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Graphicconverter windows3/15/2023 If you deal with PDFs, and who doesn’t these days, buying this program would be $27 well spent. PDFCompress offers a few options, such as stripping out fonts, downsampling resolution, and so on (right), but really, in terms of user interface, Jef Raskin would be proud: Click and drag the PDF file and drop it on the application’s window. If you are outputting to a press, this is good, but if you want to put light PDFs up on a website or email them to someone, it’s overkill. Quark uses a rather literal interpretation of the PDF standard, and therefore Quark PDFs contain a lot of coding information that may not be necessary. The biggest problem with Quark’s PDFs is that they are huge. Many print professionals advise against this, preferring to use Adobe Acrobat, but for a quick and dirty PDF, that’s a bit too much hassle. I regularly produce PDFs in Quark XPress by using the built-in JAWS export. PDFCompress, from MetaObject, reduces the size of Adobe PDF files, as the name implies. Like many great low cost applications it only does one thing, but it does it so well. Wow! This program’s name is almost enough of a review for this little app. GraphicConverter is available for both OS X and the classic Mac OS, and if you have a PowerMac G4 or G5 or PowerBook G4, it’s worth checking your applications folder – Apple bundles GraphicConverter with pro Macs. The results are frankly excellent – better, in my experience, than even those created with Adobe ImageReady. One of the best uses to which you can put GraphicConverter is shaving the file size of JPEGs and GIFs intended for the Web. The program is limited to RGB files only, which means it’s not really a competitor to Photoshop, but it certainly gives apps like ColorIt! and Photoshop Elements a run for their money. This includes all of the usual formats (JPEG, TIFF, GIF, etc.) as well as more exotic formats used by Atari computers, Amigas, Silicon Graphics workstations, and the venerable Apple IIGS.Īt a price of $30 (or $35 if you want a CD), this alone would make the application worth owning, but GraphicConverter is actually a full-featured bitmap editor in its own right. GraphicConverter imports about 175 graphic file formats and can export about 75 graphic file formats. GraphicConverter is sold as an application that converts graphics files from one format to another, a task that it performs admirably. Thankfully, Thorsten Lemke, the developer, doesn’t seem to want to go down that route. GraphicConverter is only just a shareware app – that is, it is shareware, but it’s so popular that it could be boxed, shrink-wrapped, and sold for $200 and still remain popular. Prices and capabilities of these shareware apps may well have changed since then. Publisher’s note: This article was written in 2004. It is four such applications that we’re taking a look at today. Thirdly, the Mac’s small market presence means that applications developed by small companies and shareware developers can make a splash in the marketplace proportionally greater than they could achieve on the PC. Many inexpensive applications for Windows, such as you might find on a carousel at the local convenience store, are of amazingly low quality. Secondly, the vast majority of PC-only applications are dreadful. Not only this, but they are often superior to their PC namesakes. This is literally true – there are many more programs available on the PC – but it ignores three key facts.įirstly, all of the applications that are important for day-to-day usage, from Word to Photoshop, are available on the Mac. Of course, this runs contrary to common wisdom – the Mac is thought to be a poor cousin to Windows in terms of the number of applications available. 2004 – One of the advantages of using a Mac is the wealth of software available for the platform.
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