Avoiding the Output Blues: A Digital Publishing Primer, 1st edition
Authors: Taz Tally
Venue:  (1999)

From the Book:PREFACE: OverviewThe title of this book, Avoiding The Output Blues, tells the tale of what this book is about, preventing, or at least mitigating, as many problems as possible when it comes to creating and printing documents with desktop publishing equipment and software. Most of us who are using desktop publishing equipment today are doing so without the benefit of any formal or professional training. Many of us have been thrust, dropped, dragged, pulled, pushed or otherwise cajoled into the world of desktop publishing. Many of us have also come to enjoy the art and technology of the desktop, once we figured out how to make it work for us rather than struggle against it. Avoiding the Output Blues is an attempt to provide fundamental background information, as well as a myriad of tips and tricks, about desktop publishing won through many years of mistakes and trial and error. I hope it helps. Enjoy!Meet the bits & bytes Players Stars of "As the BYTE Turns"Danny D'ZinerDanny is a very bright, creative artist and designer. Although he never intended to, Danny has started working on a computer. Now Danny does nearly all his work on a computer. Danny bought a great system and started to work. All was rosy until Danny started sending out his files to a printer to have them output at high resolution for printing. Danny was used to having everything he handed to the printer work. He was soon to find out that not everything he created on the computer could be output through a high resolution Postscript RIP. Danny had to learn how to avoid the perils and pitfalls of Postscript. Heneededhelp.Sam E. SalesLike Danny, Sam E. was educated in the old school. He was used to picking up art boards from his clients and delivering them to scheduling, and then on to prepress. He had been doing most of Danny's printing for several years now, and they had a good relationship with few problems. Sam E. Sales has started having problems with client files, though. He gets more disks, and he has no idea what's on them. Prepress has even sent back some clients' disks with strange instructions about parent EPS files and missing fonts. Sam E. no longer feels comfortable answering client questions or even presenting quotes for these electronic jobs. He might just have to learn about that computer after all. Pauline E. PrePressPauline has been with the same printing company for over ten years. She started out in typesetting and then learned stripping (no, not in a night club) and had become quite proficient at assembling film. Pauline likes technology, so when her printing company started getting computers to do typesetting, she learned to use them. Over time Pauline has graduated from typesetting to page layout and, finally, on to scanning and electronic stripping. Pauline's responsibilities now include preflighting incoming client files. Problems with client files have become the biggest bottleneck in prepress. In fact, the problems have become more numerous and severe as clients send in increasingly complex files and more "finished jobs." Sam E.'s problems were coming to her, and worse, he usually refused to inform his clients about their file preparation problems, so the same mistakes reocurred. Now, Pauline had a secret crush on one of Sam E.'s clients, Danny D'Ziner, but he is one of the worst offenders! Maybe she could help. The ACM Portal is published by the Association for Computing Machinery. Copyright © 2010 ACM, Inc. Terms of Usage Privacy Policy Code of Ethics Contact Us Useful downloads: Adobe Acrobat QuickTime Windows Media Player Real Player