advice regarding Catalina

Daniel, thank you for being again very frank on this. I know that transition to the newer OS is unavoidable.

I’m perfectly aware of this, and have been looking for alternatives for years. But it’s not so easy.

The move to a subscription has convinced/forced many companies to stay with CS6. These companies are not prepress services or other firms that have to be open to the most up-to-date file format. They just have to make the factory go on.

There are publishing companies still using old Macs with an old version of Quark XPress installed. It works, costs nothing to maintain, has no new issues to solve.

My business ecosystem is made of internal documentation workstations, that don’t need anything new introduced after CS6. Most Macs can stay at the old version, and PCs have no issues with CS6, even if updated to newer versions of the OS. And then, there are the translators, who only use InDesign for final retouching the documents translated with Trados or Wordfast.

I’m a bit more problematic, since I use both InDesign and music software, and they are often integrated. To be more precise: wasn’t it for Dorico, I could stay with High Sierra with no problems. The new EDM features of Logic don’t appeal me. New emoj and TV shows in the new Mac OS are of very little interest.

So, I have to find solutions for myself. None of them include subscribing to CC, if not as a last (and still problematic) resort.

A first solution I’m looking for is virtualization. VirtualBox is not working, yet, but Parallels Desktop is promising. Just experimenting. It is not very expensive, and if working it can be the right solution.

Another solution is having my old Mac connected via Ethernet to the new Mac. Just two cables: Ethernet and power. Switch it on, and run the older MacOS in a window inside the new Mac. Work on a shared folder. Smooth and fast, if I can solve an issue with the screen always defaulted to a small window. If the old Mac fails, I can look on the 2nd hand market for a new one (or rely on the Mac laptop).

Of the above, I prefer virtualization, because everything sits in a single machine. Very elegant. But they are both viable solutions.

As for alternatives, there are two: waiting for the Affinity series to be completed (but I guess this will happen in no less than a couple years, possibly more); or switch to a markdown solution, not aimed at book publishing. My clients still want a book, and a printed one for at least part of it. Maybe things will change in a few years.

In the end, the bad font rendering will be the real unresolved issue, and I’m here wondering how the others have learnt to live with something so big.

Paolo

Right up the logic board or power supply burns out when you’re on a deadline. Having your business’s entire production rely on ageing hardware is a risky proposition.

I feel your pain. Virtualization is the only realistic option: I use Parallels and it works very well.

Apple’s font rendering is geared towards hi-DPI displays. I would have thought a 4K 27" screen should work well.

If you accept to use a 2:1 ratio, it works great. It is how Retina is conceived for Apple’s own 5k displays. But with a 4k you would end up with an effective resolution of HD (2048 x 1080). I find it a waste of space in a 27" display.

I was suggested to try to create a bigger virtual display, and halve from there. This is something requiring SIP to be disabled, so I’m not sure this can be done in Catalina, with the more aggressive system protection policy.

Paolo

The whole point of Retina scaling is that you get all the benefits of the display’s pixel density, without the tiny sizes. You still get the full resolution of the screen, it’s just ‘pretending’ that all the objects are twice the size. But that doesn’t make it a 1080p display.

1 Like

To make it clear what I mean, when I mean that I dislike how the screen appears from Mojave, here is a comparison between the same screen grab. This is from High Sierra:

And this one from Catalina:

Both from the same 4k display, set at a comfortable and roomy resolution of 2304 x 1296. I guess the differences are evident.

Paolo

Yes, using a non-integer scaling size is going to look bad and be more work for the GPU. Set it to 2x scaling.

This would mean reducing a lot the available work space. Plus, having big UI elements, that would force one to move back. In a word, giving up with the advantage of having a 27" display.

High Sierra can do non-exact resizing wonderfully. Windows does it well. Apple want to sell their 5k iMacs. But I’m personally quite disgusted at the idea of trashing away a perfectly functioning display when it’s time to change the CPU.

The only solution to move to their more modern systems might be using a virtual resolution higher than the natural resolution of the display, but I’ve not yet tried, and not checked if it can work with Catalina.

EDIT: No, the virtual scaling was needed when I had the Mac mini 2012. With the Mac Pro 2013, the resolution I’m using is already scaled/HiDPI. So, there is no need to create it.

Paolo

I tried to select intensity 3 for the font smoothing in Catalina. The default should be 2, so I had chosen the default value.

There is a huge difference. Intensity 3 is not far from High Sierra, an is reasonably satisfactory:

Paolo

I would like to advise you to skip Catalina and just use Big Sur instead.
Catalina is an incomplete pre-release of macOS Big Sur.
I attended the summer beta test of macOS Big Sur, seeing that it behaves more stable than the public releases of macOS Catalina at the time. Dorico has no problem on it according to my tests.

P.S.: This post only talks about Intel Mac.

If I can wait still a little before upgrading (it depends on the release date of Dorico 4…), I will probably go directly to Big Sur. At the moment, it seems that not all the music software has been completely ported to the new OS.

For sure, I should stop testing Catalina, and immediately install Big Sur in my test drive.

Paolo

1 Like

You all might want to know that I went ahead and installed Catalina, finally, about two months ago, and it has been working fine, including with Dorico. I see no problems.

–L3B

1 Like