> > This guy appears to be too small to know about PDF. He's probably the > kind of guy who believes "DTP" is synonymous with "Pagemaker", and > "computer" is synonymous with "Windows." I've seen slightly larger > publishing and printing houses (those big enough to do books and > magazines, not just flyers) totally dependent on Postscript, and now PDF. > They actually buy Postscript fonts costing lots of money, and do all > their page composition and galley proofs using high-end Postscript > engines, and distinguish between Postscript fonts optimised for different > printing engines (high speed printing presses and your "heavy duty" HP > laser printer will need different optimised versions of fonts to get the > same image), and so on. Quite a few of them use Macs for the back-end > work. > > And these guys never use PageMaker on Windows. Many of them use Quark > Express, some use Frame Maker, etc. > > Shuvam
i tend to disagree on some issues here. PDF has commoditized postscript, and bridged the 'digital divide' between the advanced users and beginners. as a macintosh user since 1984 i can tell you through first-hand experience that since 1997-8, the win doze platform matches or excels the mac platform for these tasks, and several independent reports across the world endorse this as well. small-time imagesetting bureaux across india have become more pdf-savvy and are quite happy to accept pdf files and output them on film. i know several in delhi alone, and can point others to you across india, even in non-metro cities like poona, coimbatore, hyderabad, etc. fonts optimised for different outputs was critical in the early eighties. however, with the arrival of font-hinting, both in postcript and then in truetype fonts, supported in opentype fonts as well, this issue has become less relevant. it is only an issue today when it comes to extremely small or extremely large sizes, too rough or too smooth paper, the finish of the paper, and some peculiarities of a specific font design. (a dense understanding of ink trapping with respect to serif designs is required). and a few other issues as well. sandip just seems to have come across a guy who does not know pdf yet. he can just call up the yellow pages and find dozens of studios, even ordinary 'dtp' setups, that can handle his stuff easily. asia-pacific is pagemaker territory and has a large market-share in india. the upper-middle tier use quark, but the top-end and the most sophisticated tool is dominated by indesign. framemaker is a totally different category of publishing, which i call 'document engineering' and it is in this space that the opensource TeX competes heavily with framemaker. do note that TeX is an ecosystem in itself, and has many tools, software, that cover several vertical segments. most major distributions of gnulinux come with tools for TeX. the opensource community finally has scribus, barely 18 months old. i have used this software somewhat, and find its features comparable to pagemaker 5.x, quark 4, with some features from pagemaker 6, quark 5, plus it supports pdf natively. however, imho, i find scribus too amateurish for the professional community. it may be another 12 months before something outstanding hits the market. but atleast the process has started. sandip, it is possible to do fairly sophisticated page layouts in openoffice and save them as pdf. a few months ago i created a multi-page report in openoffice and was quite impressed with its typographic control and pdf output. i suspect openoffice borrows some concepts from TeX. for instance, if you type '13th' the 'th' is automatically created as a superscript, with some good typesetting controls. :-) LL _______________________________________________ ilugd mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd
