Crossing The Great Divide

Gone are the days when we needed special translation software to even read files from The Other Side. Whereas network connections once required arcane geek incantations and burnt offerings, mere mortals can now point, click, and magically access a networked PC from their Mac. We live in wonderful times.

But that doesn't mean things are perfect or painless. Windows users have to accept that many Macintosh users consider file extensions equivalent to obscenities. Macintosh users must learn to avoid florid naming conventions. And everybody still needs to gather up the fonts before they send a job out the door.

While setting up a network is outside the scope of this book, the assumption is that you've figured out some way to get your stuff to wherever it needs to be. We've come a long way from floppies (Grandma, what are floppies?) and SyQuest drives. It was very chic to have huge whopping 44 MB SyQuest cartridges ten years ago, and blank CDs cost nearly 20 dollars apiece. Now, we have large-capacity CDs, DVDs, and memory sticks, and none of the current methods is platform-specific. Pardon the flashback. The author suddenly feels very, ah, mature.