CompuServe Messages

Jonathan: I don't do pro color output (amateur stuff at home, though). However, there are Amigans out there who'd love to see more bureaus like your that are sensitive to their needs. I've seen some service bureaus advertising in the Amiga mags. Here in my city there is exactly one bureau that welcomes Amiga format disks. For everyone else, if I want to get output I need to use the Amiga's disk transfer utility to get them a useable file on a MS-DOS disk. (CrossDOS, built into the Amiga OS). My partner and I do B&W Postscript output on a laserjet for small jobs and proofing big jobs. We can send the Amiga-generated PS files by modem or disk to any service bureau. Amigas can handle standard and high density 3.5" disk formats plus just about any other disk format, e.g., Syquest, Bernoulli, etc. While Amigas can read and write PC, Atari and Mac disks, I know of no PC or Mac utility that can read an Amiga-format disk. One of my Amigas also has a Mac emulator board and we sometimes use Aldus Pagemaker on it. So we can send out a disk from the Amiga in Mac format, too. We send EPS files out from Amiga desktop publishing programs, too, as I indicated. There are three top-of-the-line Amiga DTP packages that handle Postscript, and they also will do full color separations. In fact, Professional Page for the Amiga was the first software on any platform to do color seps, and an earlier, now defunct package, Shakespeare, was the first color DTP package on any platform. Pagestream currently may be the top of the line in Amiga DTP. Both it and ProPage handle Pantone and are equivalent to top of the line DTP packages on the Mac and PC. There is a PC version of ProPage now, I believe, but I don't know if it can read files created on the Amiga version. You'd have to ask Gold Disk. Other Amiga packages like Art Department and Image Professional are analagous to Adobe Photoshop. They include format converters to TIFF, PCX, JPEG, GIF and other popular acronyms. A few years there ago there was a Canadian-based Amiga magazine produced entirely on Amigas, including most of the ads, with full color separations. It was very slick. Alas, it's gone. There are some PC programs that will read Amiga IFF files. Hijaak is one. Graphics Workshop is another. Having them handy might be a service to potential Amiga customers. I don't know of any PC programs, however, that handle IFF-24. That's the IFF variant for 24-bit images (16.7 million colors). But an Amiga-side package like Art Dept. should be able to transform an IFF-24 into something a PC or Mac can read. — Ron Legro from Milwaukee via AUTOPILOT (The only way to fly)