Comments on: Don’t Use PICT. Please.

By: Yuhong Bao

Yuhong Bao — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 04:12:22 +0000

“According to Adobe’s docs, PICT is still supported. In fact, they even insist that, “The Macintosh PICT (or Picture) format is widely used for Mac OS graphics and page-layout applications, and for transferring files between applications.” Which is a bizarre statement… it is not widely used. And anyone who does “widely use it” should be flogged with a noodle.”
Well, it used to be true, under classic Mac OS and even early Carbon. But while PICTs are not that dangerous IMO, they has been deprecated along with QuickDraw since 10.4. 64-bit apps cannot render PICTs since they have no access to QuickDraw (the few 64-bit APIs that do render PICTs used a 32-bit pictd helper process to do so). If you open one under Preview in Snow Leopard, for example, you will be asked to open the app in 32-bit mode.

By: Yuhong Bao

Yuhong Bao — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 04:07:27 +0000

Bob Levine: The reason is that WMF is from 16-bit Windows GDI which did not support these features. Win32 invented EMFs which support all Win32 GDI features. Consider that 16-bit Windows is dead since long ago, EMFs should be used if possible instead of WMFs.

By: Bob Bringhurst

Bob Bringhurst — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 18:19:41 +0000

Thanks for the heads up, David. Even though the Help topic warns people not to use PICT files for anything but lo-res printing, we’re still sending a mixed message. I edited the topic to remove all praise of PICT files.

By: Massey Padgham

Massey Padgham — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 06:38:52 +0000

Many newspapers use PICT for ad placeholders when pages (at least Quark ones) are set up in Layout 8000 (an ad placement/page scheduling program in common use to laydown newspapers). It creates a pict with the name, number etc of the ad. Of course, the real ad comes along later and the Pict was in a print suppressed frame anyway…
But PICT as a production file format. Not.

By: joecab

joecab — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 23:41:19 +0000

> Then get with the times man!

I know, I know *groan*

I always resave JPEG files as TIFF. Why? I’m paranoid, and I don’t want to risk someone else working on those JPEGs without realizing that they may not be working with it at maximum quality. Better to just take that x factor out entirely.

By: Bob Levine

Bob Levine — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 18:20:08 +0000

I have a client…a very large international company with many subsidiaries that uses an automated system to insert the proper logos into Word and Powerpoint.

In order to work properly they can’t be scaled…CorelDRAW to the rescue!

By: Eugene

Eugene — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 16:02:20 +0000

Hey Bob, that’s why when I make an file for MS office in Illustrator I make it roughly 2 or 3 times larger than it would be needed.

When it’s brought into MS office it needs to be scaled down to the right size. It’s very rare that anyone using MS Office would print or display their slideshows in anything larger than A4. So making the image A3 or A2 size in Illustrator then exporting to WMF definitely accounts for that.

And when have you met anyone that uses non-pro apps who are fussy how they’re print stuff prints anyway? (insert wink smiley)

By: Bob Levine

Bob Levine — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 15:50:30 +0000

Re: WMFs

They’re horrible format for high end use with no support that I know of for bezier curves or CMYK. This means that when you convert a file to WMF all curves are converted to small line segments and CMYK colors are converted to RGB.

When you scale those files up the lack of bezier support becomes very apparent. FWIW, I find Illustrator’s capability to save as WMF insufficient even for Office apps leaving curves looking very jagged.

When I need a WMF I use CorelDRAW which does a much better job.

By: Eugene

Eugene — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 15:06:57 +0000

SVG is currently a web type of image. I wouldn’t risk using it in a printing workflow. It’s bascially a vgml (vector graphic markup language) and I think it’s done with xml. Because of this it can contain scripting and animations and things like that. As far as I know it’s fine to save these as PDF as the pdf coding preserves all the vectors. As well as being a web graphic it would probably all RGB, so I’m not sure how that translates into CMYK? But as it’s xml it could contain weird things and require extra proofing, like scripts and animations etc. There is a SVG print format being worked on at the moment by W3C with Adobe and Corel and a few others but I’m not sure how far along that is?

I’m a little sketchy on the details, I’ll admit. But I think it’s best to save it as a PDF to avoid unforeseen headaches.

By: Kim Bach

Kim Bach — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 14:52:46 +0000

What about using open formats like SVG?