Re: InDesign and Binary
Re: InDesign and Binary
- Subject: Re: InDesign and Binary
- From: David Wollmann <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 5 Dec 2003 12:46:26 -0700
On Dec 4, 2003, at 7:45 PM, John Fieber wrote:
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
Thank you for this very informed response. Sounds like I will not be
able to do anything about here. The PPD I am using is telling InDesign
that it wants to use Binary but as you stated it must have been
disabled by Adobe.
Odd, since Adobe will allow Binary in other apps. using this same PPD.
I thought that updates to software and OS's were suppose to further
improve our work flows, but this seems to take a step backwards, after
all I've been able to print in Binary to my proofer for 5 years with
all my "old" software. I should at least be given the choice of data
format, i.e. binary, and if it doesn't work that's why there is a
second alternative, Ascii.
If you figure out a hack I'd be interested in hearing about it.
Thanks again,
David Wollmann
_______________________________________________
colorsync-users mailing list | email@hidden
Help/Unsubscribe/Archives:
http://www.lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/colorsync-users
Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.