CMYK or RGB? Macintosh or Windows? How's a poor guy to upgrade?

[hedley_finger@xxxxxxxxxxx]

Keyboard tappers:

My daughter's partner intends to leave the hospitality industry and change
career to desktop publishing and multimedia.  He intends to buy a new
computer for his studies and therein lies the problem: Macintosh or
Windows?  From being in full employment with a steady income, he is about
to become an impoverished student, so needs to spend his savings wisely on
computer hardware.

Macintosh does CMYK and Windows does RGB, so the unthinking decision would
be to simply go for Macintosh.  Yet Macintosh hardware comparable to
similar Windows hardware is so much more expensive (remember, we are on a
budget here).

So is anybody out there using the full panoply of Adobe graphic arts
products (InDesign, PageMaker, Photoshop, Illustrator) to produce
publications for PRINT on Windows, with high-quality, fully separable CMYK
PDFs or camera art?  Is this possible?  Is this desirable?  Are the
algorithms for converting Windows RGB to the CMYK for print sufficiently
acceptable?  Which hardware should this man buy?

I look forward to advice from the four-colour printing experts.
Unfortunately, most of my work is B&W or two-colour, so I have no
experience in this field.   By the way, I am no platform fanatic: at home I
have an elderly PowerMac 7300/200, at work a Gateway Windows PC, and have
used probably twenty different operating systems in the last 20 years.

[Windows 2000, FrameMaker 6.0p405, FrameScript 1.27C01, Enhance 2.03,
Acrobat 4.05.2, mif2go 31u33, WebWorks Publisher 7.0, IXgen 5.5.h, HTML
Help Workshop 4.74 build 8702.0, HTML Help 1.31]

Regards,
Hedley

--
Hedley Finger
Adobe Certified Expert, FrameMaker 5.5.x
Technical Communications/Best Practice Mentor
MYOB Australia Pty Ltd  <http://www.myob.com.au>
P.O. box 371   Blackburn VIC 3130   Australia
12 Wesley Court   Tally Ho Business Park   East Burwood 3151   Australia
Tel. +61 3 9222 9992 x 7421  Fax. +61 3 9222 9880  Mob. +61 412 461 558
<mailto:hedley_finger@myob.com.au>


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