[OS X TeX] Preparation of illustrations for press

[Alan Litchfield]

Hi Bruno,

Bruno Voisin wrote:
>
> Does it get better if you save as pngs at the same resolution in
> Photoshop? pdf is primarily intended for vector content, using it for
> bitmap content may be the culprit here.

For a project that is destined for the press you do not want to use formats
intended for online viewing. These include png, gif, jpg, etc. and are all
lossy in way or another.

PDF is not and never has been intended solely for vector art. It is a platform
independent container for all kinds of content that range from vector or
raster based illustrations to video and can contain javascript for
interactivity. PDF is more than capable of being used for producing high
quality raster output, just look at all the glossy mags in the supermarket,
nearly every one of them will have been a pdf at some stage in its life. I
have been using pdf as an output format to produce everything from posters and
brochures to books since the mid-90's and with no major issues.

>
> Also, Adobe applications notoriously produce huge files and assume
> huge computer resources. They are also generally not well optimized
> for the Mac. Did you try Gimp instead? (I'm no Gimp user myself, so I
> don't know whether the result will get smaller with it.)

Umm. No. Adobe applications do not make notoriously large files. GIMP is a
rasterised graphic image manipulation program and is quite capable of making
really big files too. Note that it is not the applications that necessarily
make the files big, but the user. High quality work requires a lot of image
data, hence big files (the average newspaper page file when sent to a
CreoScitex platesetter is around 4Gb).

Adobe applications not generally well optimised for the Mac??? Bruno, really.

I am not about to trumpet Adobe's cause, but by comparison with any other
application suite in the same field, they have no peer.

Cheers
Alan

-- 
Alan Litchfield MBus (Hons), MNZCS
AlphaByte
PO Box 1941, Auckland
http://www.alphabyte.co.nz