Anyone here work in the newspaper industry? I'm interested in hearing about any experiences in making the leap to OS X, or switching to InDesign. We're a small daily looking at these changes. The main problems seem to be with pre-press.

i work for a campus newspaper; and we swear by indesign and osx. (os9 in some instances heh) Yeah, it works really well; what challengs are you looking to overcome?

Success story of a switch.

http://www.apple.com/ca/hotnews/success/nouvelliste/

Thanks for the link. I guess I should make it clear that I mean switching from OS 9 and Quark.

I work in the newsroom so I'm not all that familiar with the problems faced by prepress. Apparently, some of the things they have to worry about are font management, ad placement, and various add-ons that together make up a precarious house of cards. We have a press on-site to print the paper.

Most campus papers have made the switch to InDesign. Adobe has undertaken an incredibly aggressive campaign to get into the schools. In such a cash-strapped field, it isn't surprising that Quark looses when compared to the cost of not only InDesign, but the entire Creative Suite.

Essentially, what I'm saying is that if your paper takes on interns or hires people fresh out of school, a switch to InDesign within the next year or two is almost manditory.

If you have a press onsite, there are few issues you cannot resolve. Do you have a PDF workflow? How do you do your trapping? Is your imagesetter really really old and tempermental? What OS does your RIP software run under?
These are the questions you should be answering.

You'll still need to run Quark to deal with incoming ads.
Know that to convert a Quark 6 file to InDesign CS you have to downsave to Quark v. 5, open it in Quark 5, then downsave to v. 4 before InDesign can convert it. You can get around the whole issue by saving to PDF or EPS from Quark and placing the file in InDesign.

Macspectrum.com may be able to help you out more in depth.

I remember using wax to strip in the galleys of typeset text. Aaah, that was the end of an era.

... and no one better say that they remember pouring hot lead into a typesetter's form, Mac users can't be that old.

I rememder using wax to strip in the galleys of typset text. Aaah, that was the end of an era.

Wow, I used to do that twenty+ years ago in college when I worked on our campus newspaper, and also in the college PR office. I also used to do typesetting there; I forget the brand of machine but basically it had a big high-RPM wheel inside on which you'd lock down a font strip. Basically when you hit a key, a synced strobe inside the machine would flash though the clear character on the font strip onto film. When you were finished the machine would develop the film and spit out your galley; you'd let it dry then start waxing & stripping.

I also remember what it was like when one of my colleagues didn't install a font strip properly on the drum, and it came loose... ruining the strobe/lens array inside the machine in seconds. Scared the crap out of us, and took big bucks to fix.

Memories...

Our local daily (with a circulation of about 40,000) still uses Quark 4.5 and Mac OS 8.6 for design work. The reporters are beginning to get eMacs as our old Power Mac 7300s die, though. Many people still use AppleWorks 5 in Classic, but some of are now using TextEdit; it's fast, can write natively to plain text, and can use Apple's Canadian spell checker (which follows Canadian Press style rather well).
Mac OS 8 still works fine, but they've been looking at moving to OS X, mainly so the machines will crash less. They may also move to InDesign (since it's cheaper and has better Photoshop integration) if they can convince the editors and designers to learn it.
As well as the printing and marketing department issues mentioned before, they just couldn't move to OS X for a long time because QuickWire (for getting articles from wire services) wasn't available in a native version. The new version is out now, though, so it's just a matter of time.

Apparently one of the big issues for us is upgrading a program called QuickTrac used for tracking and imposing ads. It's expensive. Also, they apparently don't want to switch to InDesign because it would be a lot of work to convert old ads from Quark -- some of which go back five (!) years. I hope they can be convinced the cost saving and improved quality would more than offset this. Any maybe it's time to update those old ads anyway.

That's interesting about QuickWire. I didn't know they were such laggards.

You'll also need to get font managment software. The font book in osx is no good at all.

I used InDesign 2.0 and CS on both PC's and Mac's at the our student newspaper for the last three years. I find InDesign (Both 2.0 and CS) to be extremely flexible, very stable, and full of useful features. The integration with Photoshop is key. I've even used my iBook G4 to produce a complete 20 page issue while on the road.

David

Here's another question: Any thoughts on replacing PowerMac G3s with Mac Mini G4s -- as opposed to PowerMac G5s? The cheaper Minis would probably be fine for the next few years, but the PowerMacs would probably do us for maybe half a dozen years.

BTW, I'm talking about computers for page layout, not prepress stuff.

I'd go with the G5's for a number of reasons including improved workflow. The time you save with the faster machines (especially when designing full page ads or large graphics) will more than justify the increased cost.