Windows 10 Questions

[Bobby Henderson]

Lately I've gone over to Microsoft Publisher for most of the signs, posters and stuff that I need to make. It's impressive in many ways but it's (as Bobby calls it) dumbed-down to where it's about unbearable.... it keeps trying to think for me. (Same thing Photoshop Elements does, I suppose!) If I ever need to do something with a lot of graphics, or text that is artful in some way, I usually use Photoshop. If it's mostly plain text, I'll use Publisher since it makes editing easier.

Most sign companies hate Microsoft Publisher .PUB files or working with that application. Exporting a PDF is a fallback option, but even that can be sketchy if you don't have an application that's great at importing PDF files.

Photoshop is not good for text handling. The tools are very primitive in older versions of Photoshop. Only a few improvements have been made in the latest CC version. Jaggies are far more noticeable on pixel-based lettering than in photo imagery. I try to keep any lettering in the vector realm if possible. The text tools and text effects in vector-based "draw" applications are superior and not nearly as frustrating to use.

If I do dress up some kind of lettering design within Photoshop the graphics always get designed first in vector format within Adobe Illustrator or CorelDRAW (with the CDR stuff exported to Illustrator). The vector paths are then pasted into the Photoshop as Smart Objects or AICB-based paths that can be used to generate precise selections. If the lettering needs to retain sharp, high resolution edges then I'll create pixel-based fill imagery in Photoshop and use Illustrator's clipping mask functions to paste the imagery since the vector-based lettering.

Inkscape can do quite a lot for an open source vector-based drawing application. I often recommend that to casual users who want to create their own vector-based graphics without having to spend a bunch of money on professional level software. Affinity Designer is pretty affordable ($49) and has a more visually slick user interface than Inkscape (which looks like a throw-back to the 1990's). Vectornator is free for the iPad and Mac OSX. Autodesk Graphic costs $8.99 for iOS and $24.99 for OSX.

We're pretty much dependent on files we receive from external sources. Those guys tend to use Adobe products for graphical work and Microsoft products for standard "office related" files like text documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Professional editing is mostly done in Avid Media Composer for video and ProTools for audio. That way, you're pretty much locked into an ecosystem, defined by the industry around you. This is also, why switching to Linux is practically impossible. Switching to Mac would technically be possible, but even then there is software that we'd to run in stuff like Parallels. Also, Apple has really let down the professional industry by neglecting their workstation offerings for years on end. I like the flexibility of Windows desktops and workstations, where you can easily upgrade stuff like RAM, harddrives and GPUs, without trashing the entire system.

I got a pretty good laugh out of what Apple did when they re-introduced the Mac Pro tower. $1000 for a computer monitor stand? Only a superficial douchebag would be happy throwing money down the toilet like that. I've been saying it for years: Apple is into selling computers as status symbols and pieces of jewelry or fashion rather than tools to get work done. I can imagine some business executive planting one of those shiny cheese grater boxes on his desk. The Mac Pro tower isn't going to take over render farms at visual effects firms.

In my line of work, graphic design within the sign industry, the Windows platform is more dominant than ever. Back in the 1990's to early 2000's some industry specific sign making software was made for the classic MacOS and then OSX. But one by one each vendor making "CAS" software ditched their Mac versions. I was kind of surprised none of the major players in large format printing RIP software made OSX versions of their applications. LED-based "jumbotron" displays are run by specialized hardware controllers that interface with proprietary software. None of the leading companies (Daktronics, Watchfire, etc) make Mac versions of their software -although some apps have been re-developed as web-based solutions that can be operated by a variety of desktop or portable devices.

I worked for a publishing company from 2012 through mid-2015. They produced both books and magazines. The whole Adobe thing is completely entrenched in that business, as others have mentioned above. I believe that the thought of moving to a different software vendor was considered to be too scary to contemplate at that time. Part of the problem is that these businesses don't just use Adobe software, but they also use other software that works with the Adobe products and is useless without them. For another vendor to enter that market, even with a superior product, the barrier to entry would be very high.

Back in the 1990's Adobe was kind of on the outside looking in with regards to professional publishing. Quark Xpress was the dominant application for page layout then. PageMaker drew nothing but laughter from Quark fans. But Quark made a few missteps in the late 1990's and early 2000's. Adobe developed InDesign as a completely new application built on new PDF technology. The Quark fans tried poo poo-ing InDesign, but in the space of just a few years InDesign took control of the professional publishing industry. Tight integration with Illustrator and Photoshop was one selling feature. InDesign was among the first applications to fully adopt the OpenType format (which Adobe had a hand in creating).

[Steve Guttag]

Wait...you aren't still using ATM (Adobe Type Manager)?
Back in the early '90s...I too had a copy of Page Maker (student pricing) as it was one of the means to deal with Post Script. I had no idea what I was doing with it and mostly figured out just what i needed to know to get a particular job done. Since I had (and have) Macs, I have my collection of Post Script Fonts (Still). There was a program called Font Hopper that allowed one to convert them to more modern forms to work with later programs (this is probably still 15 years ago now).

At this point, I have Photoshop Elements and do very little with graphics. Photoshop lets me do what very little I do with images. I have friends that can do in minutes what it would take me days/months to do and what they do will look good too...mine...well...meh. I try my hand a little at CAD now, not full AutoCAD but QCAD (VERY low cost CAD software but reads/writes ACAD dwg and dxf files)...That industry seems to be going to REVIT though. Like such programs, I'll never use them enough to be proficient.

[Mark Lensenmayer]

Regarding Adobe CS3. Adobe gave me a special version that does not need the server access. Most of what I needed worked under Win 10. Contacting Adobe support might make CS3 available.

[Rick Raskin]

) I understand that Win10 is some sort of subscription model. If I don't pay for a subscription, does Win10 stop working or will I just not get updates?

If you are running Windows 7 you can upgrade to Windows 10 for free. Simply download and run Microsoft's Media Creation Tool. It will function as a normal install including updates and won't expire.

[Scott Norwood]

To clarify my earlier comments: there are plenty of alternatives to Adobe products. My understanding, though, is that a major issue in book and magazine publishing is maintaining things like color consistency from the book designer's computer monitor to the printed book. Supposedly, the Adobe products handle this better than anything else. And said Adobe products are not just used by the book publisher, but also by the printing company and various third-party contractors and such. I'm not an expert in any of this. I used to work with people who are, though.

I can say that, from personal experience, Adobe is a rather irritating company to deal with on matters like software licensing.

I used Pagemaker circa 1990 when in secondary school. I was involved with the publication of the school's literary magazine. At the time, it ran on a Mac, and was decent enough, but slow on the hardware of that era. The weakest point at that time was the 300 DPI resolution of the laser printer that we were using. The output quality was good for its time, but not professional quality. The way that things worked at that point was that we printed the text on the laser printer, then glued everything together (using hot wax) and cut rectangles of red cardboard and glued (waxed) them where photographs and artwork were to be placed. The red rectangles produced clear rectangles on the Kodalith negative that the printer made, which is where he would insert the halftone negatives for the greyscale artwork. This was then used to produce printing plates for the printing press. I believe that most modern processes skip this step and go right from the computer file to the printing plate, but we have things like optical scanners and digital cameras now, so artwork can go right into the computer page layout.

[Frank Cox]

My friend with the print shop prints his plates directly from a special printer. I wrote a RIP so he could do that since it was going to cost something like $50,000 to buy one. I spent about six months and learned far more about printing and graphics than I ever thought I would need to know but eventually came up with a working RIP that he's been using to this day, and he paid me a lot less than $50,000.

It's less flexible and probably a bit less efficient than a commercial product would be because it's just tuned up for his exact press and printer setup (and it's based on my best guesses about how it should work having never actually used one before myself), but it works pretty well. He runs it on a fairly beefy dedicated computer since trying to run it on his main application server brings the whole thing to its knees. But he can just feed the output from Scribus to it, the program does the imposition and RIP and prints the plates. One step operation, though it does take a while. Feed the paper to the RIP computer and go for lunch....

It even does colour separations.

The RIP computer's name is, of course, Jack.

[Scott Norwood]

Clearly, you should have offered to do the job for $49k....

Actually, I'd bet that Jack is more stable and reliable than the commercial equivalent. Most of this software, despite the price, is truly awful.

[Bobby Henderson]

Wait...you aren't still using ATM (Adobe Type Manager)?

I think a computer would have to be running WindowsME, 98 or earlier for ATM to work. WindowsNT as well as WindowsXP and later had built-in support for Postscript Type 1 fonts. But! They didn't carry over support Type 1 Multiple Master fonts. Funny thing, the latest big update to Windows10 pulled "official" support for Postscript Type 1 fonts, even though they still seem to work (for now).

Mention the term "ATM" to some younger computer graphics people and they'll think you're talking about a certain kind of sex act. If one was running an old version of Windows in a virtual machine and had a copy of Adobe Type Manager it would be possible to ressurect great MM typefaces like Penumbra and Kepler among others. The new OpenType Variable font format basically does what the Multiple Master format did, but with the greatly expanded character sets capable from OpenType. There's not much in the way of Variable Fonts and applications that can use them currently. That high priced Adobe stuff supports it though.

To clarify my earlier comments: there are plenty of alternatives to Adobe products. My understanding, though, is that a major issue in book and magazine publishing is maintaining things like color consistency from the book designer's computer monitor to the printed book. Supposedly, the Adobe products handle this better than anything else. And said Adobe products are not just used by the book publisher, but also by the printing company and various third-party contractors and such. I'm not an expert in any of this. I used to work with people who are, though.

I think Adobe has the professional print publishing market pretty locked up. There's a lot of industry specific third party plug-ins made for InDesign that greatly enhances its capabilities for newspaper and magazine publishing. Quark Xpress had the monopoly on that plug-in market 20+ years ago. Then there's all the plug-ins available for Photoshop and Illustrator. Astute Graphics on its own turns Illustrator into a wonderful drawing application by virtue of its outstanding plug-ins.

Much of the printing industry has standardized on Adobe's technology. It seems like every time Adobe does an update on their applications they send out a lot of technology updates to other third parties at the same time. Our large format printing RIP applications never barf back any PDF or EPS files I send to them, no matter how new the file type may be and what new features might be included. "Freeform gradients" was a brand new thing with Illustrator CC 2019. I really had to use that feature for graphics on a medical marijuana dispensary sign we made a year ago. I was worried the feature would be too new for our printers to handle, but they output it correctly.

Still, color matching can be a real nightmare at times. Adobe tries to do its own part by keeping things very consistent on the software end. However, when you're doing large format printing work the types of vinyls or other materials you use will have their own ink and color profiles. Our two latex printers and UV flatbed printer do a better job of maintaining consistent color than the old thermal inkjet printer we retired (and sold!). But still, shit happens. If you don't keep good records about what profile was used or are careful about specifying colors in the artwork itself you could run into trouble. Someone with a vehicle wrap purchased months ago might need a patch job. The color needs to match.

I can say that, from personal experience, Adobe is a rather irritating company to deal with on matters like software licensing.

Adobe can be irritating in multiple directions. We have 3 licenses of Creative Cloud in my workplace, for me and 2 other co-workers who do design and production work. Every now and then I'll get some telemarketer calling up as if he's an actual Adobe employee trying to hard sell me on Creative Cloud for Teams even though I don't want that. We would be paying around $20 per month more per license for benefits that don't seem worth the cost. I'll get crap via email trying to pitch the same thing, almost saying we're required to shift to the "teams" subscription. Bullshit.

Then there's the recent pissing contest currently going on between Adobe and Dolby. Previously one could encode Dolby Digital 5.1 audio and even Dolby Digital Plus 7.1 audio directly from Premiere Pro or Audition. I don't understand the terms of the dispute. Nevertheless all Dolby Digital encoding was yanked from all Adobe software. The fallbacks are using a rival audio or video editing application that still offers the capability or spend $600 or more on third party plug-ins. Dolby's own sound encoding software only runs on OSX and is priced through the fucking roof. But the DTS-HD Master Audio suite does run on Windows and those tracks work great for things like Blu-ray discs.

I used Pagemaker circa 1990 when in secondary school. I was involved with the publication of the school's literary magazine. At the time, it ran on a Mac, and was decent enough, but slow on the hardware of that era. The weakest point at that time was the 300 DPI resolution of the laser printer that we were using. The output quality was good for its time, but not professional quality. The way that things worked at that point was that we printed the text on the laser printer, then glued everything together (using hot wax) and cut rectangles of red cardboard and glued (waxed) them where photographs and artwork were to be placed. The red rectangles produced clear rectangles on the Kodalith negative that the printer made, which is where he would insert the halftone negatives for the greyscale artwork. This was then used to produce printing plates for the printing press. I believe that most modern processes skip this step and go right from the computer file to the printing plate, but we have things like optical scanners and digital cameras now, so artwork can go right into the computer page layout.

That takes me back to one of the jobs I had during college, working at Olden Camera. I answered phones there and did the paste-up and photostat work for the weekly ads they published. We had these big camera ready paste up boards. A bunch of the type was spat out of a laser printer and hot-glued to the board. I was hand cutting amberlith for spot color plates. It was a giant pain in the ass. I hated the ad deadline nights. I'd be there well past midnight some nights, having to ride the subway to Brooklyn at zero dark thirty after dropping off the finished ad boards. This was when NYC was posting over 2000 homicides per year in the 5 boroughs, not the sub-300 annual numbers the gentrified boroughs are running now. Doing that manual paste up work gave me a certain sense of discipline in planning a project versus blindly jumping in the way so many "graphic artists" do these days.

[Mike Blakesley]

Most sign companies hate Microsoft Publisher .PUB files or working with that application. Exporting a PDF is a fallback option, but even that can be sketchy if you don't have an application that's great at importing PDF files.

Photoshop is not good for text handling. The tools are very primitive in older versions of Photoshop. Only a few improvements have been made in the latest CC version. Jaggies are far more noticeable on pixel-based lettering than in photo imagery. I try to keep any lettering in the vector realm if possible. The text tools and text effects in vector-based "draw" applications are superior and not nearly as frustrating to use.

I can agree with all of this. I hate text editing in Photoshop.

I've hardly ever used Publisher for anything I had to send out to get printed. I don't really send out much actually -- my biggest "job" is I do posters, brochures and banners for our county fair, which I do send out, and I've used Photoshop for all of those. I do use Publisher to create the fair's brochures, it works well for that, but I do export the file as a PDF so I've never had a problem.

So here's a Photoshop question for you experts..... If I take a smallish picture or logo and enlarge it using "Image size," the picture gets all jaggy -- understandable, since it might be a low resolution picture. But if I take that SAME picture, and make the "canvas size" bigger, and then resize the picture using the "Transform" function, the picture looks much better. Why/how is that?

[Steve Guttag]

What you need is the CSI filter. Those guys could enlarge anything with incredible clarity!

[Bobby Henderson]

So here's a Photoshop question for you experts..... If I take a smallish picture or logo and enlarge it using "Image size," the picture gets all jaggy -- understandable, since it might be a low resolution picture. But if I take that SAME picture, and make the "canvas size" bigger, and then resize the picture using the "Transform" function, the picture looks much better. Why/how is that?

It's probably a difference in settings. A "bilinear" or "nearest neighbor" setting in the Image Size dialog box will enlarge an image with increasingly noticeable jaggies because of the type (or lack of) interpolation being used. The "bicubic smoother" setting will work better on enlarging images. If I'm using the free transform tool to manually resize an image on a layer in Photoshop I'll use the bicubic sharper option for any reduction and the bicubic smoother option for any enlargement.

The newest versions of Photoshop have more options for image enlargement. There's also third party applications and plug-ins available for image enlargement purposes. The filter in Photoshop tries to detect edge detail and preserve it when doing enlargements. But this stuff works only so well -despite the rampant bullshit constantly portrayed on TV series and movies. There's really no substitute at all for having a source image with really high native resolution. An already high resolution image can withstand enlargement tricks a lot better than something grabbed off a web page.

[Leo Enticknap]

Same syndrome as when you take a 16mm reversal dupe of a feature made for the airlines in the 1970s, scan it on a Northlight at 4K, and expect it to look like a Robert Harris restoration. GI = GO.

[Mitchell Dvoskin]

Well, I did the free upgrade from Win7 to Win10 on my very slow (WiFi/disk hardware) antique Toshiba laptop (not my primary home computer). Although it took forever, it mostly went without any problems. Playing around with Win10 after the install, I find I like it more than I thought I would, but I ran into two problems that took me a while to resolve.

First, after the install I had no sound. Troubleshooting utilities told me I have the most recent drivers for the sound card, I tried uninstalling it and rebooting to so Win 10 would re-install, but still no sound. I gave up for the night, and shutdown the computer. The next morning, the sound was working. It seem that if I restart or shutdown and then reboot within a few minutes, no sound. If I leave it shutdown for a while before rebooting, the sound works. I don't know if this is a Toshiba problem or a Win10 problem, but this did not happen with Win7.

The second problem. I downloaded and installed the VLC DVD player, and in settings set it to be the default video player. Unfortunately, when I inserted a DVD, the Microsoft store popped up. I had to manually start the player. I eventually discovered that the old Win7 control panel is still there, and it had set autoplay to bring up the store, overriding the settings. Once I changed it in the control panel to default to the VLC DVD player, everything worked correctly.

I played around with the Edge browser, but at the moment I still like Firefox better.

[Marcel Birgelen]

It could be that your audio driver and/or hardware isn't compatible with the Windows 10 Fast Startup option. You can check earlier in this topic to disable it and just give it a try. Obviously, there could be a gazillion other reasons for this particular problem, but I've seen problems with older drivers in combination with Fast Startup before.

[Bobby Henderson]

My earlier comment about support for Postscript Type 1 fonts being pulled from the latest build of Windows 10 appears to be accurate. We recently upgraded our standard "perpetual" licenses of CorelDRAW to their 2019 version, basically to cut the cost of half for getting into what is now pretty much a subscription arrangement. $99 per year is considerably less than $198 per year. Funny thing: any documents with lettering set in Type 1 fonts would not print to our office laser printer from CorelDRAW 2019. But PDFs output from CorelDRAW 2019 would print correctly. And if I opened the CDR file in an earlier version of CorelDRAW the Type 1 font-based objects would print correctly. Pretty weird.

Here's the thing: Corel has its own Font Manager software that allows one to use fonts not directly installed into the OS. It just looks in one or more target folders and allows you to use them. It's really convenient, but if you have a really large amount of fonts in the target folder it can seriously bog down the program. I looked in Windows' Fonts folder and discovered some Type 1 fonts I had previously installed in the OS were no longer there. So as a test I tried installing an old Berthold type family, Akzidenz Grotesk BE, which came with an ancient version of Adobe Illustrator. It loaded, but wouldn't show up in any of the applications. So I tried re-booting the PC. After the re-boot I looked into Windows' Fonts folder and Akzidenz Grotesk was no longer installed. So that sucks. I have a pretty valuable collection of old Type 1 fonts. They're still usable within CorelDRAW. But if I want to use them in any other applications I'm going to have to get some font conversion software to convert them to OpenType format.