QUOTE (Roman Farraday @ July 24, 2009 12:12 pm)
Does anyone have a POV on laying out cards in JPEG versus PDF? Robert likes to lay his out in JPEG for the following reasons:



I tend to think PDF is friendlier in that everyone is comfortable printing PDFs. The other reason I like them is because you can put all images in one file. But is there anything wrong with laying out in JPEG? Can anyone not print JPEGs? Please let me know your thoughts/experiences.

There are lots of problems with JPEGs. First, is that you have to have a separate program to open the file and print them from, be it Windows Media/Picture Viewer, MSPaint, GIMP, Photoshop or what-have you. I find Windows Media/Picture Viewer to be about the worst program possible for printing images...same with MSPaint. That means, you're left with GIMP or Photoshop, and not everyone has those programs. With a PDF, the viewer has a built-in print option. While you do need Acrobat Reader (also a separate program), for whatever reason almost everyone seems to have that program, and printing from the PDF viewer seems easier for some reason.

Secondly, with JPEGs, you need a separate file for each page...there's no way to link them together. While you can zip them all up to make it only 1 download, you still have to deal with either unzipping, or downloading separate files for each page. With a PDF, there's no unzipping necessary, and there's only 1 file for all layout pages.

And lastly, since the JPEG pages are all separate files, you have to print each page separately, whereas with a PDF, it's just 1 file, and you can print all pages with a single click. There isn't much gained in the image quality department between a JPEG and a PDF. Now, if we were talking about TIFF layouts...then there's an argument to be made that the extra steps necessary in downloading and printing are worth it for the higher quality...but nobody has produced any TIFF decks yet.

I prefer PDF layouts for the above reasons.

Darth Trumpetus...trumpeter of fury.