Digital BW, The Print

hi sam.

i'm quite new to this list, and there is finally something i can 
contribute. as a graphic artist by trade, i'm in the midst of producing 
a project incorporating bw photos and text, like you described. i've 
always found that printing from Illustrator produces the best comps on 
both my Epson 1160 and 1280. i believe that the reason is primarily 
because Illustrator previews the image far better than layout programs, 
which is important for printing to non-postscript devices. and it's 
easy to create color and bw layers for printing in two passes.

the quality of the prints printed from Illustrator on my 1160 using MIS 
inks are nearly identical to those printed directly from photoshop. but 
i do have to admit, that i'm asking myself why i undertook this (self-
promo) project in the first place, given the edition of 25, 13 pages (2 
sided) passed through 2 printers. it's taken weeks to print. but the 
results are good. 

if you have access to Illustrator, it might save you time converting 
files from InDesign to Acrobat, etc. 

wendy


> There's a third consideration for me, because I'd like to print 
> captions and other text along with the old and small BW family-photo 
> prints I need to re-print. Captions I guess I could do in Photoshop, 
> especially Photoshop 6. But to have magazine-like integration of 
> photos and columns of text, I'd need to move the images to pages 
> formatted in something like InDesign and print from it or Acrobat 
> without the PiezoBW driver. But is the FS Black ink black enough to 
> do the text well? Because I could instead run each side of each sheet 
> through the printer twice, once for the text, in blacker ink (and 
> color accents) printed with the Epson driver from InDesign or 
> AppleWorks, and once for the image, in FS ink. But printed with which 
> driver?