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The Worm has Turned again - part 6 of 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

by Mike McNamee Published 01/10/2009

We made some preliminary investigations to assess the cross-platform portability of InDesign documents, particularly in regard to font issues. This seems as complex as ever and the help documents we located on the web were easily as complicated as any convoluted PC discourse. We will revisit this when we have the strength!

Snow Leopard (aka OS 10.6) was officially launched just before we went to press. The initial responses on the web seem mainly positive (compare this with the fracas of 'upgrading' from Vista to Windows 7). The upgrade is also less damaging on your wallet, costing a mere £25.

There are incompatibilities: you need at least 1 GB of RAM and it will not install on any Mac based upon the Power PC processor. The Guardian Technology page says that there are 'few' issues, but if you look at the actual forum posts (http://snowleopard.wikidot.com/) there seem to be plenty of issues with Photoshop CS4, Illustrator and some reports of instability with external hard drives - it might be best to wait a week or two to see how things settle before you plunge in on a business-critical machine. It is reported to be very fast. Apple have chosen to release Snow Leopard ahead of schedule, some say to leave the field open for a mass of new iPods, they might have been better to leave it until after and do a bit more homework with Adobe.

File Names - what you can and cannot do

we apologise for the complexity of this page but it is (almost) the last word on what you can and cannot do with file names. If your business life depends upongetting files to clients in one piece you need to read and follow it. If you want the very simplest advice, never stray from an 8.3 convention ie:yourfile.ext

The following list is fairly exhaustive and pulls together references from various sources. Compliance with these conventions as assets are added to your library will allow widest use of the assets without subsequent manual intervention to re-path/name, etc. The rules take into account the use of assets on local and network hard drives, CD/DVD, removable drives and online (web/ftp) using Mac OS9/OSX and Windows OSs: 1. Illegal filename characters, (e.g. : or ?). (All OSs).

2. Deprecated filename characters (; and ,). (All OSs).

3. >31 filename characters including extension. (Mac Classic).

4. >64 filename characters including extension. (Windows: ISO9660+Joliet CD or Hybrid CD partition).

5. No extension - extensions are mandatory for Windows and the only means for Extensis Portfolio to tell file type. (Windows, Mac OS X).

6. Filename has >1 period - Portfolio may misinterpret extension. (Windows, Mac OS X).

7. Extension may be wrong, ie not 3 characters. (Windows, Mac OS X).

8. Illegal characters in path to file - same issue as #1 but for path. (All OSs).

9. Deprecated characters in path to file - same issue as #2 but for path. (All OSs).

10. A filename may not begin with a period. (In Windows it's not allowed, a Mac treats it as a hidden file)

11. A filename may not end in a period. (Windows not allowed - OS 'throws away' the trailing period when naming/reading so incorrect matching vs. Mac name)

12. Names conflicting with some of Win OS' old DOS functions (Not allowed in either upper or lowercase and with or without a file extension or as a file extension: COM1 to COM9 inclusive, LPT1 to LPT9 inclusive, CON, PRN, AUX, CLOCK$ and NUL)

13. Case sensitivity. Windows OSs (and IIS web servers) aren't case sensitive. Most other OSs (and web servers) are.

14. Filenames ought not to begin with a hyphen (Unix systems may interpret the filename as a flag to a command line call).

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Contact Mike McNamee

1st Published 01/10/2009
last update 09/12/2022 14:59:50

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