Saving Time and Money with Computer Standards
If your organization is like most, the individual, or individuals, responsible for
generating your newsletters, mailings and other publications use personal computers and
word processing and/or desk top publishing software to produce camera-ready originals to
be photocopied, imageset or submitted directly to a printer for reproduction. This
approach offers many obvious advantages over the old scissors and paste approach, but it
also can have pitfalls.
The most common problems encountered by many of our customers involve missing or
incompatible software or document elements, (e.g. fonts
and graphics) which show up when
the publication is passed from one person to another or from one production stage to the
next. Even as cross-platform compatibility among applications is close to making the
holy war between MAC and PC supporters irrelevant, everyone, it would seem,
still has their own favorite software, fonts, and graphic formats. These personal
preferences often lead to increased costs and delays anytime more than one person is
involved, (this is especially true in nonprofit organizations with volunteer help).
Smart organizations solve this problem by establishing and strictly enforcing
standards as a matter of policy. Exceptions are generally permitted only when the
designated enforcement authority is satisfied that the exception is justifiable. Based on
our experience in working with dozens of organizations, we feel that the most successful
strategy for identifying products and file formats to adopt as organizational standards is
to stick with those that are the most widely used among the organizations and individuals
with whom your organization routinely works.
While there are dozens of major DTP software offerings and graphics formats
available, only a small number of each enjoy widespread use. Among our customers located
in the Seattle area, Microsoft Word, Adobe
PageMaker, Adobe PhotoShop and Macromedia
Freehand, (and to a lesser extent, Adobe Illustrator) are the de facto standard DTP
software products. Tagged-Image File Format
is the most widely used graphics
format for print production. JPEG's
and GIF's are compressed, and produce poor
results when printed.
When it comes to
fonts, the story becomes much more complicated. For those
publications which will be imageset, it is probably best to go with
Adobe Postscript fonts.
While not very interesting, Times
and Helvetica are great for avoiding tears at the
service bureau. Proprietary fonts, like the MAC’s built-in city
fonts,
and bargain basement fonts, like "2,000 TrueType fonts for $9.95",
should be strenuously avoided.
