Re: iQueue replacement
Re: iQueue replacement
- Subject: Re: iQueue replacement
- From: Roberto Michelena <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 23 Jul 2004 19:03:30 -0500
I have myself struggled with iQueue too - speed and reliability issues. And
after so much trouble, the most common answer I hear is "oh, but the Windows
version is faster and has a better interpreter".
In my case, I need postscript-to-postscript. In two customers I sold it
betting on the "if it's Gretag-Macbeth it should be good" idea, and in both
cases that bet costed me my reputation.
In both, it's purpose is to sit in front of a bunch of laserprinters of
different models and make their output look as if at least they belong to
the same planet.
But, when a 50Mb file that already takes a long 5 to 8 minutes in the
printer, adds on top of that another 3 minutes of iQueue (G3/500)... And
iQueue 'eats' about 1 out of every 20 files... Well, unusable is the word,
at least for a 30-user, 3-printer environment like this. Ah! and it does not
processes two ot three files simultaneously unless you open more than one
instance of it, which again "on the Windows version works fine". Of course
not so in Mac OS 9.
IF budget were not a problem, I would use a high-end workflow product such
as Oris Works, Dalim Swing, OneVision, etc... All of them with solid
interpreters, most of them only for Windows or Linux, some of them with the
added benefit of "flattening" the PS or PDF file to a very simple and much
smaller one, which will then fly through the printer in a fraction of the
time the original would have taken.
But budget is a problem indeed. Hey, even a solution can be built using
AppleScript in OSX, now that it has a postscript to PDF interpreter, and
that Quartz filters allow for color matching in PDFs. Nothing as
sophisticated as black channel preservation, but it's free...
The suggestion to look into PuzzleFlow is also a valid choice... If it's
modular enough you may be able to buy only the functionality you want and
stay on budget. Same for Dalim's Swing. But none is OSX, one is Windows and
the other one Linux.
-- Roberto Michelena
EOS SAC
Lima, Peru
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