This week subscriber Doug Clapp, proprietor of PocketPCpress (http://www.pocketpcpress.com/), wrote with an interesting question. He’d received a book that had been typeset in QuarkXPress (Doug didn’t have QuarkXPress) and sent to him as a “stuffed” (.sit) Macintosh file (Doug didn’t have the StuffIt program or a Macintosh). What Doug *needed* was an unstuffed Microsoft Word document that he could use on his PC.
I finally went out and bought that new monitor I mentioned last week–a 19-inch Sony that looked great in the store (playing the Jurassic Park DVD!). But when I got it home and hooked it up, it didn’t look so good. The characters in Microsoft Word looked jagged, and the toolbar icons were huge! Couldn’t it do better than that? Then it struck me: on a monitor that was capable of 1600 by 1200 resolution, I was displaying 1024 by 768. No wonder! I quickly increased the resolution to the max, using the following procedure (I’m running Windows 98; if you’re a Macintosh user and would like to explain how to do this on a Mac, I’d love to include your instructions in next week’s newsletter):
This week I’ve been shopping around for a new monitor. That got me thinking about what editors need in the way of computer equipment. If you work for a corporation, the powers-that-be probably think like this: “Editors just do word-processing, so they don’t need much of a computer.” Then they buy you something cheap and slow.