Comments on: Leopard Oddity

By: GFreeman

GFreeman — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 02:43:43 +0000

attn: Bruce Webb

MacFixit has a tutorial on installing Leopard on an external FireWire drive and then hooking that drive to to your PPC Mac. It seems to have worked for a lot of people.

By: Jon H

Jon H — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 06:24:50 +0000

I’ve been happy with an HP inkjet printer for which I also bought the duplexing attachment, used with OS X.

I avoid the multi-function boxes.

By: Bernard Yomtov

Bernard Yomtov — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 19:16:22 +0000

David,

Maybe you’re luckier than I am. My particular curse was a Laserjet all-in-one. It now functions as a perfectly serviceable copier/fax, but attempts to scan involved endless reboots, restarts, software reloads, etc., and printing was only somewhat easier.

By: David

David — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 02:08:00 +0000

Still on Tiger, but I have to say both the HP printers on our home network perform flawlessly. No hassles whatsoever. An old laserjet 2100TN and a new Officejet all-in-one. Now, don’t get me started on trying to upgrade Ubuntu. Has seriously hosed that machine.

By: Bernard Yomtov

Bernard Yomtov — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 23:49:25 +0000

which one? Do tell! (looking for such a printer)

It’s called an HL-5280DW. Installation was a minor hassle, but nothing serious.

By: Fr.

Fr. — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 22:33:36 +0000

Sorry, line spacing got messed up.

By: Fr.

Fr. — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 22:32:35 +0000

I faced this issue too. Solutions:

– Use Acrobat Pro, cropping tool + grid + snap-to-grid, and re-save as PDF.
Inconvenient: costly, necessitates two programs where one should be enough. – Save to 300dpi and preserve scaling up to reasonably large sizes.
Inconvenient: large files where a nice vectorised file would do the trick.

I consider the issue as a bug. Preview should allow for destructive crop or warn that its cropping tool does only soft crops.

By: Watson Aname

Watson Aname — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 21:32:51 +0000

C.L. Ball, it simply isn’t possible to scale a raster graphic (jpeg, tiff, etc) the same way you can scale a vector graphic (pdf, ps, etc.). Once you are in a raster form, you are in some sense stuck with the resolution you started with, which is not good. Kieran is doing the right thing sticking with vector format for vector figures.

By: Kieran Healy

Kieran Healy — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 20:19:41 +0000

In my experience using an HP printer on a Mac is for masochists. I ended my long nightmare by getting a wireless duplexing Brother printer that actually is able to commmunicate with the Mac consistently.

I didn’t pick the office printer, alas. Though Leopard has let me do something I don’t think was possible before (though I may be wrong) which is to connect wirelessly to the HP color laserjet in the main office. I just had to manually tell it the IP address and it figured the rest out.

By: Kieran Healy

Kieran Healy — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 20:18:20 +0000

Were you able to use that method before?

Yes, but I guess in retrospect I wasn’t using it with applications that didn’t recognize the bounding box thing.

By: duus

duus — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 20:15:31 +0000

“wireless duplexing Brother printer that actually is able to commmunicate with the Mac consistently.”

which one? Do tell! (looking for such a printer)

By: Bernard Yomtov

Bernard Yomtov — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 19:49:09 +0000

By: David Goodison

David Goodison — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 19:06:42 +0000

I have to admit it never occurred to me that one could crop a pdf in that manner to begin with. Were you able to use that method before?

Both Keynote and Pages have great (and easy to use) masking capabilities. That’s what I use to make use of just a portion of a larger pdf file. That way you can still scale the masked image.

By: Tim McG

Tim McG — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 18:40:57 +0000

When is Apple coming out with “Liger”? I’m not switching until then.

By: PeWi

PeWi — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 17:42:50 +0000

Have also not upgraded yet, but the grap Apple + $ is apparently still working, and in Leopard will also give you the size of the window you are grabbing in pixels (apparently)

Yes, so many interesting features, but here is another one waiting for .1 or even .2