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At 17:15 on 12 Aug 98, Pat Churchill  wrote in part:

> The problem is this - some work on Macs, some on PCs. some produce
> pages in Quark, others in PageMaker.

> I have it in the back of my mind that might be a solution converting
> documents to .pdf files

Several potential problems here. 

The first is the PC-to-Mac transition. The biggest problem you'll run
into there is with fonts. A variety of type vendors claim to provide
identical fonts on both platforms, and a variety of programs claim
to convert TrueType or Type 1 fonts across platforms. However, there
always seem to be bugs. If your papers really want a goof-proof
solution, my suggestion would be to stick with the package of free
fonts that Microsoft provides under its universal website typography
plan. This includes identical Mac and PC versions of Times New
Roman, Courier New, Verdana, Trebuchet, Impact, Comic Sans and
perhaps one or two others. All may be downloaded for free from
Microsoft's website. The advantage is that all spacing and 8th-bit
characters appear to be identical. The disadvantage is that it
limits your typographic choices.

I would also stick with 300 dpi TIFF files (yes, they will be huge) 
for virtually all of your graphical elements. Some programs, notably 
the Corel suite on PCs, which I suspect some of your papers 
will be using, create non-standard EPS files and frequently use older 
bitmap standards such as PCS, which Quark in particular does not 
reliably handle. TIFF is perhaps the safest cross-platform choice. 
And since it is a bitmap, if you really need a font other than one of 
the standards, you can insert it as a graphic without having 
to worry about whether the font is the same on all of the different 
machines.

The Pagemaker/Quark transition is more difficult. Frankly, I would
rather work with editable EPS generated by current versions of
Freehand or Illustrator if I were going across platforms. But you are
right: The sensible answer is Acrobat. You'll need the "real" version
of the encoder -- not just the shareware reader -- whenever you
create a file. However, you should be able to make it editable and
printable in the reader version. Forget trying to import and 
export from Acrobat into Pagemaker or Quark. Just create and print it 
directly in Acrobat. If you really must import it, create an 
EPSF (print to file with an EPS driver) and insert it into your 
pages locally.

The biggest thing is, make sure you actually try these solutions  
before implementing them. A lot of people will tell you what should 
or could work, but practical experience is that most of these 
solutions do not work nearly as well as you might think. There's 
always some minor bug that ends up making the page look terrible. I 
just set up a paper to go direct to negative with process color 
created on PC and output on a Mac at a distant site. Almost nothing 
that was "supposed" to work actually did. And they were staying 
entirely within Quark.


              ERIC K. MEYER - meyer@newslink.org
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Subject: Giving feedback to Webmasters From: "Eric Meyer"  Date: Wed, 12 Aug 1998 05:46:52 -0500
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Subject: Giving feedback to Webmasters
From: "Eric Meyer" 
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