Re: The Death of Carbon

On Tue, 18 Dec 2007 14:21:34 -0800, Daniel Johnson wrote
(in article <13mghvd8qtm2m85@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>):

"George Graves" <gmgraves2@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:0001HW.C38C8A660039E84EF0182648@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On Mon, 17 Dec 2007 14:06:25 -0800, Daniel Johnson wrote
(in article <13mdsmvpceehmfc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>):

Yes. DOS had nothing to offer in printing, and Mac OS was noticably
better.
Windows was better still, however.

Right. That's why the lion's share of the prepress industry belongs to
Macs.

Apple got there first, and the apps solved the problems of generating
working PostScript. But it really helped to install ATM.

Once they did that, they had the apps- and the quality of the OS printer
support mattered a whole lot less- in that market. But they still suffered
from a poor printing architecture anyway, because *other*, non-PostScript
printers were mostly unsupported. HP put in the effort to make Mac drivers,
but nobody else did.

It is a good illustration of how the apps matter more than anything.

Because Windows printing is so much better. If I had a dollar for every
company that I have helped out because they couldn't get PostScript
printing
to work reliably with Windows, I'd be a rich man.

I don't think your experience is dispositive. You are one of those people
who breaks Windows PCs just be being in the same building with them. :D

You got it backwards. I was IN the building BECAUSE the floks were having
printing problems.

Also wasn't it the original
developer of ActiveX (who's name escapes me) who once said that Windows
printing and especially it's PostScript printing support was so screwed-up
that the entire OS would have to rewritten from scratch to fix it?

He'd have to be quite a fool to say that. :D

In my extensive experience, he was spot-on right!

Now things
might have changed with XP and Vista (I have no printing troubleshooting
experience with either of them), but I can tell you printing with Windows
in
Win95 through ME was a complete disaster.

Ah, well, it was fairly predictable that you'd say that.

Because it is quite true.

[snip]
This is a nice thing you can do thanks to Quartz's "PDF nature". You
didn't
get this on Classic Mac OS because QuickDraw was just too different from
PostScript.

Yes, I know. But that was then, this is now.

Yes. Today, Apple's products are not *nearly* as far behind the rest of the
industry.

Light years ahead of it, in fact. Most people know this. How come you don't?

[snip]
Sadly, Microsoft and Adobe were not able to come to terms about this sort
of
thing. Microsoft now has the unenviable task of trying to dislodge
PostScript with some printer language that will let Windows do stuff like
this. XPS is supposed to do that, and we'll see how it plays out.

I dunno. PostScript is so ensconced in the printing and publishing
industry
and PDF is so widely used in about every industry, that I really don't see
anything challenging it. After all, Neither MS or Apple could topple Adobe
Type-1 fonts even with a superior technology like True-Type.

I understand that that industry is extremely hide-bound, and that it held
out on OS 9 for a very long time.

Like I said, MS faces an unenviable task.

You mean catching-up to OSX? Yes, I agree. My bet is they won't do it. Ever!




--
The only reason that the air we breathe is free, is because the corporate
world has been unable to figure out a practical way to meter it.

.

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