[Cemetery Man]

Does anyone know of a RIP for inkjet printers that works in OSX. I used to use Adobe PressReady prior to my switch to OSX but after a call to Adobe I found out that PressReady has been discontinued therefore, no OSX upgrade. The Epson Stylus RIP is compatible with my printer, but the website doesn't tell if it works in OSX. Any help would be great.
Thanks

[Cemetery Man]

Maybe that last question was silly because I was printing from InDesign and my eps pictures printed out perfectly. No pixelated blobs like I would have gotten using Classic OS without a RIP. Does OSX not need a RIP for non-postscript inkjets? It sure looks that way. So far OSX has been awesome! Almost every annoyance I had with Classic OS seems to be gone. Its almost like switching from old skool Nintendo to Playstation 2. Everything is that much more sleek and improved. What an amazing operating system!

[Corys]

iProof System (www.iproofsystems.com)
I am betting my money they will be the first. They are claiming to have it shipping end of July.
I doubt the epson rip will be brought over. but it might..

the PowerRip from iProof has produced good results on my epson 5000. Speedwise, it's a dog...

[MikeM32]

Does boosting the output quality improve the print? The reason I ask is because I used to use an Epson 800 that can go up to 720 x 1440 dpi and it seemed to print very well when outputting at medium or high quality. I don't recall it having an actual RIP however.

Mike

[Cemetery Man]

I wondered if it was the output quality set on high that was causing such a great print out , so I lowered the quality to medium. I still got the same great quality print. I did, however, take a very close look at my vector eps that I had printed and I noticed that the edges had tiny jagged barbs on them. I'm guessing this happened because of the lack of a RIP. The jagged edges were so small that you really had to look for them to see them. Visibly, it barely effects the quality . I'm still confused why my photoshop eps printed so good. I remember two years ago when I first got my Mac and Epson and I didn't even know that inkjets needed a RIP, I tried printing EPS and TIFF images from Quark with highest quality set and all I got was pixelated blobs that looked like crap. I also tried printing them out of InDesign and, according to the error message, I wasn't even allowed access to the print window because I didn't have a RIP. It's strange that I now have the access I do and my print outs are so nice with no RIP. I'm not complaining... OSX hasn't caused me one problem yet.

[MikeM32]

It's a long-shot but you might try boosting your illustrator or freehand eps' resolution. There has been a slight problem with transparency effects since Illustrator 9 also, and I think the work-around is to flatten the transparency effects. But I think this is more of a postscript RIP problem, and since you don't technically have one well......

Try boosting the output resolution in your vector graphics program and see what happens. I think you go up to like 9600 DPI in illustrator, but 800 "should" be enough for a letter or ledger sized print.

Mike

[HAbaRI]

<STRONG>I doubt the epson rip will be brought over. but it might..
</STRONG>

definitely not. I've asked them.

anyway. indesign will print almost perfectly without a RIP - quark most likely will not. the best workaround still is to save as PDF first and then print from acrobat. this does the job quite well.

[Eric_Henao]

Originally posted by HAbaRI:
<STRONG>

definitely not. I've asked them.

anyway. indesign will print almost perfectly without a RIP - quark most likely will not. the best workaround still is to save as PDF first and then print from acrobat. this does the job quite well.</STRONG>

I've had some weird color shifts when doing this. Especially when printing PDF's generated with Quark and then printed from adobe Acrobat Reader to a HP DesignJet 500. Then comparison to a Quark-eps to Photoshop tiff and then printed from Photoshop to the printer, the color difference was way different... Photoshop seemed much more realistic. But there is no RIP on the DesignJet 500. And color controls on it are very limited...

Take that for what it is worth...

Eric

Yes, there is a PostScript RIP for OSX - you've already got it...

It's called InDesign 2.0.

InDesign has what amounts to a PostScript RIP built right into the application (here's a fun trick to try: print something to a PostScript file - you know, with a .PS extension.) Place that .PS file into InDesign and see what happens.

Pretty cool, huh?

In fact, you can even turn on InDesign 2's overprint preview to see what things will look like overprinted - and you can EVEN print the overprinted elements to your inkjet printer!

Here's another trick that utilizes the PostScript display capabilities of InDesign: InDesign, inside the application folder, contains a folder called "Fonts". If you ever have a PC/Windows job you are working on, that has its own Windows fonts, you can drag the Windows fonts into the InDesign Fonts folder, and InDesign will load them and let you use/work with them. Pretty dang cool. It even will do this on the fly - you don't even have to quit InDesign.

InDesign brings *real* WYSIWYG to the publishing community for the first time ever....

InDesign 2 Rocks!

-AD

[suhail]

OS X does not seem to require a RIP at all, but if you have a .ps file, just drag it into Photoshop and raster it at 300dpi and print it.