🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1993Mar6.000356.29906@leland.Stanford.EDU> ehle@leland.Stanford.EDU (Robert Ehle) writes:
>Of those publishers supplying disks to printers, how many have been
>asked to supply Postscript files along with the application file?
>We*ve recently been asked to this for a book and are finding it
>difficult in two ways:
>
>1) A Postscript file (which as I understand it does more a less a
>tracing of the Quark or Pagemaker document so that the people doing
>the output don't have to worry about having all the right fonts or
>even having the desktop application) is always much larger than its
>application file counterpart. There's usually no way to fit a whole
>book on a floppy disk.
>
>2) This is gotten around either by using a large capacity portable
>disk like SyQuest (which we don't have), or by breaking the Quark into
>smaller sections and then making Postscript files out of each of those
>sections. The printer actually prefers we supply smaller sections (in
>order to be able to isolate output problems before running a whole
>book), but we think breaking the book into pieces is begging for
>trouble,. Formatting it in pieces in the first place would throw out
>one of the major tools of desktop, global search and replace.
>
>Is this a problem for anyone else? Is there an obvious solution I
>don't understand?

A couple of possible approaches to solutions, at least on the Mac:
 
First and easiest, you could print a page or a small range of pages to 
disk (save as postscript). Specifying a range of pages is a standard part 
of every Mac "Print" dialog; saving as postscript (instead of sending
directly to a printer) is easy in System 7 and should already be in
your repertoire of tricks even under System 6. To jam more of these
postscript files onto a floppy, you could compress them with CompactPro
or StuffIt or DiskDoubler -- if the service bureau doesn't have the 
same software for decompressing them, simply save them as "self-extracting
archives", so that a double-click will reconstitute the files in full form.
This compressing works great with text files such as raw postscript -- you
will typically gets savings of around 75-90%.
 
If your document uses only Adobe fonts, some service bureaus will have
all of them. If the service bureau has all the fonts used in the document, 
figure out how to create a PostScript file without the fonts. This will save
a ton of bytes, about 60k per fon$ In PageMaker, at least on the Mac, I 
think you can do this in the regular (Aldus) "Print" dialog, under Options.
Again, if you want even littler pieces, you can print-to-disk just a page
or a small range of pages at a time. (I have to do this when printing 
very complex pages to an old Linotronic that has never had its memory 
upgraded.)
 
Alternatively, you could print-to-disk without including the fonts by
using Hugo Ayala's "Trimmer" control panel (on Macs using System 7).
 
Alternatively, you could print the postscript to disk, with or without 
the fonts, and use a utility called LizzieBorder to chop out particular
pages for printing (on Macs). LizzieBorden is available from your
favorite ftp site; it parses the postscript into pages.  It will even
tell you on which pages your downloaded fonts are included, so you can
be sure to send them with other pages (the docs explain all this fairly
well).  This seems to work with PageMaker output (I only did a tiny test),
and should also work with Quark Xpress generated postscript.  (It won't
work with Microsoft Word output, b/c Word apparently does not include the
necessary page-definition or page-break stuff.) It looks like a pretty 
neat utility.
 
There are probably even more tricks.  But in all cases, there is NO need
to break your original Xpress or PageMaker document into littler files.
 
Good luck.
 
Ken Kreshtool (kik@wjh12.harvard.edu)