A slight departure from the usual posts on this blog \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n
In the early 1990s, before large-scale offshoring came into play, I started working freelance, editing and typesetting technical books using Windows-based software (FrameMaker, before Adobe bought it) and certainly prior to PDF as the only way to transfer files to printers and “film bureaux”. Film, remember that? Positive\/negative, right\/wrong reading emulsion side down… Printers and bureaux were dominated by the Macintosh (maybe they still are) so without the common use of PDF, transferring Windows-generated typeset material\/files to commercial printers was, at times, a bit of a nightmare. I was working for a number of big book publishers who all used different printers, each with their own requirements for accepting electronic files which inevitably meant PostScript if you were working on a PC.<\/p>\n
I still have vivid memories of generating and shipping hundreds of megabytes of raw PostScript code using SyQuest drives<\/a>: then the only “high capacity” removable media accepted by printers. Ubiquitous, low cost, high-speed electronic transfer of huge amounts of data was still in the future, unless you had ISDN, which I didn’t and couldn’t afford. My first forays into the online world was the Bulletin Board and CompuServe and I was the proud owner of a US Robotics Sportster 14,400 Fax modem. I remember the joys of the Hayes command set, 7 or 8 bit data, odd or even parity and all the weird arcania of comms technology of the time. Enough already, too many memories!<\/p>\n Incidentally, a single 88 MB SyQuest disk cost (from memory) around \u00a360 in the early to mid 1990s! I confess that I hated using SyQuest drives because you could never be sure that a disk formatted for the PC could be mounted (i.e., opened) on a Macintosh at the printers due to disk formatting issues. After generating 500MB of PostSript data and couriering it across the Atlantic to meet a deadline you don’t want to hear that your disks can’t be read. The introduction of the Iomega ZIP drive was a blessing and wiped out SyQuest’s market, virtually overnight. Whenever I recall SyQuest drives I cannot help but think of the Trabant<\/a>. Yes I should have used a Mac, maybe, but the vast majority of Word files (for technical books) I received from publishers were generated on a PC: in an era when transferring Word files between Mac to Windows was not always a “joy” and cleaning up the “converted” Word files could be a lot of work.<\/p>\n Generating reliable PostScript code via the Windows 3.1 PostScript printer driver was an excercise in the darkest arts and the main reason I had to become, at the time, expert in PostScript programming: to understand what was going on and how all those bizarre options in the print dialog box affected the PostScript code. Page independence, VM memory in the printer and a host of other settings which made the difference in getting the PostScript to RIP successfully, or not. I recall the “font wars” of TrueType vs Adobe Type 1 font file formats: “Type 1 rules, TrueType sucks” was an oft-quoted mantra of the times and certainly the conversion of TrueType fonts for inclusion in the PostScript data stream was not always without hassles…<\/p>\n Anyway, enough of this. Monty Python Yorkshire Man sketch, anybody?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A slight departure from the usual posts on this blog \ud83d\ude42 In the early 1990s, before large-scale offshoring came into play, I started working freelance, editing and typesetting technical books using Windows-based software (FrameMaker, before Adobe bought it) and certainly prior to PDF as the only way to transfer files to printers and “film bureaux”. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"blocksy_meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.readytext.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.readytext.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.readytext.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.readytext.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.readytext.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2117"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/www.readytext.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2117\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3226,"href":"https:\/\/www.readytext.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2117\/revisions\/3226"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.readytext.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.readytext.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.readytext.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}