Re: [WinMac] Mac+Win vs. Win+Mac + Question

John Nurick(j.nurick[at]dial.pipex.com)
Wed, 29 Jul 1998 06:07:29 +0100

At 02:04 29/07/98 +0100, Peter Mannheim wrote:

>1. I've had direct experience of something very close to the Win v Mac
>balancing situation when a Marketing Dept decided they HAD to have PCs to
>use a PC-only accounts package. Subsequent support "costs" directly
>attributable to these PCs were at least 3x when they were using Macs..
>If one has to have a heterogeneous environment, the Mac users are generally
>easier to support, so there has to be a balancing tilt to crucial PC apps.
>before I would put a PC where a Mac might do ..

>Now, I'm not isn't "preaching" - I have a RL question that came out of
>this very transformation and I would appreciate some help:
>I had created convenient, faxable and printable versions of a company
>letterhead & faxhead by taking their ( Quark Xpress EPS) logo and puttting
>the EPS in a Microsoft Word header and then placing their professionally
>designed bottom-of-page address details - which because of Type 1 fonts at
>fractional point sizes etc. had to be another EPS - into the Word "Footer"
>area.

>This worked very well on the Macintosh - even if someone forgets and turns
>off the printer there is always the LaserWriter Utility to re-download the
>fonts contained inside the EPS - but on the PCs it was not as easy:- the
>(PC-format) EPSes look completely wrong onscreen - you just see the name of
>the parent EPS - but they print OK on a Postscript printer.

All a PC will ever display of an EPS is the low-res bitmap that some EPS
creators write into the header. If these are missing from the current files,
you may be able to create them by opening and saving with appropriate
options in a suitable PC application.

>Faxing from a Mac is OK - the Mac's native QuickDraw recognises the
>graphics in an EPS and you get clean 200 dpi faxes. Faxing from a PC
>however is Big Trouble! - a colleague managed to make the Microsoft Fax
>driver faxprint the top-of-page EPS logo (no fonts inside) but the footer
>was hopeless - I know of no way to force-download the fonts inside an EPS
>on a PC... Even the "successful" header EPS was changed from grayscale to
>b+w and went "blocky" - so much so that I think I am going to have to
>recreate a new version of these letterheads & faxheads for standalone PCs
>that has converted all the EPSes to pure bitmaps via Illustrator or
>whatever.... - it is obviously possible to print the putative faxes first
>and then fax them, but that seems an appalling waste of these PC faxmodems.
>I'm going to try the USRobotics faxmodem driver next, but I can't get away
>from that problem of the fonts inside an EPS that Word cannot recognise and
>so won't tell the printer driver or fax driver to use them....
>Any ideas apart from the mass conversion from vector art to bitmaps ? If
>this is goong to be necessary, are there any PC-specific tips ? ( the PCs
>are Win95 machines with ATM for Windows95 - I'd rather not have to recreate
>Type 1 fonts in TrueTypes - but please tell me if it is the "cure"...

There is some kind of an issue about faxing any type 1 fonts on PCs, not
just ones in EPS files. In my limited experience, most PC fax software
simply substitutes Truetype fonts. Try Winfax Pro, perhaps (though I haven't
had particularly happy experience with that, for other reasons).

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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b2 on Tue Jul 28 1998 - 22:12:48 PDT