Printing and layout software for mac?

[boostfreak]

Mac newbie here... I work in a small print business as a graphic designer, recently I switch to mac os, bought an Imac, and my boss is replacing pc's to mac pro's in digital printing and design department.

Im looking for a software or a plugin to manage print jobs like do in coreldraw.

As an example on windows, if I want to print business cards, I do the design in illustrator or photoshop, then rasterize it to 300dpi jpg or tiff, import it to coreldraw, then print preview and choose tabloid and the preset for bc , and print 24 business cards per tabloid with trim marks.

I know I can do an action in photoshop, but with coreldraw is so easy, quick and you have full control of printing what you want, like booklet, or manual layouts.

That's the only I'm missing from wind0ws. Any idea?

 

[Jim Campbell]

Aside from the fact that you used the term "jpg" in a sentence about print workflows… you could actually set up a template in Illustrator itself to the correct size of your printer's card sheets; lay it up once with 24 cards in a 6x4 grid with cut marks and re-use for all subsequent projects. Well, you'll need one template for single cut and one for double cut, but you see what I mean.

For multi-page documents, you're basically going to need InDesign (or Quark… I don't hate Quark 8, but I know that's a minority view!). Alternatively, if the licensing costs of either ID or QX are too high (and they are expensive), or the learning curve is too steep (and it is steep) it might be worth running CorelDraw under Windows via BootCamp on the Mac.

Cheers

Jim

 

[boostfreak]

thanks Jim for the reply, as for jpg, its only because coreldraw gets nasty importing .pdf, so its faster to use a tiff or jpg, I use pdf for everything else like offset plates.

We already have a lot of client forms in Indesign and old ones in pagemaker, so the route should be indesign and illustrator template you suggest or bootcamp (maybe parallels).

Don't know why such a great feature its missing in adobe products.