Re: CMYK or RGB? Macintosh or Windows? How's a poor guy to upgrade?

[cpwinter -at- rahul -dot- net]

On 18 Oct 2002, at 10:33, hedley_finger -at- myob -dot- com -dot- au wrote:

> 
> Keyboard tappers:
> 
> My daughter's partner intends to leave the hospitality industry and change
> career to desktop publishing and multimedia.  He intends to buy a new
> computer for his studies and therein lies the problem: Macintosh or Windows?
>  From being in full employment with a steady income, he is about to become
> an impoverished student, so needs to spend his savings wisely on computer
> hardware.
> 

    Here in the US, in my experience, the choice of computer is often 
determined by where one goes to school. When I took courses leading to 
my tech writing certificate, Framemaker was taught on a PC, while the 
Photoshop instructor used Macs. Note that these software applications, 
both essential (IMO) to desktop publishing, are available for either 
platform. I had some problems due to being unable to carry data files 
from one platform to another. (True, this was mostly due to my lack of 
experience.)

    I mention this in case your daughter's partner doesn't yet know 
whether he will run into a similar situation in his courses. However, if he 
can buy a computer and then use that for all his coursework, he should 
go for the less expensive option -- the PC -- and buy the software he 
needs on academic discount.

> Macintosh does CMYK and Windows does RGB, so the unthinking decision would
> be to simply go for Macintosh.  Yet Macintosh hardware comparable to similar
> Windows hardware is so much more expensive (remember, we are on a budget
> here).
> 
> So is anybody out there using the full panoply of Adobe graphic arts
> products (InDesign, PageMaker, Photoshop, Illustrator) to produce
> publications for PRINT on Windows, with high-quality, fully separable CMYK
> PDFs or camera art?  Is this possible?  Is this desirable?  Are the
> algorithms for converting Windows RGB to the CMYK for print sufficiently
> acceptable?  Which hardware should this man buy?
> 

    For what it's worth I use Framemaker, Photoshop, Illustrator and 
Pagemaker (along with the MS Office suite, communication apps, and 
CAD software) on a second-hand Thinkpad 770 with 192MB of RAM. It's 
not what I would call a production setup, but it works well for small jobs 
like brochures, business cards and Web pages.

> I look forward to advice from the four-colour printing experts.
> Unfortunately, most of my work is B&W or two-colour, so I have no
> experience in this field.

    I'm not an expert in color printing. I generally make a PDF version and 
take that to Kinko's (a nationwide chain of service bureaus here) to have 
it printed on their big laser printers. So far, I have not had a job for which 
quality of color rendition is critical, so Kinko's has sufficed.

    My first recommendation at this stage is to gather information. By that 
I mean: search out tutorial sites on the Web; get on as many mailing 
lists like this one as possible; and follow Usenet groups like 
comp.publish.prepress. Also, there are a lot of good books out there. 
One possibility is "Digital Prepress Complete", though it's out of print. I'm 
sure there are modern equivalents.

Chris


^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Buy ComponentOne Doc-To-Help 6.0, the most powerful SINGLE SOURCE HELP
AUTHORING TOOL for MS Word. SAVE $100 on the full version and $50 on the
upgrade.  Offer ends 10/31/2002 (code: DTH102250).
http://www.componentone.com/d2hlist1002

All-new RoboHelp X3 is now shipping! Get single sourcing, print-quality
documentation, conditional text and much more, in the most monumental
release ever. Save $100! Order online at http://www.ehelp.com/techwr-l

---
You are currently subscribed to techwr-l as:
archive -at- raycomm -dot- com
To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-techwr-l-obscured -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com
Send administrative questions to ejray -at- raycomm -dot- com -dot-  Visit
http://www.raycomm.com/techwhirl/ for more resources and info.