,

I understand your frustrations with the programs you mentioned. I too have had issues with clients using such software and this forum can certainly be a great place to vent. I will however state that any good prepress person can use either platform (Mac or Windows) with any software, including Publisher, Corel, MS Word/Excel, Quark, CS3 or even MS Paint and do it efficiently. Just because a designer chooses to use a program familiar to them doesn’t make them a bad designer. Bad designs make for a bad designer.

Mac or Windows makes no difference to me, nor does the program used. I can always make it work and be happy doing it because no company should refuse work. Any company that does needs to seriously revise their business plan or they won’t be around long. I can not tell you how many times we captured new clients from another facility because I was willing to work with the designs/layouts created by that said client. I do understand how difficult it can be especially when under serious time constraints but simply refusing to do work is not acceptable. (IMHO)

Also, any good prepress facility must have the resources to do the job right which includes having both platforms and any software their clients utilize.

John
 
Re: PC VS Mac Platforms

Craig,
Sorry but Charles is right! Yes, i can say that Corel is slighlty better than Publisher, Word and Excel, but is it very problematic when it comes to Prepress. It generates big files, gigabytes of .PS files or crashes during printing.. Corel lens, fountain, shadows and other efects take hours to be RIP-ed.
We work as prepress buro, and accept files from both Windows and MAC. We also recieve Office and Corel files - but Adobe files and generated PDF's from adobe are files that we never have problems with (we use Preps for Imposition).
Programs like Corel, makes people go to Mac.
I can agree it is not the Platform - it the software that you use. Adobe CS3 - for graphics PC or MAC it the best solution.

Arsim Shala
 
Re: PC VS Mac Platforms

Platform doesn't make a difference. Applications can make a difference.

This is why we so desperately need STANDARDS for how files are created. I've seen just as many bad files from a Mac as from a PC when coming from semi-professionals (either non-professionals or youngsters just out of school). A bad file is a bad file regardless of where it comes from.

The standards that I teach (I'm an instructor of Prepress at Fashion Institute of Merchandising and Design in Los Angeles) are the PDF/X standards. I know that Time-Warner's magazines all require that ads be submitted as PDF/X-1a. While there can be issues at the flattening stages, at least all the files +are+ preflattened and will work with MOST modern RIPs (Time-Warner ensures this by controlling what prepress systems their print vendors use).

If a file passes the PDF/X standards, then it ensures that all fonts (yes even free truetype fonts--and I've seen plenty of them used on Macs as well), images, etc. are embedded and in the correct colorspace. It won't ensure that images are of high resolution, but sometimes you have to allow for low-res images (ever tried to include screen captures in a computer book without low-res images?).

If we start with standardized files, we ensure that they will print.
 
Re: PC VS Mac Platforms

Our company does large and grand format printing. We started in ’94. For the first six years I would say our biggest challenge was more software than platform. The wild card has always been competency.
For years we needed to maintain updated versions of PhotoShop, Illustrator, Freehand, Quark, PageMaker, and Corel Draw. Almost all advertising agencies, design studios, and in-house graphics departments we dealt with designed on Macs on the first five programs listed. Printing designed in the sign industry was almost exclusively in Corel Draw on a PC. We coped.
For most of this time we maintained both a design and a prepress department so maintaining multiple copies of all of these programs was expensive and it required every computer in the prepress department to be loaded with them and every prepress specialist to know their way around all of them. YIKES!
Historically all of our prepress and design was done on Macs and our RIPs were all PCs.
I think it was about seven years ago we installed all the Adobe applications and Corel Draw on a PC Workstation that also doubled as our scanning workstation. That way if we ran into problems that we viewed as more platform related we would prepress it on the PC. As an Adobe Authorized Service Provider we got one each of the Mac and PC suites. I also hired a designer who was both an Illustrator and Corel Draw jockey. With this configuration we had very few problems with platforms or programs. Competency of the content creator will probably always be a challenge.
I would say in the last couple of years our industry has been taken over by CS. I don’t think we have gotten a non Adobe file in a couple of years and fortunately as our clients have become larger national companies the percentage of incompetently created files has also diminished. We also don’t see many files created on PCs.
I predict that the greatest problem we will face will be more in our clients and ourselves migrating to the latest version of CS and having our RIP software keep up. Every time there is a major upgrade we seem to have RIPping issues for three to six months.
The platform issue is about to get very interesting because I have been told CS4 takes advantage of 64 Bit threading to access infinite RAM ONLY on the PC at this point. We create and print multi-gig files and are, for example, working on two prints that are 22.5’ by 200’ right now and could use all the RAM we can access. There may be a couple more PC graphics workstations in our future.
 
Re: PC VS Mac Platforms

All these years later, its still the dog chasing the tail. I've been wrestling with customers for many years to build PROPERLY prepared PDF files. Since they can't seem to get it right (colors, bleeds, fonts inbeddedm etc.) for my workflow, I have to have the NATIVE application files. But hey, that's why they still pay me the big bucks.

Desktop publishing is 20 years old...how come I've aged 40 years during that time?

Did I mention that FONT is just another 4 letter word that starts with "F"...I'll say no more.

I Love my job!!!

Ray "Bubba"
 
Re: PC VS Mac Platforms

Basically, it boils down to two thing.

First, windows was built as a closed system. MS didn't want the average user to add files from the outside, load fonts and programs. Does anyone remember altering your .ini files just to load a font face for each printer, creating enormous .PS files on 18 floppies zipped and segmented to only find that disk 14 was corrupt or my favorite, writting over .dll files and not being able to use an application already installed. Wait, wait, wait, how about fix a corrupt application, on the Mac it was usually as easy as deleting the Preference file the PC it was usually a nightmare. I started on the PC with Ventura Publishing running it own OS, and Corel Draw (they lost me when they came up with CMYK 256) and I did so damn fine work and I know designer who Use windows only and never have PC issues. IMHO MS & windows still prefer IT people test and make changes, if you can do that your self - I'm happy for you. Yes, they played catch up and there are very little difference today between using either systems for graphic by *"TRAINED PROFESSIONALS"* I do everyday.

Apple had a open system making it easy for software changes, easy to load font and easy to use. Apple design their system around "The human interaction design" making it more intuitive to use (the quick key to exit a program is still the same as it was when I started in 88. And in just looks better.

The issue is that the Mac Graphics people went through all the hardships until we learned the do's and don'ts. Tiff or eps, what applications to use and what were the gotchas. Windows trying to be a player in the graphic world decided they knew better and came up with such lovely file format (wmf, emf, etc.) that caused all sorts of of havoc.

Two, Aldus (don't get me started there) came up with a great marketing idea"Have your secretary create your company newsletter", from there anyone with a computer and any applications that created pages thought they were a designer, unfortunately many are NOT.

That last point regarding Aldus, (aside from Aldus) the industry lost (mostly retired) many very good sales people (dinosaurs) and other industry professional who knew what was good and what was bad. And these people knew how to communicate between the designer and the digital prepress people.

So, you have prepress people not needing the head aches of PCs (Just give me a postscript file please), and preferred the easy of the Mac. So Mac came the defacto for graphics, and Apple has given back with newer and better (forget about the Fx) computers and persuaded software developers to use Apple's interface.

That why I prefer the Mac over the PC.

As a side note:
Today many new designers don't have a clue to creating a proper file for print printing - I had a job that had three file (me.tif, me.psd, me.eps) and believe that this is proper naming for three different files instead of 1 file in three different formats without any note stated they were being "cute". Concepts like bleeds, folding requirement, evil fonts and wrong applications use to create working. I have a document that gets sent out to customers called "Ten way to delay your job and cost you money" unfortunately not many read it.

So in the long run "Good Enough" (Two worst words in printing)" are the standard and what every comes your way - deal with it . Its getting worst not better.

Sorry for babbling on and on...
 
Re: PC VS Mac Platforms

Lol. I am out of printing now and glad of it. I remember when people started bringing in their own files I thought "this is going to be so great, it will eliminate mistakes and other problems". As you know, it has not turned out that way. Many of the jobs I did from customer's files I spent more time trying to make the file appear correctly on screen and print than I would have if I had reset and laid the whole thing out again.



Edited by: Robert Elliott on Apr 30, 2008 10:44 AM
 
Re: PC VS Mac Platforms

Isn't a Mac now a PC with a different OS? Aren't Intel CPU's the norm now? Why do components for Macs cost an arm and a leg over the same PC counterparts?
We use high end PC's exclusively now simply because all of our files handed in by customers are on this platform. Replacement parts are relatively cheap and easy to replace. Above all I can build a fantastic PC to whatever spec I want. Try building a Mac!
Personally I hate the snobbery involved between the Mac and PC issue. It's what you do with it that counts.
 
Re: PC VS Mac Platforms

In the end the computer is just a tool. Like any tool, in the right hands you can create a masterpiece; in the average hand you can get the job done; and in the wrong hands you get a piece of crap.

I've seen crap from great tools and masterpieces from what many would consider inferior tools. Remember the old saying, "It's the inferior craftsman who blames his tools."

Back in the days when I was a typesetter and Postscript and the Mac had just been introduced, we all got crazy because the Mac/Pagemaker combination turned out such garbage but our clients were entranced. They bought into the idea of "you can do it yourself" rather than hiring professionals who understood and lived type on a day to day basis. Unfortunately, we're all gone now. Some of us morphed into other things (remember Frank Romano was publisher of Typeworld, which would have limited him tremendously) and survived, but a lot of those who were "quality" typesetters have just gone on to other things.

Edited by: John Clifford on Apr 30, 2008 11:09 AM
 
Re: PC VS Mac Platforms

There used to be major differences. Macintosh could handle Postscript fonts natively, which for awhile there was no support whatsoever on Windows. Macintoshes had color calibration long before Windows too. Also Quark Xpress, which at one time was the de facto standard for page layout came out for Mac first (like 5 or 6 years before it was available on Windows) which I think was the biggest contributing factor. I'm sure that the fact that Macintoshes processor had a floating-point coprocessor made quite a difference when doing vector art vs. PC's which still to this day don't (they overcome that deficiency with sheer CPU power and speed now) And last when you consider that Macs have traditionally marketed themselves to creative people very heavily, it clear where the impression of Mac being better for print and design came from (from Apple)

Nowadays, as long as you're using professional software, there's little if any difference between the two. My only reason for sticking with Macintosh is that I've used them for decades.
 
Re: PC VS Mac Platforms

only one correction I believe they put the floating point unit into intel cpu when they came out with the pentium. 1992. remember the pentium pro. and of course you could alway buy the math co processor in 286, 386 and 486 machines. and of course macs now run on intel because they could go faster than the g4 and g5. and macs had to come up with 2 and 4 cpu highend machines to make the g5's fast enough to do all the cool stuff. now day 4 and 8 core machines are getting to be standard.

I am a pc guy, but I have always kept a mac around to covert difficult jobs. I only use the mac occasionally now, when we get a couple jobs a month that originate in Europe and they use fonts I can't buy in pc format. And they never convert to pdf properly.
 
Re: PC VS Mac Platforms

John, you are right. Computers are tools. I still say it ends up being which operating system are you more comfortable/productive with. Personally, I think Macs are the best choice because they can run both Mac and Windows operating systems. Why would someone want anything else?
 
Re: PC VS Mac Platforms

I was brought up with a 286 MS-DOS machine in the house and that was all I knew. It was all good until are prepress person quit and I had the opportunity to move into prepress. That was when I saw the light with using Mac's. A few years later Apple started OS X and I couldn't have been happier.

Now I am beginning to use Linux more often as my personal machine mostly at home and slowly at work. Linux and OS X work well together. OpenSource software has provided me with all the learning tools I can imagine without having to fork out cash.

Once I did database development with Visual Basic and loved it. Then PHP came along and it made so much more sense to me. So I gave up VB and pretty much windows too, except on a have to basis.

So don't forget Linux. It's providing more tools for us to get the job done and that is what matters.
 
Re: PC VS Mac Platforms

Your never out of printing. It's like the mob or the bloods/cryps. Blood in blood out. There's no escape. Too late now. Too late.
 
Re: PC VS Mac Platforms

Most of the time you can find out which os was used by checking the metadata. Check "file info" under the file menu in InD, PS or Illy. If that doesn't tell you, drag the file onto a text editor and you can most of the time find the os and software used there.

While I am in this thread, I have used a mac my whole life (long before I was in the Publishing Industry) and I don't think it is hard or costly to get mac parts, build a mac or fix a mac. Mac just doesn't make crappy computers that are equivalent to cheap PC's. Mac overcharges for some parts, but there are alternatives. You just have to know where to look. For example, memory from crucial is at least half the price of memory from apple.
 
Re: PC VS Mac Platforms

This is a discussion that has been around since the start of both companies I think. In the end both systems can do pretty much the same, just with other programs / layout. Both PC and Mac have build crappy OS and computers in the past and will continue to do so in the future. Both PC and Mac have made great OS and computers and will also continue to do so in the future.

Whether you use Mac or PC, it's all about how conscious you are working with your machine. For years I was a mac user, made the switch to windows 3.11 and 98 and have now made the switch back to OSX. However I still like working on my XP box to. Some things are beter in OSX, others are better in Windows.

It's all about taste and likes if you ask me.


Since most programs are multiplatform, no real difference to me is you use Mac or PC. I figure if Artpro were a PC program, we would work on PC's here.

In any case, if you get a new computer, just make sure it's not a cheap clone with components that don't work well together or that you get a mac from a bad production week.
 
Re: PC VS Mac Platforms

This discussion was great, once again I think Graphic Designers are hanging around the wrong forums. *Every designer need to take part in the Printer’s forums.* I can see there were issues in the past and some good reasons for large printing services to limit access to professional designers where they can. I have been designing for a few years now, but I have only begun to grasp the real technical issues we all face.
 
Re: PC VS Mac Platforms

"But I don't understand why Excel isn't used more for desktop publishing?"

Criag,
Excel? Your funny.
The platform Is not the short coming It always seems to be the user working on the platform.
Thats why when ID came about (CS2 & 3) I could tell all my Windows users to convert there fonts to outlines and not deal with the font issues. Not to say there are not font issues on the Mac side, now the problem Is getting really old T1 fonts to work. As long as you have the tools to fix or hack through It at the end.
 
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