The Apple iMac: the best machine on the planet for desktop publishing. Except if you actually need to print a paper copy . . .
I wonder if anybody has found a way of speeding up the printing process? I’d love to hear from you if you have.
Mac v. PC
This morning I needed to print out some covers for my Walks around Horbury, which is selling well thanks to a recent spell of good weather.
I designed the cover (above, right) in Adobe InDesign CC 2017 but, when it comes to printing, it’s painfully slow, presumably because the program has to convert from its versatile design mode to a simple 300 dpi print version.
The solution is to output the design to a PDF, Adobe’s Portable Document Format. For compatibility, I print the PDF using Adobe Acrobat Pro. Unfortunately this takes as long as printing from InDesign; well over five minutes and even then it’s positioned incorrectly on the sheet: the margin is too narrow at the bottom and too wide at the top (see above).
Using Apple’s much simpler PDF reader, Preview, is much quicker but there’s some mismatch with the driver of my HP LaserJet printer and I can’t get it to print successfully on card.
Much as I like InDesign and the iMac, it’s easier to go back to Serif PagePlus X4 and Publisher 2010 running on my old Windows 7 PC. There’s no need to create a PDF as I can print successfully and speedily directly from either of these design programs.
Attempting to run PagePlus and Publisher from my Mac using Parallels and Windows 10 hasn’t proved successful because of print driver issues and, besides, my aim is to use InDesign for all my publications.
My thanks to the Adobe online community for their help and advice on finding a way around this problem, but the solution still eludes me.
Richard, I just found your blog, and another page where you sell your books. Was not able to find a home page connecting the two, so bookmarked both. First let me say I feel like I have found a home on your site. I love how you do your journal and your connection with nature. My maternal grandmother was born in Llangollen, Wales, so I have roots near where you are. Second, about printing slowly, I use a MacBook, build most of my files in Photoshop (I know it isn’t meant for doing layout), then place files into iStudio Publisher for printing with Epson printers. Some file sharing print slowly and some print quickly. Sometimes a file that has printed slowly on a previous printing will decide to print quickly on a new printing. I am connected through wifi, so figured it must have something to do with the connection. I understand the frustration. I would be interested in getting some of your booklets. How would I find out what all you have available and postage to the U.S., etc? I will be reading back through your entire blog archive and enjoying every post. Best of luck!
Thank you Fay, I’ve never quite drawn the two websites together. The long-running nature/drawing diary has been so useful to me as a source of material for my articles and booklets. I can let you know the cost of postage.
Hope I can find a workaround for the slow printing. I’m on a network, in fact that particular printer doesn’t do wi-fi, so I feel it should be a lot quicker and, as you say, some documents can print out surprisingly quickly.
I once did a school visit, talking about how I wrote and illustrated my books, in Llangollen. You need a head for heights if you’re going to walk across the aqueduct there!
I hope to find that some of your posts talk about how you write and illustrate your books. I would find that interesting. I have friends who have visited Llangollen, but I have never had the privilege. My mom passed on some stories that her mom told her. One was describing the maids all going out and scrubbing the front porches and shining the door knobs very early in the mornings. I have quite a picture in my mind from the description. 🙂
It’s a lovely image. Barbara says that she remembers her mum rubbing the front step with a donkey stone. In Yorkshire this was originally a fine-grained sandstone quarried at Sutton Bank and taken around the villages and towns by pedlars who had their goods loaded on the back of a donkey. My first ever exhibition was alongside an artist called Stuart Walton, who specialised in northern street scenes of terraced houses. I got a glowing review but the critic commented on Stuart’s work that she felt that the women scrubbing the steps of the terraced houses in his oil on canvas paintings put more emotion into their brushwork than Stuart did into his. Ouch!
You’ll find an awful lot about how I set about my work scattered about my long-running diary. I ought to bring some of it together into a little e-book.