Illy CS4

Running batches on AI files, every so often get an alert when file opens. This one says something about "file modified outside of Illustrator blah blah blah" with two radio button options (I chose 'discard changes, preserve artwork'). But it stalls the batch run. Any way to just bypass any and all alerts or errors?

I have a 2007 Macbook Pro 2.16Ghz 1Gb RAM with several problems and I'm wondering if it's just time to replace it.

The disk drive often struggles to mount disks or won't mount them at all. I already bought an external USB drive to remedy that problem.

The battery cover is warped and scorched and I haven't had use of the battery for years because I've been too lazy to replace it. It's not just a matter of getting a new battery because it's attached to its cover which is part of the bottom side of the laptop. It's an Apple purchase and isn't cheap.

The internal speakers started clipping out a few months ago and don't work again until I restart. External speakers solved that issue.

Most problematic is that yesterday the power supply really started flaking out and I have to jiggle and position the cord 'just so' in order for it to get juice. Without juice the computer just dies within 5 minutes. I saw some third party power adapters online starting around $36 but they don't look like mine and I'm not sure if I want to get into the ordeal of ordering a part that doesn't work. It's a one-piece thing, with the magnetic plug-in cord running to the adapter and then another cord running to the wall outlet.

I quickly did a full backup today because I think the end is near and I've been looking for another Macbook on craigslist. Is this machine worth fixing or is it time to say goodbye?

Got PDF from client, converted to grayscale in Acrobat and resaved. When I open that PDF in Photoshop it's in color (RGB). 

The PDF was already rasterized so PS isn't prompting me for dpi or color mode upon opening it.

Is this normal?

CS4 Mac.

Clipping path isn't fully coming through when I placed flattened TIFFs in Indy. Created path in an image of wrapped present with bow and had to draw add'l paths in the loops of the bow to cut out background. Highlight path in Paths palette, choose Clipping Path, flatness .5 px, save as flattened TIFF. Paths within the loops of the bow just aren't clipping in Indy. Also tried saving as Photoshop EPS, still not working.

Prolly operator error, what's the deal here?

There really isn't any. In my 13 years in the printing industry the same stereotypes are still pretty valid: printing is a male dominated business; 97% of press operators are illiterate alcoholics, bindery workers tend to be *androgynous*; the typical prepress tech is male, on the quiet side, cynical, wears blue jeans, drinks coffee; the typical CSR is female, talks nonstop, and knows very little about printing; and there are no black people working in printshops. Out of the 50 or so press operators I've worked with only two were female - one was an alcoholic and the other one ran a DI.

I did a search for "African prepress" and only found a picture of a white woman looking at a black man on screen.



I assume there are print shops in Africa and maybe in at least one of them there is a black female prepress tech. Even on this forum very few members are female: Tracy, Skryber, Pone (RIP), and maybe one other one I can't think of.

Just curious what your experience has been with demographics & diversity in printing.

Wondering if anyone else has dealt with this and what the result was. We just purchased a new copier about 6 weeks ago and just got our first bill. According to the bill we ran 31,000 color clicks in one month which is absurd because on average we never run more than 5,000/mo of black + color combined. I methodically convert all "black" copy jobs to grayscale PDFs and even set up a print queue to automatically run grayscale jobs in grayscale, so I'm kind of stumped and disgusted at the same time. Last week we had an unusually large book job that was all grayscale and that does reflect in our black meter count, but the 31K color clicks is just logistically impossible for the level of work we do.

The last blocks were handed out yesterday and are expected to be depleted by September. The end of the internet, at last!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12306573

Huh? I'm working on an old dearchived Indy file, 2/c letterhead. Has two pieces of placed art, Illy EPS. Have done my usual preflight and cleaned up the file, but when I print on our Docucolor for an in-house proof the 872 drops out. Made a PDF and it looks good, but when I print that, 872 drops out. Tried printing spot-to-process, 872 drops out. Just for fun, made a new swatch 873 spot and filled a frame with it, didn't print. Then tried printing spot-to-process and the 873 frame printed. For more fun, I recolored the 872 in one of the EPS files to 100% magenta and it printed.

What's the deal here?

Hello. Looking for some info about wide format inkjet printers and potentially a plotter for vinyl cutouts.

What wide formats printers have you worked with. Pluses, minuses? Right now we're looking at models from HP, Roland, and Canon and comparing 54" vs 62". What widths of media do you most commonly run? We are looking for a printer that can feed a variety of media for indoor/outdoor posters.

Potentially looking at a standalone plotter. Has anyone worked with these? What is the software like? (what type of file do you print from to generate the cutout path?) I've never used one, no idea how they work.

Looking for a late model refurb or used. If you can recommend any suppliers or vendors, please post.

http://indesignsecrets.com/splitting-up-threaded-stories-into-separate-frames.php

Script included in CS4. I seldom have to deal with threaded frames, or breaking them, but now I know how. Script worked great, but as others have mentioned you have to watch out for broken paragraphs.

Anyone here been directly involved in this? CSR asked me about it earlier and I've never done it. Apparently she's researching local companies to get prices.

Once a list is purchased (for our customer) can it be used repeatedly on future jobs? We got one price quote of $50/1000 names for one time use or $60/1000 names for reuse. WTF? If we buy the list I assume we get a spreadsheet or CSV type of file, right? What exactly would prevent us from just reusing it for future mailings?

I burned a bunch of DVDs using Toast on a Mac running 10.5.8. After each burn I checked to see that the data was actually burned onto the disc. When I put one of the DVDs in a diff Mac running 10.4.11 I get the "empty disc" alert. Finder mounts it and says it's a recordable disc. What's the issue here? I'm going to put one in a Windows PC and see what happens.

Color copier for sale. Specs are listed on Xerox website:

http://www.office.xerox.com/multifunction-printer/color-multifunction/docucolor-240-250/enus.html

And on product brochure:

http://www.xerox.com/downloads/usa/en/f/FILE_PROD_DC240_250_brochure.pdf

Engine comes with two RIPs - bustled EFI Fiery on the engine and a standalone Xerox FreeFlow DXP250 Color Server. Refurbed engine replaced by Xerox less than 6 weeks ago. Everything's in good working order, you can PM me for specific questions. Located in New Mexico, asking price $8400 OBO.

Anyone using it? News to me. Totally different numbering scheme. Does the world really need twice the amount of ink colors? One of our service reps just installed the swatch library in one of my RIPs and told me he knows of an advertising agency in town that's been using it.

I said, "I bet their printer isn't!", but I think he missed my extremely dry sarcasm.

Before I get into the ugliness I experienced last night trying to format & partition a 2Tb external USB drive for use between Mac & Windows I'd like to get some advice here. Is anyone sucessfully doing this with partitions of different formats? Info, plz!

What I'd like to do is split it into 3-4 partitions, with at least one being read/writeable on both platforms. Drive doesn't need to be system bootable, it's only for personal files.

Got InDesign files from client, all with placed Illy EPS graphics on each page. Each EPS contains a different Pantone spot color, but shows up as process in Indy's swatch palette.

Screwed around with them a bit and found that if I delete the EPS in Indy, delete the swatch, then bring the EPS back in the color will show up as a spot swatch.

What's the deal here?

Acrobat 9 Pro, Mac

I have a 32 pg PDF supplied as single pages with full bleed, crops, color bars, etc that I have to set up as a booklet. Using Crop Pages within Acrobat does nothing to the document size (I chose to crop to Bleed Box) which I wanted to reduce to 5.75" x 8.75" so I could do a multipage import into InDesign. But that's not going to work because of the bleeds present on the inside of the pages. The multipage import script is bringing in the PDF at its actual size of 6.33 x 9.33 and the layout is all fcuked up.

Can I avoid placing this page by page in Indy?

I connected a (nearly full) terabyte USB drive to my Mac (10.4.11). The drive is full of video & music files classified into various folders. Some of the folders opened and displayed their contents, but others did not. For example, one folder containing about 500 video files displayed nothing and Get Info said it's 0Kb. Upon connecting the drive to a Windows PC the folder instantly displays the 500 files. Get Info also says the folder is Read Only and there's no other options available...but it's not even reading it.

What's the issue here?

Can it be done? I'm not seeing a way. When I try to "Edit Image" Photoshop is rejecting it with the error I get all too often, "Could not complete your request because a color was specified using an unsupported color space."

I've dealt with this several times lately and wondering if there's a trick. Trying to purge Swatch palette (Select all unused) but some swatches insist they're used in the document (where???) and I'm afraid to just delete them (Illy doesn't ask which color you want to replace it with like Indy does).

Like today, 1-spot color Illy file, but in the Swatches palette there's a process yellow, lime, a Pantone blue, and a custom gray - none of them would highlight when I did "Select all unused" and two of them were coming into Indy when I placed the file. I ended up finding the gray, it was a stray point. I ended up doing "Select same fill/stroke" to hide all the correctly colored elements and see if there was anything left - there wasn't. Just trashed the unused colors and pushed print, off it goes.