Read the comment properly. I said that for DISPLAYING there's no need for anything more than 24 bits. Processing benefits GREATLY from increased bit depths. I just don't want my gfx card to be flooded with needless bits which can't be displayed anyhow. Storage of raw image data (whether in some queue in RAM waiting to be processed, or on disk) with the highest possible bit-depth obviously has great advantages. Just like normalizing a soundwave sampled a 8 bits sounds weird at best but martian at worst. No wonder every self-respecting studio samples at at least 24 bits even though CD's are all 16-bit. Hardly anyone hears the difference between 24 and 16 bit unprocessed audio, it only becomes apparent when it needs to be processed. The result is infinitely better from the 24-bit source. That's the point I was trying to make and it applies to all digitized information. I just hope that for final output these advanced machines don't try to pump the full load to the monitor as well since it'd be a pure waste of precious binary digits!
And, erm, no.. I've never written a 3D engine in my life and probably never will.;-)
This is all well and good, but can you see all these billions of colours? It'd be more appropriate to call them shades instead of colours. I can understand the needed colour depth for film applications but for CRT display? I don't think so. CRT's have too much blur across neighbouring pixels and a whole bunch of other artifacts that make 48-bit visualization on screen impossible. Even the biggest, most professional CRT can't do 48-bit colour properly. The only medium that I'm aware of that can actually reproduce such detail is photographic film.
I don't need my gfx card pumping extra bits through its pipeline just to (not) see them get wasted on the screen.
Using 48-bit scanning techniques is possible and even desirable on normal desktop PC's. I'm using a plain vanilla GeForce 256 with a 36-bit Microtek Scanmaker 5. Photoshop lets me import 16 bits per channel RGB images from my scanner. Of course, only a portion of the bits is actually significant because of my scanner's limitations but that's not the point here.
Photo's that need colour correction should definately come in as 16 bits/channel since it allows much finer tonal control. That's simply logical because of the many more bits, but you don't see those bits on the screen until you start playing with the 'levels' sliders or tonal curves. Then, when correction is done, I happily bring the file back to 8 bits/channel and I don't lose any visual quality. Technically I lose colour, but the human eye won't perceive it.
Film is a different story altogether since that's used for projection, which brings a lot of light into play. Because of the enormous amount of light involved in film projection, and the theoretical possibility to achieve pitch black and super-bright white on a 100% perfect projection sheet in a totally dark room, colour depth should be as high as possible. But that's the only exception I know. Images on my screen need only 24 real colour bits although I certainly do see the advantages in 48-bit storage.
Re:LaTeX in publishing
on
Wired Talks Wine
·
· Score: 1, Informative
No, PLEASE, no M$ WORD in publishing!!! I just finished preparing someone's thesis for print, and he made it in Word. Drew diagrams using Word, created formulas using Word.. And it al stank in the end! I had to redraw every diagram using Postscript (Adobe Illustrator saved me here, but I guess there may be others better suited for the job since diagrams aren't Illustrator's forté) because the printer's RIP kept hanging on the diagrams. The formulas kept getting strange blue background blocks for no apparent reason. Text would shift if the printer definition and Normal.dot file weren't exactly identical across systems. And so on, and so forth..
I solved most of this by using Adobe products to draw the diagrams and export to PDF. It took me two steps because the client in question had made his thesis fit onto an A4 size page (210x297mm.)while the destination size would be 170x230mm. So I had to scale down a 300+ page document using Word?? This obviously did NOT work. I printed the document to a Postscript file, used Acrobat Distiller on that, printed the resulting PDF to a file again this time scaling it down to the proper dimensions, and distilled that again. After a thorough proofread I had to correct around 150 small errors, like the mysterious blocks behind some of the formulas, shifted typograhpy and stuff like that. I'm glad Acrobat 5 has at least SOME editing features for PDF! In the end the thesis got printed and I have a copy on my desk right here. I just wish this guy had called me earlier so this whole project could have started its life in either FrameMaker, Quark or InDesign with proper typography, proper placement of captions, uniform character and paragraph styling and a lot less hours going into preparation for final printing and sorting out Word's peculiarities.
I have no experience with LaTeX, but I hear it's pretty good for scientific use and you can convert it properly to postscript. Just stick to that, or find a PROPER dtp package for your scientific documents if you don't want LaTeX. Whatever you do, do NOT use M$ WORD for final printing output to a professional service bureau!!! They'll curse you for it.
5% fluctuation sounds more like the effects of different chipsets and other mainboard internals. Linux speeds up dramatically when I recompile for Athlon on my T-Bird 1100, much more than just 5%.
WinNT and friends only have 2 kernels on board as far as I know (and I went looking for them). One is the plain vanilla single processor affair, the other has SMP. Both of these must be careful to cater for the lowest common denominator: a P1 Classic. Including instructions from anything higher than a P1 would cause problems on these CPU's. Not many people will be running XP on a P1, but still... Of course there's some dynamic stuff in there based on availability of MMX/SSE etc. I just don't think that's going to make the same difference as -march=athlon does on my Linux box. Maybe a few benchmark runs would be in order. I don't have the time or the box for such a test right now, maybe sometime next month, but this thread did start me thinking..
If all you do on it is type documents you won't see the difference between a 386 and an Athlon XP 2000+. That is, unless your typing skills increase in line with Moore's law of course.
This won't let me run MacOS X graphical applications. I already have my desktop (Win2K, sadly) looking like MacOS 9 but that's just looks. What I'd like to see is an actual port of MacOS X to x86, but since that's not going to happen, wouldn't it be interesting for people like Trolltech and the like to emulate Quartz/Cocoa/Carbon? Quark and Adobe wouldn't need much more than a recompile on their apps to port them over to Linux/FreeBSD, or am I missing something?
Make it emulate the Carbon/Cocoa/Quartz compatible as well then! Hell, easy for me to say, I'm no developer so I don't know how hard this is gonna be.. but it'd be a great stimulant to the likes of Adobe to port their apps to Linux/FreeBSD/*NIX and we'd finally have a proper OS to support the strenuous task of creative page layout. Win98 breaks, Win2K bends, but neither of them are really any good for heavy-duty layout work. I'm seriously considering getting me a Mac for this, but they're so damn expensive!! An Apple-compatible graphical environment on x86 would be a great leap forward for Linux. I for one would never touch anything from Redmond again!...just wishful thinking I guess;-)
I don't know what you're doing, but I've been working with PDF to hand in documents to professional printers for quite a while now. I've sent and received thousands of such documents and have never ever had a SINGLE problem with fonts or anything else for that matter using PDF. Using Quark's own file format would give font-hell one out of three times approximately. PDF sure saved me and the printing companies I work with a lot of headaches!
As a "layout guy" I have to reply to this little piece of flamebait. File format is of absolutely no concern at all to a page layout. I've seen nice layouts done in Word, some brilliant HTML-pages and also some totally dismal Quark work. You need a decent set of skills to come up with properly laid out pages. These skills take years to develop, just like geek-skills. The better the sysadmin, the less he's appreciated by the users because their computers hardly ever fail. Same goes for a good designer of informative pages. You've only produced a good layout when the readers aren't consciously aware of the layout.
Proper layouts can be made using any file format that'll store pixels or vectors. It requires insight and knowledge of the psychology of readers'perception of a page before you can even begin to make a good page design, which has nothing at all to do with computers or file formats.
The pdf format saves me a hell of a lot of time, and is far from worthless! A great lot of pages are laid out using Quark Xpress or Pagemaker. Each of these programs needs to gather all the photo's and other graphical elements included on the layout, put them in a folder, relink the file to the document's new relative location and gather all required fonts for proper printing into a single directory. This goes wrong almost 100% of the time. It's not like it's the end of the world when your printing company calls you for a missing font, but still.. it went wrong! PDF saves huge loads of trouble by embedding graphics, fonts, photo's, colour management, printing instructions and a bunch of stuff more into a single very small file. The collected Quark files I used to send off would easily reach 100MB in size. A PDF document, generated from InDesign with its excellent PDF-export function, rarely gets bigger than 5MB and there's no perceivable loss of quality.
PDF is not very useful online in combination with Acrobat Reader. If you were to use PDF in a more browser-like manner, without the zooming controls and stuff like that but proportionally fitting the page to your browser window, you'd probably have a very usable browsing experience. The way it is now, Acrobat Reader (one of the many PDF-readers, I'm aware of that fact)is too much paper-centric. This, in my opinion, is merely a matter of presentation and should be easy to solve for on-screen applications.
All things said: PDF is an absolute boon to anyone wanting to print elaborately laid out pages. LaTeX is great for books, but don't even go there if you want to lay out the next issue of Cosmopolitan. On-screen presentation should be hugely improved, but calling the format worthless clearly shows your ignorance on subjects dealing with professional printing.
As far as I know pdf isn't secret, but only adobe may change it since they invented pdf.
I like PDF a lot because it allow me to send a digital file to just about any print shop to be reproduced on paper and it won't be different from what I see on screen. I work as a graphics designer and have sent hundreds of PDF's off to dozens of printing companies, and never once had a single problem with it. MS Word's DOC format is a sure-fire way to instant hell!
Slashdot Mirror
Read the comment properly. I said that for DISPLAYING there's no need for anything more than 24 bits. Processing benefits GREATLY from increased bit depths. I just don't want my gfx card to be flooded with needless bits which can't be displayed anyhow. Storage of raw image data (whether in some queue in RAM waiting to be processed, or on disk) with the highest possible bit-depth obviously has great advantages. Just like normalizing a soundwave sampled a 8 bits sounds weird at best but martian at worst. No wonder every self-respecting studio samples at at least 24 bits even though CD's are all 16-bit. Hardly anyone hears the difference between 24 and 16 bit unprocessed audio, it only becomes apparent when it needs to be processed. The result is infinitely better from the 24-bit source. That's the point I was trying to make and it applies to all digitized information. I just hope that for final output these advanced machines don't try to pump the full load to the monitor as well since it'd be a pure waste of precious binary digits! And, erm, no.. I've never written a 3D engine in my life and probably never will. ;-)
This is all well and good, but can you see all these billions of colours? It'd be more appropriate to call them shades instead of colours. I can understand the needed colour depth for film applications but for CRT display? I don't think so. CRT's have too much blur across neighbouring pixels and a whole bunch of other artifacts that make 48-bit visualization on screen impossible. Even the biggest, most professional CRT can't do 48-bit colour properly. The only medium that I'm aware of that can actually reproduce such detail is photographic film. I don't need my gfx card pumping extra bits through its pipeline just to (not) see them get wasted on the screen. Using 48-bit scanning techniques is possible and even desirable on normal desktop PC's. I'm using a plain vanilla GeForce 256 with a 36-bit Microtek Scanmaker 5. Photoshop lets me import 16 bits per channel RGB images from my scanner. Of course, only a portion of the bits is actually significant because of my scanner's limitations but that's not the point here. Photo's that need colour correction should definately come in as 16 bits/channel since it allows much finer tonal control. That's simply logical because of the many more bits, but you don't see those bits on the screen until you start playing with the 'levels' sliders or tonal curves. Then, when correction is done, I happily bring the file back to 8 bits/channel and I don't lose any visual quality. Technically I lose colour, but the human eye won't perceive it. Film is a different story altogether since that's used for projection, which brings a lot of light into play. Because of the enormous amount of light involved in film projection, and the theoretical possibility to achieve pitch black and super-bright white on a 100% perfect projection sheet in a totally dark room, colour depth should be as high as possible. But that's the only exception I know. Images on my screen need only 24 real colour bits although I certainly do see the advantages in 48-bit storage.
No, PLEASE, no M$ WORD in publishing!!! I just finished preparing someone's thesis for print, and he made it in Word. Drew diagrams using Word, created formulas using Word.. And it al stank in the end! I had to redraw every diagram using Postscript (Adobe Illustrator saved me here, but I guess there may be others better suited for the job since diagrams aren't Illustrator's forté) because the printer's RIP kept hanging on the diagrams. The formulas kept getting strange blue background blocks for no apparent reason. Text would shift if the printer definition and Normal.dot file weren't exactly identical across systems. And so on, and so forth.. I solved most of this by using Adobe products to draw the diagrams and export to PDF. It took me two steps because the client in question had made his thesis fit onto an A4 size page (210x297mm.)while the destination size would be 170x230mm. So I had to scale down a 300+ page document using Word?? This obviously did NOT work. I printed the document to a Postscript file, used Acrobat Distiller on that, printed the resulting PDF to a file again this time scaling it down to the proper dimensions, and distilled that again. After a thorough proofread I had to correct around 150 small errors, like the mysterious blocks behind some of the formulas, shifted typograhpy and stuff like that. I'm glad Acrobat 5 has at least SOME editing features for PDF! In the end the thesis got printed and I have a copy on my desk right here. I just wish this guy had called me earlier so this whole project could have started its life in either FrameMaker, Quark or InDesign with proper typography, proper placement of captions, uniform character and paragraph styling and a lot less hours going into preparation for final printing and sorting out Word's peculiarities. I have no experience with LaTeX, but I hear it's pretty good for scientific use and you can convert it properly to postscript. Just stick to that, or find a PROPER dtp package for your scientific documents if you don't want LaTeX. Whatever you do, do NOT use M$ WORD for final printing output to a professional service bureau!!! They'll curse you for it.
5% fluctuation sounds more like the effects of different chipsets and other mainboard internals. Linux speeds up dramatically when I recompile for Athlon on my T-Bird 1100, much more than just 5%. WinNT and friends only have 2 kernels on board as far as I know (and I went looking for them). One is the plain vanilla single processor affair, the other has SMP. Both of these must be careful to cater for the lowest common denominator: a P1 Classic. Including instructions from anything higher than a P1 would cause problems on these CPU's. Not many people will be running XP on a P1, but still... Of course there's some dynamic stuff in there based on availability of MMX/SSE etc. I just don't think that's going to make the same difference as -march=athlon does on my Linux box. Maybe a few benchmark runs would be in order. I don't have the time or the box for such a test right now, maybe sometime next month, but this thread did start me thinking..
If all you do on it is type documents you won't see the difference between a 386 and an Athlon XP 2000+. That is, unless your typing skills increase in line with Moore's law of course.
This won't let me run MacOS X graphical applications. I already have my desktop (Win2K, sadly) looking like MacOS 9 but that's just looks. What I'd like to see is an actual port of MacOS X to x86, but since that's not going to happen, wouldn't it be interesting for people like Trolltech and the like to emulate Quartz/Cocoa/Carbon? Quark and Adobe wouldn't need much more than a recompile on their apps to port them over to Linux/FreeBSD, or am I missing something?
Make it emulate the Carbon/Cocoa/Quartz compatible as well then! Hell, easy for me to say, I'm no developer so I don't know how hard this is gonna be.. but it'd be a great stimulant to the likes of Adobe to port their apps to Linux/FreeBSD/*NIX and we'd finally have a proper OS to support the strenuous task of creative page layout. Win98 breaks, Win2K bends, but neither of them are really any good for heavy-duty layout work. I'm seriously considering getting me a Mac for this, but they're so damn expensive!! An Apple-compatible graphical environment on x86 would be a great leap forward for Linux. I for one would never touch anything from Redmond again! ...just wishful thinking I guess ;-)
I don't know what you're doing, but I've been working with PDF to hand in documents to professional printers for quite a while now. I've sent and received thousands of such documents and have never ever had a SINGLE problem with fonts or anything else for that matter using PDF. Using Quark's own file format would give font-hell one out of three times approximately. PDF sure saved me and the printing companies I work with a lot of headaches!
As a "layout guy" I have to reply to this little piece of flamebait. File format is of absolutely no concern at all to a page layout. I've seen nice layouts done in Word, some brilliant HTML-pages and also some totally dismal Quark work. You need a decent set of skills to come up with properly laid out pages. These skills take years to develop, just like geek-skills. The better the sysadmin, the less he's appreciated by the users because their computers hardly ever fail. Same goes for a good designer of informative pages. You've only produced a good layout when the readers aren't consciously aware of the layout. Proper layouts can be made using any file format that'll store pixels or vectors. It requires insight and knowledge of the psychology of readers'perception of a page before you can even begin to make a good page design, which has nothing at all to do with computers or file formats.
The pdf format saves me a hell of a lot of time, and is far from worthless! A great lot of pages are laid out using Quark Xpress or Pagemaker. Each of these programs needs to gather all the photo's and other graphical elements included on the layout, put them in a folder, relink the file to the document's new relative location and gather all required fonts for proper printing into a single directory. This goes wrong almost 100% of the time. It's not like it's the end of the world when your printing company calls you for a missing font, but still.. it went wrong! PDF saves huge loads of trouble by embedding graphics, fonts, photo's, colour management, printing instructions and a bunch of stuff more into a single very small file. The collected Quark files I used to send off would easily reach 100MB in size. A PDF document, generated from InDesign with its excellent PDF-export function, rarely gets bigger than 5MB and there's no perceivable loss of quality. PDF is not very useful online in combination with Acrobat Reader. If you were to use PDF in a more browser-like manner, without the zooming controls and stuff like that but proportionally fitting the page to your browser window, you'd probably have a very usable browsing experience. The way it is now, Acrobat Reader (one of the many PDF-readers, I'm aware of that fact)is too much paper-centric. This, in my opinion, is merely a matter of presentation and should be easy to solve for on-screen applications. All things said: PDF is an absolute boon to anyone wanting to print elaborately laid out pages. LaTeX is great for books, but don't even go there if you want to lay out the next issue of Cosmopolitan. On-screen presentation should be hugely improved, but calling the format worthless clearly shows your ignorance on subjects dealing with professional printing.
If only PDF were editable...
As far as I know pdf isn't secret, but only adobe may change it since they invented pdf. I like PDF a lot because it allow me to send a digital file to just about any print shop to be reproduced on paper and it won't be different from what I see on screen. I work as a graphics designer and have sent hundreds of PDF's off to dozens of printing companies, and never once had a single problem with it. MS Word's DOC format is a sure-fire way to instant hell!