Re: InDesign and Binary
Re: InDesign and Binary
- Subject: Re: InDesign and Binary
- From: John Fieber <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 4 Dec 2003 21:45:39 -0500
On Dec 4, 2003, at 5:58 PM, Matt Deatherage wrote:
On 12/4/03 at 3:09 PM, David Wollmann <email@hidden> wrote:
Anyone know what's going on and how to enable the Binary setting? If I
print to a Postscript file it will let me choose the correct language,
Binary, but not when I simply want to print a proof.
I'm unfamiliar with your equipment, but typically, the driver refusing
to allow the "binary" option means that the PPD you've selected for
the printer disallows binary communication. That would explain why
you can export with it, and possibly print through other paths, but
not through this one.
Binary printing has been a bit of a headache for a lab I help manage.
Many common printer-protocol combinations--most notably those NOT
involving AppleTalk PAP--require that binary postscript be BCP or TBCP
encoded. Up through MacOS 10.2 there was no support for applying this
encoding in the OS print subsystem, so if the application doesn't do
the encoding itself, you are hosed.
Based on a variety of messages on the email@hidden list, it
seems to be Apple's position that applications generating their own
PostScript should be responsible for determining what encoding is
appropriate. However, Adobe's documentation of the various PostScript
protocols advocates that applications NOT encode and leave that up to
downstream processing closer to the printer. The argument there is
that the generated PostScript may not be going to a printer directly,
but rather embedded in another context--an Illustrator generated file
in an InDesign document for example.
Personally I think Adobe's position is a little more sensible (and is
more or less what they implement in their applications), but
incompatible with Apple's apparent position.
The result is that binary PostScript printing fails in many situations.
I read somewhere that the InDesign folks disabled binary postscript
explicitly on MacOS 10 because of this. It may be overly conservative
since there are also a fair number of situations where binary
PostScript works just fine.
The Panther print system will do TBCP encoding of binary PostScript
before sending it out to a printer that requires it, but that is done
in a CUPS filter (pstops) that is NOT part of the filter chain for
print jobs that get submitted as PostScript-in-PICT, which is what the
Adobe applications generate. I haven't tried tacking the pstops filter
on after the pictwps filter in Panther, but a hacked TBCP enabled
pstops filter in Jaguar didn't work. That is most likely because
pstops does a lot of other fiddling which probably broke the Adobe
generate PostScript. I suspect this because a simple hack of a filter
that ONLY did TBCP encoding did the trick.
-john
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