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Showing posts from 2010

"Why Won't Safari Play Some MP3s on My Web Site?"

While adding new MP3 audio files to my Web site recently, I discovered that Safari was refusing to play one of the MP3s already there. The frustrating part was that I could see no difference between this MP3 and any of the others that Safari did play. Searching the Web, I found that this problem was neither uncommon nor particularly new. Safari under Snow Leopard has been having a lot of weird problems playing MP3s. And despite a fair amount of discussion , no one seems to have a solution. So here's mine: Forget MP3. Though it's a common element of HTML5 audio, and though Apple is nominally supporting it, it's really a legacy format. Support may well dwindle further, going forward. My advice is to use MP4 instead. But isn't MP4 a video format? As it turns out, not really. It's a file format that can contain video, audio, stills, and more. You can have audio with your video, or you can have audio without video. Sound familiar? Yes, it's a direct descend

"How Can I Still Create PostScript Files with Acrobat's Adobe PDF from InDesign in Snow Leopard?"

With Mac OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard," Apple introduced an entirely new architecture for print drivers. The new system is designed to provide greater reliability and timeliness in printer support by taking much of it out of the hands of printer manufacturers that, frankly, have never been great at supporting the Mac platform. With such a major change, though, there were bound to be casualties, and one was Acrobat's Adobe PDF print driver. It simply stopped working. In response, later versions of Acrobat Pro 9 have entirely removed the driver and its associated PostScript Printer Description (PPD) file from Snow Leopard systems. In its place, Acrobat leaves a new "Save as Adobe PDF" item on the PDF menu of the OS X print dialog. And of course, we can still export direct to PDF from within Adobe CS applications like InDesign and Illustrator. That's all well and good for general use, but it doesn't satisfy every case. For instance, Lightning Source, the POD