Mac or PC

[Will]

I agree with Dick about it being sensible and clear, though I don't think Flora was thinking of that particular post.

My only comment is that I do sympathise with Ewa. What is possible, and what page makeup people, sub-editors and publishing company IT departments (sorry Tim & Co at Archant ) will accept are two different things.

Converting between PC and Mac formats has been one bane of my particular magazine publishing life for many years. I can understand the need for making rules about file formats, sub-editors and Quark Xpress operators frequently don't have the technical knowledge to deal with unusual file types, but do think generally a bit more flexibility could be allowed. Restrictions are necessary, for instance it is possible to do things like extract graphics and text from PDF files but the resulting pictures are seldom good enough for magazine reproduction and they, and the text, need a lot of work from me before they can be used. Fortunately Photoshop allows picture files to be saved (and compressed) in either PC or Mac-readable versions.

The whole point of JPEG files is that they are automatically compressed when saving, with minimal loss of quality. TIFF is generally better for magazine reproduction but even using LZW compression the files are generally far too large to send as e-mail attachments, and if you rely on a French dialup or even ISDN connection you do need to set an upper limit on size, believe me.

I have worked in companies where PCs and Macs have interfaced happily over a network, and in others where the only way to get text between the two was to convert to plain text and for me, as editor, to add in Quark Xpress codes for bold, italic, headlines, body text and the like. What a pain, and it would never work 100% first time. The idea of Zip files is interesting, but surely should be unnecessary for JPEGs (apart from using it as a conversion fiddle). I find unzipped JPEG picture files (almost always from Macs) can often contain some particular format that crashes my PC system for some reason. Also, I dislike using Zip files, unless from a very well known and trusted source,  as they can be used to disguise viruses and worms. Sorry about the technicalities, but other publishing people will understand.

[Quillan]

"I have worked in companies where PCs and Macs have interfaced happily over a network"

Exactly, I have set up loads of Novel networks that have a mixture of PC's and Macs and there has never been a problem exchanging files as the server does the conversion automatically when the file is saved making the whole process completely transparent to the end user.