Incidentally, when that event with the magazine took place 20 years ago, PCs were not even in the running for quality of post-production in publishing. . . or pre-press. The screen issues were abysmal on Windows.
Representation of WYSIWYG on Windows made accurate typography and layout ridiculous. It was a fact of the geometry of screen display. Macs, again, designed from day one for typography literally displayed on the screen what you would get when printed. Apple used square pixels while Windows had rectangular pixels. Made for a mess.
Today, the Quartz Graphic Layer that Apple uses to display the screen on Macs is in reality Display PDF. . . and it makes it very easy to see WYSIWYG for typography and font rendering. It also means that if you can see it on the screen, you can make a PDF of it for importation into a publishable document. . . and you can define the resolution to be what you need. Not so on PCs.
We get a camera ready ad from an ad service in PDF format. The mac would not open it. Send the file to IT guy that handles PC’s in the department as ask him to open it and work it. He does, sends it back and it works.
You guys can talk all you want about how great the Macs are but they were nothing but frustration in our department. When the department went to all PC all those problems went away with no discernible difference in ad print quality.
None of you Mac devotees has explained why a more expensive machine is better other than to simply say they are and to resort to “you just don’t know what you are talking about.”
The objective is to get the ads processed (100 or so a night) and meet deadline. Whatever gets that done best is best. The nuance about it being infinitesimally better (and I don’t concede that point) is pointless when weighing the objective. Bottom line, Macs gone, productivity improved. That’s our departments experience (and yes we still have artists in the department complaining the Macs are gone).
Yup...you’re right on.
I remember when we saw the Mac Quadra 800 at Comdex many, many years ago, and Display Postscript was demonstrated, I switched to Macs and haven’t looked back.
We do use an E20 workstation here for bookkeeping and database work, and I tried porting some of our ads, flyers, brochures and magazine articles over to it, what a nightmare!
I packaged our ID files and reran the files through Photoshop CC, made sure the fonts mapped properly to the Windows versions (same foundries) and proofed it in ID...the lpi, the screens, the alpha channels, spot colors and the font metrics were all messed up, and made bad versions when we RIPped it, then PDF’ed it...Win 7 is just not set up for a printing/publishing workflow.
Now, there are some expensive RIP’s you can buy, like EFI, Onyx, Island, etc., but why bother when the Mac does it bundled in its hardware and software?
See ya’,
Ed