GHK, I assumed from the initial statement of " .....recently discovered how to print RAW without JPG-ing it...." that he is opening the RAW picture directly from the Adobe RAW converter as a Smart Object, which still contains some raw data as I understand it. It makes no difference to me because i have never thought of even trying printing in other than the usual way for obvious reasons. Perhaps you have some better information about the smart object difference.

Charles,
Thanks for yours. I agree re the difference or lack of it. I suppose RAW is there just to give the best chance of the best pic, in some cases as a back-up. If you get it right, or adequate, for your purposes in JPG then no more action needed. My reason for asking was that I assume there are more pixels to be used in RAW as opposed to JPG.
I use a canon Pro 9000 Mk11 which has plummeted in price since the new Pro 1 arrived. The 9000 was recommended as tops but only for colour glossies, and it is. I have an older 6650 for B&W and text. The 9000 is good up to A3Plus too when needed. But I stick mainly to A4 on the basis that a good big one is better than a good small one. (It is also easier to see at my age!)

Hallo Marcomarks, Thanks for yours. So unless the JPG shot on its own (ie perhaps as part of a RAW&JPG combination)is really good, then the RAW processed can surpass it. The processed RAW which becomes a second JPG should then be better than the original JPG, and thus will produce a better print. This without retaining more pixels(myy riginal query)where I thought the extra quality or depth of colour would come from.i was wrong to think this. It is all down to the processing, and perhaps a half -decent pic to start with! Many thanks.

Hallo Marcomarks, many thanks for taking the time to spell things out so clearlyI am certainly inclined to do RAW+JPG to be sure. I did not realise that a JPG revisited does degrade, another reason for committing to Raw as its own JPG can be reconstituted.
My interest is shooting horses jumping cross-country so there is their coat colour plus the rider's to get right. (Rider looks only at the position of both and the horse says nothing!)So it is really only my own satisfaction which is paramount.
Thanks again for the explanation.Think I am about done on this...

In either case, if you create a file that is 300 ppi per inch horizontally and vertically, the file you print is going to have more ppi than a home printer can print when converted to dots per inch anyway.
Whether shooting RAW or JPG you have the same amount of pixels of information.
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Dear Marcomarks,
You are quite right to criticise me. I would not normally make a comment without attempting to justify it. The reason, in this instance, was twofold: (a) I was fairly busy and the justification would have been time-consuming;
(b) I have made rather a lot of posts on this general topic over the last few weeks (probably too many) and I felt that I had already said everything that was relevant sometimes more than once).
Nevertheless, I apologise and will attempt to make recompense by addressing the matter in full detail.

Here goes: "Whether shooting RAW or JPG you have the same amount of pixels of information."
There is nothing much wrong with this but it is worth adding a few points.
If you select the 'Raw plus JPG' camera setting, two saves will be loaded to the memory card.
The saved JPG will actually have less pixels than the Raw because it is compressed (downsampled) on saving. Of course the JPG will be resampled up to its original pixel size when you open it into Photoshop or whatever. You obviously recognise that the upsampling requires interpolation of new pixels which are not identical with the ones discarded on compression; I have never seen your phrase "fake recreated pixels" before, but I think that it is an excellent description of what actually happens. I hope you won't mind if you see me use it at some future date!
The other thing about the JPG is that it is processed, to quite a fair extent, before it is first saved in the camera.
the degree and nature of this varies somewhat from camera to camera, but it almore certainly involves adjustment of highlight and shadow points, and of colour values including colour balance.The saved Raw is, as near as is resonably possible (depending to a small extent on manufacturers decisions - the reason why there are so many Raw formats in circulation) an accurate record of what was initially recorded by the digital sensor. The Raw file itself only contains tonal information; hence it has only one channel (greyscale) and is comparatively small. All the other information, notably the colours which require channels, is stored in vector form in sidecar channels, this actually resulting in a reduction in memory requirements. When you try to open the Raw file, it is, strictly speaking, not possible to do so. What you get is an on-screen representation of a file converted to a logarithmic format with all the sidecar information incorporated into it. This file is much larger now and will, more or less, retain its size when saved, especially if the save is in PSD format, which I would definitely recommend.
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"In either case, if you create a file that is 300 ppi per inch horizontally and vertically, the file you print is going to have more ppi than a home printer can print when converted to dots per inch anyway."

I confess that I am not sure what point you are trying to make here.
Whether a printer can accommodate a 300ppi image or not depends on the file size in pixels. Certainly, even a 24 Mp image from a Sony A900 would have a long side of just over 20 inches; too big even for A3 paper, but you could either increase the ppi (without data loss), or downsize the image using 'Bicubic Sharper' with only minimal loss which would not be detectable in practice.
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"So a RAW file that has been converted to another format like TIFF or JPG or Whether shooting RAW or JPG you have the same amount of pixels of information.whatever for printing purposes or a JPG should be so similar (assuming you haven't opened and saved the JPG a lot of times) when printed that you likely won't be able to tell the difference between them."

It doesn't degrade from re-visiting it, only by opening it then saving it again. Each save is a re-compression that takes away more and more original pixels so degradation takes place each time. If you just look and then close it without saving it, degradation does NOT take place.

That IS another advantage of RAW. If you keep your original files in the RAW format, edits to them are non-destructive to the file, and you can start over to create an all new JPG or TIFF or whatever, or use the same settings as before with some slight adjustments while still retaining the original file quality.

Lightroom, for example, saves all the changes you make as a history along with the file, and you can come back and change things you did slightly or radically, reset everything back to original and start completely over, etc.

By the way, a NIK Software plug-in for PhotoShop or Lightroom was recommended to me that gives you enormous latitude for changing characteristics of zones of a photo by clicking on that zone and tweaking the sliders that pop up, then clicking on another zone and tweaking its sliders that pop up. The zones can even overlap if you want. Sounds beneficial to your need to work on the horse's coat versus the rider's coat as separate entities within the same photo. Lightroom does somewhat the same thing by brush painting a mask that is affected by parameter sliders but this plug-in is intuitive and smart. I've very excited by it and I'm doing a demo trial right now.

http://www.niksoftware.com/viveza/usa/entry.php

First: you cannot print directly from a Raw file. If you could the result would be virtually useless. The file Must be converted to a logarithmic format to be realistically viewed on screen or printed. You don't have to do anything to achieve this; it happens automatically when you click 'Open ' on the stored Raw file. What comes up on screen is the log format conversion and, after processing it should be stored in log format, for which I strongly recommend PSD, not JPG, gecause of the lossy compression of all JPGs. When you do this, you don't need to do any thing about keeping your Raw file; it will be automatically retained in the same store as before. The only change in it will be that it will reflect any adjustments which you chose to make to it in the Raw state. This is a sensible thing, but if you do want to go back to the original version it is quite easy to do it.
Now for the crucial point of which image, the JPG or the one derived from the Raw ( it isn't a Raw file any more - in my case it is always PSD) GIVES THE BETTER FINAL RESULT.
My answer to this is, that if both are handled as well as is possible, it will always be the Raw. The key lies in the proviso I have just made.
There is little or no point in using Raw file unless you
carry out as much of your post processing as you possibly can on the Raw image before converting it to a log format.
I have said, above, that an opened Raw displays a log conversion on screen. However, this is only a display; the image that you work on is still in the Raw format and the changes you make will not cause any information loss because you are only altering the vectors in the sidecar. When, having completed your work on theRaw file, you click 'Open Image' the conversion to log format happens and the on screen image, although it is still exactly the same in appearence, is now a true representation of the new, log image which I always save into memory as a PSD.
I have not finished at this stage though; I reopen the PSD in Photoshop and carry out further processing which was not within the scope of the Raw file (even thogh I realise that my changes now result in some data loss). The file is then saved as my final version (for the time being at least - I can always return to it later and make amendments, especially as I make great use of layers, especially adjustment layers, in my processing - the PSD save retains all layers).
If I have to process a JPG I still do it in Photoshop without changing my technique. However, when I resave it as a JPG, all the layers are lost and later modifications incur further data loss, the overall loss being much greater than with the PSD/Raw route.

GHK