Subject: Re: [netatalk-admins] Netatalk and OPI
From: Hans-Guenter Weigand (hgweigand@wiesbaden.netsurf.de)
Date: Sun Jan 24 1999 - 17:54:49 EST
sw@nan.co.uk (Sak Wathanasin) wrote:
> In reply to Hans-Guenter Weigand's message of the 23/01/99 at 01:48 +0100,
> > They are not archived, but they have to be present during the whole
> > production process. A subfolder named 'layout' is also common practice.
> >
> > Quite often Xpress files and the low-res files are given to external
> > people for layout purposes. When these files return, their OPI paths
> > still must match.
>
> The hi-res path must be the same*; the low-res file is not used at all
> during printing: it must be embedded in the PS stream, otherwise the OPI
> server never sees it.
Right.
> > Mmh, good point. But few people use (too) long names. They seem to
> > prefer deeply nested folders, which makes the pathnames long, not the
> > filenames.
>
> There's a 255-byte limit on Mac pathnames as well.
Helios Ethershare has a limit of 100 characters for the absolute Unix
path. So why bother? :)
> > And I doubt that there is a Kanji-savvy commercial OPI software running
> > on Unix...
>
> Maybe not on Unix, but I worked on one for the Mac...
>
> * Most commercial OPI servers will also allow you to specify a number of
> default folders to look in if it can't find the original path; the one I
> worked on certainly did.
Right. But most pictures are job-specific, so this fallback works in
almost no case.
> >From your other message:
>
> > But only if the preview matches the settings for the layout file. If you
> > just downsample a tiff file from 300 to 72 dpi you get a really small
> > file, but you lose quality.
>
> Only if you're talking about print quality; there is no loss in
> screen-display quality. That is because the Mac only displays at 72 dpi.
> Photoshop/QXpress etc effectively all "downsample" (or rather QuickDraw
> does) as they draw to the screen. It has to do it every time it redraws,
> and of course, all operations apply to every pixel in the original hi-res,
> even though you only see the effects at 72 dpi, which is why uisng the
> low-res is such a big win.
The aim of downsampling is to minimize the file sizes used for layout
purposes. My idea is to increase the quality of these pictures while
keeping their size, or keep the quality and decrease the file size even
further.
> > > Does this mean that you have the Helios OPI watching every job folder?
> >
> > No, it watches the whole volume(s) automatically. There is no way to
> > configure anything.
>
> Yuck; no wonder you guys complain.
OK, I was a bit wrong here. You can turn off the creation of low-res
files for a volume or use a suffix for folder names. But this is not the
point of my complaints. Helios is very fast in the creation of new
low-res files. There is no need to configure it to make it faster there.
This software suck in other concerns.
-hgw
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b28 : Sat Dec 18 1999 - 16:16:15 EST