Thanks Buko and Ann for the comments about FAP 4 – I’ve had too many things to buy in the last couple of months but I’ll put it on my list for next month. :>) I upgraded to v. 3.3.2 a few months before the deadline for the free upgrade. :>(
Learn how to optimize Photoshop for maximum speed, troubleshoot common issues, and keep your projects organized so that you can work faster than ever before!
However, FAP does offer a free 30-day trial version which is fully operational and which might give you a chance to see if FAP 4 would be useful to you and tide you over for the next few weeks.
Neil – Custom made fonts and probably other fonts as well (old version of certain fonts come to mind – even fonts have updates). Impossible to tell which ones until you happen to get one of those.
Poorly constructed fonts (not adhering to font standards), whether from a second-rate foundry or by customization, can be problematic in a number of applications.
But I have not been aware of problems even using a number of T-1 fonts created 15 or more years ago. Maybe I’ve been lucky. <g>
Early Type 1 Adobe versions of Optima were problematic because they included two versions of the font in each single font file, one for LaserWriters printers and one for Linotype imagesetters. That creates problems for some applications that don’t know how to deal with that.
Incredibly, Adobe refused to provide a free update when they fixed Optima. 🙁
I know of Adobe’s Eras and Optima (and I got free updates for the original cut). But, I’m not familiar with any particular issues with Palatino or Franklin Gothic.
The Meta font – which was house font at my previous job at an Apple center/reseller – had earlier versions that were really problematic. Meta got updated though.
At the newspaper where I work nowadays we had problems with a custom fotn containing symbols for horse-races. That works though when put into Indesigns nd Illustrators own Fonts folder but is otherwise invisible.
I have my original Adobe Type 1 Franklin Gothic and Palatino fonts (I even have the floppies!)
I still have a large collection of vintage 1987-1997 (give or take) font floppies which I need to find time to finish archiving to CDs or DVDs before the magnetic medium flakes off or gamma rays zap ’em. For anyone in a similar position, what I found is that floppy drives do not appear to offer support for 400K and 800K diskettes under OS X.
But I still have a G4 gathering dust that was never upgraded from OS9. And I think that Windows machines can recognize the disks — although there is a fair chance they can’t read Mac-formatted diskettes…
I have a G4 that boots into OS 9 that I will keep until either it or I die.
I have a LaCie outboard floppy drive that I use on my G5, when needed that has managed to rescue all my 3.25 discs .
I’ve gotten all files off my collection of various vintage floppies which I check from time to time for kicks to see how much more information has evaporated. Some, from the late 80s and early 90s are still completely intact, others from then and through the mid-90s era just keep getting worse and worse.
On my G5, I’ve got an Iomega multi-card reader/3.5" bi-platform disk drive which I bought, as their onsite advertising promised the ability to read ANY 3.5" floppy capacity. As was later and reluctantly confirmed by Iomega, they meant for Windows. They did offer a refund, but the drive was cheap enough and still useful enough that I’ve kept it. So, it’s back to the old G4 and OS 9.
Previous message, ""3.25 discs" should have been "3.5 discs."
I was thinking 5.25 discs!
Yikes. The last machine I had that could read one of THOSE was an Alpha workstation running Windows NT on which our Harlequin RIP ran. And we said goodbye to that about 1997-98.
Great piece of equipment. It just sat over in the corner, mutely crunching Postscript files sent to it by all the Macs about 1000 times faster than the fastest Mac in existence at the time could do, and feeding the Agfa Selectset 7000 imagesetter. One forgot it was even there but about once a year when we would have a power outage. Then I would have to fire up its monochrome monitor and reload the OS from a single 5.25 floppy and about 4 additional floppies of NT Service Pack bug fixes.
That Alpha CPU was 64 bit, way back in the early 90s. (I’m sure the NT OS was not 64 bit.) It only had 16 megs of RAM which was a LOT then and which cost more than a present-day Honda Accord!
No the good old days were when we sliced open our fingers with razor knives while we were stripping. Also shooting all the negs on a process camera. After spending a night in the darkroom making the prints and doing the layout on art boards. And then there was the art waxer and my fave Spray Mount.
Before we got a computer to set the type we had a Linotype hot type machine in the back. and pulled galley proofs and shot that.
I must say there are a few of us in here that have witnessed quite the revolution in the graphics/printing industry. I for one feel quite lucky to have been part of this. the kids these days don’t know how easy they have it.
Too many of the "new kids" seem to know less about prepress and production, less about how to choose and use stock, less about type specification and good typography, less about how to select the most effective printing process, less about working with mechanical requirements, less about…
It’s a part of the problem that working largely in the insular environment of a computer screen creates. No one gets off his seat and gets his hands dirty.
