Pearls Before Swine: Strip Layout
https://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2021/09/23

What could go wrong ?

Lynn

On Thursday, September 23, 2021 at 2:54:36 PM UTC-4, Lynn McGuire wrote:
> Pearls Before Swine: Strip Layout
> https://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2021/09/23
>
> What could go wrong ?

I think if he'd randomized the order instead of just reversing, it'd be funnier.

In article <94ab98c9-ba17-4bac-a954-9305dce8c3a1n@googlegroups.com>,
Ross Presser <rpresser@gmail.com> wrote:
>On Thursday, September 23, 2021 at 2:54:36 PM UTC-4, Lynn McGuire wrote:
>> Pearls Before Swine: Strip Layout
>> https://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2021/09/23
>>
>> What could go wrong ?
>
>I think if he'd randomized the order instead of just reversing, it'd be funnier.

The premise sounds false, just in there to set up the joke.

I can't imagine that a full comic strip actually taxes a modern upload.
--
columbiaclosings.com
What's not in Columbia anymore..

On 9/23/2021 2:24 PM, Ted Nolan <tednolan> wrote:
> In article <94ab98c9-ba17-4bac-a954-9305dce8c3a1n@googlegroups.com>,
> Ross Presser <rpresser@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Thursday, September 23, 2021 at 2:54:36 PM UTC-4, Lynn McGuire wrote:
>>> Pearls Before Swine: Strip Layout
>>> https://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2021/09/23
>>>
>>> What could go wrong ?
>>
>> I think if he'd randomized the order instead of just reversing, it'd be funnier.
>
> The premise sounds false, just in there to set up the joke.
>
> I can't imagine that a full comic strip actually taxes a modern upload.

Berkeley Breathed used to hire a charter jet to send his weeks worth of
inked Bloom County strips from Austin, TX to New York City on Saturday
night for the Sunday newspapers from 1980 to 1989.

Lynn

On 9/23/2021 3:33 PM, Lynn McGuire wrote:
> On 9/23/2021 2:24 PM, Ted Nolan <tednolan> wrote:
>> In article <94ab98c9-ba17-4bac-a954-9305dce8c3a1n@googlegroups.com>,
>> Ross Presser  <rpresser@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On Thursday, September 23, 2021 at 2:54:36 PM UTC-4, Lynn McGuire wrote:
>>>> Pearls Before Swine: Strip Layout
>>>> https://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2021/09/23
>>>>
>>>> What could go wrong ?
>>>
>>> I think if he'd randomized the order instead of just reversing, it'd
>>> be funnier.
>>
>> The premise sounds false, just in there to set up the joke.
>>
>> I can't imagine that a full comic strip actually taxes a modern upload.

Right. Besides even if the paper isn't using a canned comics page from
an outside vendor it's highly likely that nobody in editorial or
production even looks at the strips. Plug in and print, to repent at
leisure if there are complaints about content.

> Berkeley Breathed used to hire a charter jet to send his weeks worth of
> inked Bloom County strips from Austin, TX to New York City on Saturday
> night for the Sunday newspapers from 1980 to 1989.

Partly true:

> Read this carefully: “Bloom County” had a weekly deadline for 10
> years. I missed 100 percent. Each of those 500 weeks, I had to drive 40
> miles at 4:30 a.m. to the airport at whatever city I lived in to put the
> strips on a plane as cargo, delivered by a cabdriver in Washington,
> D.C., a few hours later. Every. One.

(https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/08/arts/bloom-county-40-berkeley-breathed.html)

However comics are one of the parts of the paper that are printed well
ahead of the distribution date - Saturday night is absurd.

--
Mark Jackson - https://mark-jackson.online/
Poverty is a choice made by governments not individuals.
- Fiona the Unemployed Bettong (Andrew Marlton)

On 9/23/21 3:33 PM, Lynn McGuire wrote:
> On 9/23/2021 2:24 PM, Ted Nolan <tednolan> wrote:
>> In article <94ab98c9-ba17-4bac-a954-9305dce8c3a1n@googlegroups.com>,
>> Ross Presser  <rpresser@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On Thursday, September 23, 2021 at 2:54:36 PM UTC-4, Lynn McGuire wrote:
>>>> Pearls Before Swine: Strip Layout
>>>> https://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2021/09/23
>>>>
>>>> What could go wrong ?
>>>
>>> I think if he'd randomized the order instead of just reversing, it'd
>>> be funnier.
>>
>> The premise sounds false, just in there to set up the joke.
>>
>> I can't imagine that a full comic strip actually taxes a modern upload.
>
> Berkeley Breathed used to hire a charter jet to send his weeks worth of
> inked Bloom County strips from Austin, TX to New York City on Saturday
> night for the Sunday newspapers from 1980 to 1989.

This very strip is 5.4 MB. In 1980, on home equipment, it would take
something like ten hours to upload. In 1990, about 12 and a half
minutes. Today, of course, the time is humanly negligible.

Hell, I can remember a time when it would have taken 24 hours. (I can
also remember a time when only a one-off water-cooled supercomputer
would meet the performance specs of a gawddam Apple Watch.)

On 9/23/2021 2:59 PM, Mark Jackson wrote:
>
> On 9/23/2021 3:33 PM, Lynn McGuire wrote:
>> On 9/23/2021 2:24 PM, Ted Nolan <tednolan> wrote:
>>> In article <94ab98c9-ba17-4bac-a954-9305dce8c3a1n@googlegroups.com>,
>>> Ross Presser  <rpresser@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> On Thursday, September 23, 2021 at 2:54:36 PM UTC-4, Lynn McGuire
>>>> wrote:
>>>>> Pearls Before Swine: Strip Layout
>>>>> https://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2021/09/23
>>>>>
>>>>> What could go wrong ?
>>>>
>>>> I think if he'd randomized the order instead of just reversing, it'd
>>>> be funnier.
>>>
>>> The premise sounds false, just in there to set up the joke.
>>>
>>> I can't imagine that a full comic strip actually taxes a modern upload.
>
> Right.  Besides even if the paper isn't using a canned comics page from
> an outside vendor it's highly likely that nobody in editorial or
> production even looks at the strips.  Plug in and print, to repent at
> leisure if there are complaints about content.
>
>> Berkeley Breathed used to hire a charter jet to send his weeks worth
>> of inked Bloom County strips from Austin, TX to New York City on
>> Saturday night for the Sunday newspapers from 1980 to 1989.
>
> Partly true:
>
>> Read this carefully: “Bloom County” had a weekly deadline for 10
>> years. I missed 100 percent. Each of those 500 weeks, I had to drive 40
>> miles at 4:30 a.m. to the airport at whatever city I lived in to put the
>> strips on a plane as cargo, delivered by a cabdriver in Washington,
>> D.C., a few hours later. Every. One.
>
> (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/08/arts/bloom-county-40-berkeley-breathed.html)
>
>
> However comics are one of the parts of the paper that are printed well
> ahead of the distribution date - Saturday night is absurd.

Thanks, I could not find the article that I read that from. My memory
is just not very good anymore. I would have sworn that he had to hire a
jet. Instead, he just used a regular cargo jet and a taxi.

Lynn

On Thursday, September 23, 2021 at 4:20:40 PM UTC-4, John W Kennedy wrote:
> On 9/23/21 3:33 PM, Lynn McGuire wrote:
> > On 9/23/2021 2:24 PM, Ted Nolan <tednolan> wrote:
> >> In article <94ab98c9-ba17-4bac...@googlegroups.com>,
> >> Ross Presser <rpre...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>> On Thursday, September 23, 2021 at 2:54:36 PM UTC-4, Lynn McGuire wrote:
> >>>> Pearls Before Swine: Strip Layout
> >>>> https://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2021/09/23
> >>>>
> >>>> What could go wrong ?
> >>>
> >>> I think if he'd randomized the order instead of just reversing, it'd
> >>> be funnier.
> >>
> >> The premise sounds false, just in there to set up the joke.
> >>
> >> I can't imagine that a full comic strip actually taxes a modern upload.
> >
> > Berkeley Breathed used to hire a charter jet to send his weeks worth of
> > inked Bloom County strips from Austin, TX to New York City on Saturday
> > night for the Sunday newspapers from 1980 to 1989.
> This very strip is 5.4 MB. In 1980, on home equipment, it would take
> something like ten hours to upload. In 1990, about 12 and a half
> minutes. Today, of course, the time is humanly negligible.

I'm going to suggest that the originals are much larger, and tiff or
bmp, which are lossless.

Pt

On Thursday, September 23, 2021 at 1:24:44 PM UTC-6, Ted Nolan <tednolan> wrote:

> The premise sounds false, just in there to set up the joke.

> I can't imagine that a full comic strip actually taxes a modern upload.

Perhaps he feels his comic strip is such a masterwork of art, each panel is a
one-gigabyte high-resolution file.

However, while the premise is no doubt preposterous, and is just there to
set up the joke... what is wrong with that? I can't really expect that much
techincal accuracy from a humorous comic strip.

John Savard

On Thursday, September 23, 2021 at 5:07:24 PM UTC-6, pete...@gmail.com wrote:

> I'm going to suggest that the originals are much larger, and tiff or
> bmp, which are lossless.

Surely GIF or PNG would be more likely than either of those? BMP is restricted
to Windows and OS/2, and TIFF is relatively obscure, its main use being multi-page
images.

John Savard

On Thu, 23 Sep 2021 16:46:54 -0700 (PDT), Quadibloc
<jsavard@ecn.ab.ca> wrote:

>On Thursday, September 23, 2021 at 5:07:24 PM UTC-6, pete...@gmail.com wrote:
>
>> I'm going to suggest that the originals are much larger, and tiff or
>> bmp, which are lossless.
>
>Surely GIF or PNG would be more likely than either of those? BMP is restricted
>to Windows and OS/2, and TIFF is relatively obscure, its main use being multi-page
>images.

King Features and the Washington Post both say that they want PDFs.

Lynn McGuire <lynnmcguire5@gmail.com> writes:
>On 9/23/2021 2:59 PM, Mark Jackson wrote:
>>
>> On 9/23/2021 3:33 PM, Lynn McGuire wrote:
>>> On 9/23/2021 2:24 PM, Ted Nolan <tednolan> wrote:
>>>> In article <94ab98c9-ba17-4bac-a954-9305dce8c3a1n@googlegroups.com>,
>>>> Ross Presser  <rpresser@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> On Thursday, September 23, 2021 at 2:54:36 PM UTC-4, Lynn McGuire
>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>> Pearls Before Swine: Strip Layout
>>>>>> https://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2021/09/23
>>>>>>
>>>>>> What could go wrong ?
>>>>>
>>>>> I think if he'd randomized the order instead of just reversing, it'd
>>>>> be funnier.
>>>>
>>>> The premise sounds false, just in there to set up the joke.
>>>>
>>>> I can't imagine that a full comic strip actually taxes a modern upload.
>>
>> Right.  Besides even if the paper isn't using a canned comics page from
>> an outside vendor it's highly likely that nobody in editorial or
>> production even looks at the strips.  Plug in and print, to repent at
>> leisure if there are complaints about content.
>>
>>> Berkeley Breathed used to hire a charter jet to send his weeks worth
>>> of inked Bloom County strips from Austin, TX to New York City on
>>> Saturday night for the Sunday newspapers from 1980 to 1989.
>>
>> Partly true:
>>
>>> Read this carefully: “Bloom County” had a weekly deadline for 10
>>> years. I missed 100 percent. Each of those 500 weeks, I had to drive 40
>>> miles at 4:30 a.m. to the airport at whatever city I lived in to put the
>>> strips on a plane as cargo, delivered by a cabdriver in Washington,
>>> D.C., a few hours later. Every. One.
>>
>> (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/08/arts/bloom-county-40-berkeley-breathed.html)
>>
>>
>> However comics are one of the parts of the paper that are printed well
>> ahead of the distribution date - Saturday night is absurd.
>
>Thanks, I could not find the article that I read that from. My memory
>is just not very good anymore. I would have sworn that he had to hire a
>jet. Instead, he just used a regular cargo jet and a taxi.

Pre-9/11, counter-to-counter shipping was common for such things. Drop
it at the airport and someone would pick it up at the other end.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-to-counter_package

On Thu, 23 Sep 2021 15:59:34 -0400, Mark Jackson
<mjackson@alumni.caltech.edu> wrote:

>
>On 9/23/2021 3:33 PM, Lynn McGuire wrote:
>> On 9/23/2021 2:24 PM, Ted Nolan <tednolan> wrote:
>>> In article <94ab98c9-ba17-4bac-a954-9305dce8c3a1n@googlegroups.com>,
>>> Ross Presser  <rpresser@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> On Thursday, September 23, 2021 at 2:54:36 PM UTC-4, Lynn McGuire wrote:
>>>>> Pearls Before Swine: Strip Layout
>>>>> https://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2021/09/23
>>>>>
>>>>> What could go wrong ?
>>>>
>>>> I think if he'd randomized the order instead of just reversing, it'd
>>>> be funnier.
>>>
>>> The premise sounds false, just in there to set up the joke.
>>>
>>> I can't imagine that a full comic strip actually taxes a modern upload.
>
>Right. Besides even if the paper isn't using a canned comics page from
>an outside vendor it's highly likely that nobody in editorial or
>production even looks at the strips. Plug in and print, to repent at
>leisure if there are complaints about content.
>
>> Berkeley Breathed used to hire a charter jet to send his weeks worth of
>> inked Bloom County strips from Austin, TX to New York City on Saturday
>> night for the Sunday newspapers from 1980 to 1989.
>
>Partly true:
>
>> Read this carefully: “Bloom County” had a weekly deadline for 10
>> years. I missed 100 percent. Each of those 500 weeks, I had to drive 40
>> miles at 4:30 a.m. to the airport at whatever city I lived in to put the
>> strips on a plane as cargo, delivered by a cabdriver in Washington,
>> D.C., a few hours later. Every. One.
>
>(https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/08/arts/bloom-county-40-berkeley-breathed.html)
>
>However comics are one of the parts of the paper that are printed well
>ahead of the distribution date - Saturday night is absurd.

Not to mention the "Bulldog" edition (well, the papers in Seattle had
these at the time, so I presume those in NYC did as well), which was a
Sunday paper that came out ... on Saturday.

The Sunday paper wasn't about the news; it was about the advertising
circulars and other inserts. And columns.
--
"I begin to envy Petronius."
"I have envied him long since."

On 2021-09-23 4:07 p.m., pete...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Thursday, September 23, 2021 at 4:20:40 PM UTC-4, John W Kennedy wrote:
>> On 9/23/21 3:33 PM, Lynn McGuire wrote:
>>> On 9/23/2021 2:24 PM, Ted Nolan <tednolan> wrote:
>>>> In article <94ab98c9-ba17-4bac...@googlegroups.com>,
>>>> Ross Presser <rpre...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> On Thursday, September 23, 2021 at 2:54:36 PM UTC-4, Lynn McGuire wrote:
>>>>>> Pearls Before Swine: Strip Layout
>>>>>> https://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2021/09/23
>>>>>>
>>>>>> What could go wrong ?
>>>>>
>>>>> I think if he'd randomized the order instead of just reversing, it'd
>>>>> be funnier.
>>>>
>>>> The premise sounds false, just in there to set up the joke.
>>>>
>>>> I can't imagine that a full comic strip actually taxes a modern upload.
>>>
>>> Berkeley Breathed used to hire a charter jet to send his weeks worth of
>>> inked Bloom County strips from Austin, TX to New York City on Saturday
>>> night for the Sunday newspapers from 1980 to 1989.
>> This very strip is 5.4 MB. In 1980, on home equipment, it would take
>> something like ten hours to upload. In 1990, about 12 and a half
>> minutes. Today, of course, the time is humanly negligible.
>
> I'm going to suggest that the originals are much larger, and tiff or
> bmp, which are lossless.
>
> Pt
>

TIFF is lossless... ...but it has lossless COMPRESSION (LZW).

The black ink in a largely white panel of the typical comic strip will
compress fantastically well.

On 2021-09-23 5:39 p.m., J. Clarke wrote:
> On Thu, 23 Sep 2021 16:46:54 -0700 (PDT), Quadibloc
> <jsavard@ecn.ab.ca> wrote:
>
>> On Thursday, September 23, 2021 at 5:07:24 PM UTC-6, pete...@gmail.com wrote:
>>
>>> I'm going to suggest that the originals are much larger, and tiff or
>>> bmp, which are lossless.
>>
>> Surely GIF or PNG would be more likely than either of those? BMP is restricted
>> to Windows and OS/2, and TIFF is relatively obscure, its main use being multi-page
>> images.
>
> King Features and the Washington Post both say that they want PDFs.
>
>

They say that TODAY...

On 2021 Sep 23, Mark Jackson wrote
(in article <ir44lfFren4U1@mid.individual.net>):

>
> On 9/23/2021 3:33 PM, Lynn McGuire wrote:
> > On 9/23/2021 2:24 PM, Ted Nolan<tednolan> wrote:
> > > In article<94ab98c9-ba17-4bac-a954-9305dce8c3a1n@googlegroups.com>,
> > > Ross Presser <rpresser@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > > On Thursday, September 23, 2021 at 2:54:36 PM UTC-4, Lynn McGuire wrote:
> > > > > Pearls Before Swine: Strip Layout
> > > > > https://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2021/09/23
> > > > >
> > > > > What could go wrong ?
> > > >
> > > > I think if he'd randomized the order instead of just reversing, it'd
> > > > be funnier.
> > >
> > > The premise sounds false, just in there to set up the joke.
> > >
> > > I can't imagine that a full comic strip actually taxes a modern upload.
>
> Right. Besides even if the paper isn't using a canned comics page from
> an outside vendor it's highly likely that nobody in editorial or
> production even looks at the strips. Plug in and print, to repent at
> leisure if there are complaints about content.
>
> > Berkeley Breathed used to hire a charter jet to send his weeks worth of
> > inked Bloom County strips from Austin, TX to New York City on Saturday
> > night for the Sunday newspapers from 1980 to 1989.
>
> Partly true:
>
> > Read this carefully: “Bloom County” had a weekly deadline for 10
> > years. I missed 100 percent. Each of those 500 weeks, I had to drive 40
> > miles at 4:30 a.m. to the airport at whatever city I lived in to put the
> > strips on a plane as cargo, delivered by a cabdriver in Washington,
> > D.C., a few hours later. Every. One.
>
> (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/08/arts/bloom-county-40-berkeley-breathed.htm
> l)
>
> However comics are one of the parts of the paper that are printed well
> ahead of the distribution date - Saturday night is absurd.

Back when I was working in the pre-press section of a newspaper (pre-press
created the film and the plates used to print the paper) we would start
printing some sections of the Sunday paper on Wednesday or Thursday. That
would usually be thing like the ‘magazine’, and various chunks of
full-page, two-page, and quad-page adverts. The entertainment section,
including things like crosswords and the comics, and the tv guide (remember
them?) would be printed on Thursday or Friday. Note that printing the tv
guide was a major production. At first we had a SyQuest disk (God, how we
hated SyPest with the fury of 10,000 suns) then we got a network 56k modem
and I got to go to tv guide people’s FTP site and spend over an hour
downloading a massive 9 MB file every Wednesday. Then we, and the tv guide
people, got broadband and I could get the file, which had doubled or tripled
in size, in a matter of minutes. We’d verify that we got the _correct_ file
(one reason for the SyPest disk had been that they sent _all_ the files...)
and send it to film and burn plates, and stack them for the press guys to
crank them out at their convenience. Recall that black pages were one page of
film, and one plate, spot colour was two pages, full colour was four. Film
was $3/foot, plates varied up to $50 each. We had a circulation of over
550,000, a set of plates was good for about 50,000 impressions, so we burned
about a dozen plates per. Two dozen for spot colour, four dozen for full
colour. You may detect why full colour wasn’t common until relatively
recently, when the price of plates went down. Comics pages for the Sunday
editions were, of course, full colour. You better believe that the comics, tv
guide, ‘magazine’, and things like opinion and fashion and what not were
all printed by Friday, or the editor and the senior press guy would be most
irate. We printed about 75% of the Sunday paper by Friday. The main holdouts
would be sports and editorial; if certain games ran late the sports people
would still be producing copy at 23:00 Saturday night... which is when the
presses started prting the parts of the Sunday paper not yet printed. If the
sports guys didn’t deliver copy in time, we went with filler and got the
paper out the door. Which meant that early editions looked remarkably
different from late editions. If you think that sports reporting sometimes
looked rushed, that’s because it _was_ rushed.

On 2021 Sep 23, John W Kennedy wrote
(in article<nd6dnaYQqowNfNH8nZ2dnUU7-V3NnZ2d@giganews.com>):

> On 9/23/21 3:33 PM, Lynn McGuire wrote:
> > On 9/23/2021 2:24 PM, Ted Nolan<tednolan> wrote:
> > > In article<94ab98c9-ba17-4bac-a954-9305dce8c3a1n@googlegroups.com>,
> > > Ross Presser <rpresser@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > > On Thursday, September 23, 2021 at 2:54:36 PM UTC-4, Lynn McGuire wrote:
> > > > > Pearls Before Swine: Strip Layout
> > > > > https://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2021/09/23
> > > > >
> > > > > What could go wrong ?
> > > >
> > > > I think if he'd randomized the order instead of just reversing, it'd
> > > > be funnier.
> > >
> > > The premise sounds false, just in there to set up the joke.
> > >
> > > I can't imagine that a full comic strip actually taxes a modern upload.
> >
> > Berkeley Breathed used to hire a charter jet to send his weeks worth of
> > inked Bloom County strips from Austin, TX to New York City on Saturday
> > night for the Sunday newspapers from 1980 to 1989.
>
> This very strip is 5.4 MB. In 1980, on home equipment, it would take
> something like ten hours to upload. In 1990, about 12 and a half
> minutes. Today, of course, the time is humanly negligible.

it took literal hours to FTP down 6 to 9 MB files in the mid 1990s.
>
>
> Hell, I can remember a time when it would have taken 24 hours. (I can
> also remember a time when only a one-off water-cooled supercomputer
> would meet the performance specs of a gawddam Apple Watch.)

oh, yes.

On 2021 Sep 23, Quadibloc wrote
(in article<baa132a8-0045-49fb-baba-1abf38becb50n@googlegroups.com>):

> On Thursday, September 23, 2021 at 5:07:24 PM UTC-6, pete...@gmail.com wrote:
>
> > I'm going to suggest that the originals are much larger, and tiff or
> > bmp, which are lossless.
>
> Surely GIF or PNG would be more likely than either of those?

no. GIF was limited in colour palette. PNG couldn’t work with several
common tools for a loooong time. (Quark Xpress, I’m looking at _you_.) When
I was at the paper, we not onlt wanted TIFFs, we wanted _CMYK_ TIFFs, RGB
TIFFs showed as colour on screen but printed in grayscale. No colour seps.
This was another Quark quirk. In addition to hating SyPest, we weren’t that
fond of Quirk Xcess. Especially as it cost US$1000/copy and was heavily
copy-protected.

> BMP is restricted
> to Windows and OS/2, and TIFF is relatively obscure, its main use being
> multi-page
> images.

pre-press people lived ot died by CMYK TIFFs.
>
>
> John Savard

On 2021-09-24 12:30 p.m., Wolffan wrote:
> On 2021 Sep 23, Quadibloc wrote
> (in article<baa132a8-0045-49fb-baba-1abf38becb50n@googlegroups.com>):
>
>> On Thursday, September 23, 2021 at 5:07:24 PM UTC-6, pete...@gmail.com wrote:
>>
>>> I'm going to suggest that the originals are much larger, and tiff or
>>> bmp, which are lossless.
>>
>> Surely GIF or PNG would be more likely than either of those?
>
> no. GIF was limited in colour palette. PNG couldn’t work with several
> common tools for a loooong time. (Quark Xpress, I’m looking at _you_.) When
> I was at the paper, we not onlt wanted TIFFs, we wanted _CMYK_ TIFFs, RGB
> TIFFs showed as colour on screen but printed in grayscale. No colour seps.
> This was another Quark quirk. In addition to hating SyPest, we weren’t that
> fond of Quirk Xcess. Especially as it cost US$1000/copy and was heavily
> copy-protected.
>
>> BMP is restricted
>> to Windows and OS/2, and TIFF is relatively obscure, its main use being
>> multi-page
>> images.
>
> pre-press people lived ot died by CMYK TIFFs.

Ah, Quark Xpress.

Everyone hated it...

....and rightly so...

....but everyone used it...

....and rightly so.

:-)

Wolffan <akwolffan@zoho.com> writes:
>On 2021 Sep 23, John W Kennedy wrote
>(in article<nd6dnaYQqowNfNH8nZ2dnUU7-V3NnZ2d@giganews.com>):
>
>> On 9/23/21 3:33 PM, Lynn McGuire wrote:
>> > On 9/23/2021 2:24 PM, Ted Nolan<tednolan> wrote:
>> > > In article<94ab98c9-ba17-4bac-a954-9305dce8c3a1n@googlegroups.com>,
>> > > Ross Presser <rpresser@gmail.com> wrote:
>> > > > On Thursday, September 23, 2021 at 2:54:36 PM UTC-4, Lynn McGuire wrote:
>> > > > > Pearls Before Swine: Strip Layout
>> > > > > https://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2021/09/23
>> > > > >
>> > > > > What could go wrong ?
>> > > >
>> > > > I think if he'd randomized the order instead of just reversing, it'd
>> > > > be funnier.
>> > >
>> > > The premise sounds false, just in there to set up the joke.
>> > >
>> > > I can't imagine that a full comic strip actually taxes a modern upload.
>> >
>> > Berkeley Breathed used to hire a charter jet to send his weeks worth of
>> > inked Bloom County strips from Austin, TX to New York City on Saturday
>> > night for the Sunday newspapers from 1980 to 1989.
>>
>> This very strip is 5.4 MB. In 1980, on home equipment, it would take
>> something like ten hours to upload. In 1990, about 12 and a half
>> minutes. Today, of course, the time is humanly negligible.
>
>it took literal hours to FTP down 6 to 9 MB files in the mid 1990s.

I spent some time at one of the Dow Jones (WSJ) printing plants in the
1990's. They switched from hand pasteup to downloading the
negatives (or positives depending on how the plates were created)
via C-band dish every afternoon. By the mid 90's, the digital
data stream was printed directly on a plate with a laser, rather
than the former photographic method. The nice thing about offset
is that the plate is oriented the same as the page, rather than
a mirrored image - much easier to proof.

They started printing about 6:00 pm (2star edition) so they could
get it on a plane to Hawaii, the front page was updated sometimes
for later editions (3star and 4star) depending on how local the
target market was. Print run ended about 11:00 pm.

On 9/23/2021 2:54 PM, Lynn McGuire wrote:
> Pearls Before Swine: Strip Layout
> https://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2021/09/23
>
> What could go wrong ?
>
> Lynn
>

Ah, thanks, first comment.. the strip is backwards.

On 9/24/2021 3:15 PM, Wolffan wrote:
> We printed about 75% of the Sunday paper by Friday. The main
> holdouts would be sports and editorial; if certain games ran late the
> sports people would still be producing copy at 23:00 Saturday
> night... which is when the presses started prting the parts of the
> Sunday paper not yet printed. If the sports guys didn’t deliver copy
> in time, we went with filler and got the paper out the door. Which
> meant that early editions looked remarkably different from late
> editions. If you think that sports reporting sometimes looked rushed,
> that’s because it_was_ rushed.

By contrast, our local (Gannett) paper often defers reports of
yesterday's non-early sports until tomorrow - when it often then prints
only the scores. For example East Coast AAA baseball games starting as
early as 5 PM yesterday didn't make today's paper at all.

--
Mark Jackson - https://mark-jackson.online/
Poverty is a choice made by governments not individuals.
- Fiona the Unemployed Bettong (Andrew Marlton)

On Friday, September 24, 2021 at 6:15:54 PM UTC-4, Mark Jackson wrote:
> On 9/24/2021 3:15 PM, Wolffan wrote:
> > We printed about 75% of the Sunday paper by Friday. The main
> > holdouts would be sports and editorial; if certain games ran late the
> > sports people would still be producing copy at 23:00 Saturday
> > night... which is when the presses started prting the parts of the
> > Sunday paper not yet printed. If the sports guys didn’t deliver copy
> > in time, we went with filler and got the paper out the door. Which
> > meant that early editions looked remarkably different from late
> > editions. If you think that sports reporting sometimes looked rushed,
> > that’s because it_was_ rushed.
> By contrast, our local (Gannett) paper often defers reports of
> yesterday's non-early sports until tomorrow - when it often then prints
> only the scores. For example East Coast AAA baseball games starting as
> early as 5 PM yesterday didn't make today's paper at all.
> --
>

As a paperboy for the New York Daily News in the late 1960s, delivering
60 mi east of Times Square, I'd get my Sunday Supplements delivered on
Wednesday and the main section of the paper on Sunday morning. The color
section might have been from a different plant, such as Eastern Color, up
in Waterbury, CT, Greater Buffalo Press, or World Color at Sparta, IL. There
were so few color section printers at that time that when one bought
another the Department of Justice anti-trust lawyers came calling.

For someone who followed several of the story strips, it took willpower to
avoid sneaking a peek at the Sunday pages while "putting the paper together"
sans the last section.

--
Kevin R

On Thursday, September 23, 2021 at 1:54:36 PM UTC-5, Lynn McGuire wrote:
> Pearls Before Swine: Strip Layout
> https://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2021/09/23
>
> What could go wrong ?
>
> Lynn
He didn't do this before? Perhaps I got it all backwards.

On 9/24/21 3:22 PM, Wolffan wrote:
> On 2021 Sep 23, John W Kennedy wrote
> (in article<nd6dnaYQqowNfNH8nZ2dnUU7-V3NnZ2d@giganews.com>):
>
>> On 9/23/21 3:33 PM, Lynn McGuire wrote:
>>> On 9/23/2021 2:24 PM, Ted Nolan<tednolan> wrote:
>>>> In article<94ab98c9-ba17-4bac-a954-9305dce8c3a1n@googlegroups.com>,
>>>> Ross Presser <rpresser@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> On Thursday, September 23, 2021 at 2:54:36 PM UTC-4, Lynn McGuire wrote:
>>>>>> Pearls Before Swine: Strip Layout
>>>>>> https://www.gocomics.com/pearlsbeforeswine/2021/09/23
>>>>>>
>>>>>> What could go wrong ?
>>>>>
>>>>> I think if he'd randomized the order instead of just reversing, it'd
>>>>> be funnier.
>>>>
>>>> The premise sounds false, just in there to set up the joke.
>>>>
>>>> I can't imagine that a full comic strip actually taxes a modern upload.
>>>
>>> Berkeley Breathed used to hire a charter jet to send his weeks worth of
>>> inked Bloom County strips from Austin, TX to New York City on Saturday
>>> night for the Sunday newspapers from 1980 to 1989.
>>
>> This very strip is 5.4 MB. In 1980, on home equipment, it would take
>> something like ten hours to upload. In 1990, about 12 and a half
>> minutes. Today, of course, the time is humanly negligible.
>
> it took literal hours to FTP down 6 to 9 MB files in the mid 1990s.

That would, of course, depend on the modem—but I see I was a little off
on the timeline. 57,600-bps home modems were nearer the turn of the
century than 1990. (I’m old enough to remember when speeds like that
could be achieved only by leasing eight lines to run in parallel, and
2000-bps dial-up modems were the size of a toaster oven.)

>> Hell, I can remember a time when it would have taken 24 hours. (I can
>> also remember a time when only a one-off water-cooled supercomputer
>> would meet the performance specs of a gawddam Apple Watch.)
>
> oh, yes.
>