[MacDV] Windows won't read a Data CD from a G4

[Richard Brown]

Toast Titanium 5.1.3 should work fine, particularly in OSX. However,
older Toast versions on OS9 gave us no trouble either.

Make sure you are using either "MacOS/Windows Hybrid" in Titanium,
or pure ISO 9660 in other older toast versions. On the Mac use
the eight dot three PC (DOS) naming convention. It only helps because
there are still a LOT of ancient Windows machines out there. Long
file names are not handled well in much of the world, even today.

Next, when migrating down the food chain to a PC, always keep things
as simple as possible. Flatten all layers in Photoshop and send the thing
as a TIF file, uncompressed. All PC's should be able to read them.

Even more bulletproof, and way simpler in OSX, is to use press ready
PDF as your export medium. Everybody can ready them too.

Above all, DO NOT USE the MacOS CDR utility. We encountered
non-Windows readable discs with it. NEVER with Toast. It also
does a weird job at making things ISO 9660 as to long file name
truncation. Even older Toast iterations allows "Joliet" file naming
convention, meaning certain PC's will read the long file names,
though you should not be using them when going Mac -> PC.

We go down the food chain everyday, because while the magazines
we submit to are about 99.5% Mac-only, our clients are PC users,
way too often for what they do with computers, and tragically often
AOL dialup users as well. So it goes.

ANOTHER CAVEAT: Never send a Windows user a CMYK jpeg
image. Chances are, they will have utterly no clue what to do with
it. Always convert CMYK to RGB JPG  for non-printing client proofing,
with a color caveat statement as to shift from said conversion.

Richard Brown