2. PRINTING IN PAGEMAKER
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Nate A. Rush, of Carlinville, wrote: "I recently learned the following and thought you might like to pass it along. For quite a while I've had trouble with the print resolution of scanned photos and digital camera photos in my newsletters (I'm using PM 6.5 on Windows 98). The edges were jagged and the images looked muddy. I ran across the following suggestion by a PM user in Adobe's User to User Forum...
'In the print menu go to options and click on TIFFs/Images. The default seems to be Optimized subsampling, change this setting to NORMAL and PM will send all of the bitmap image. The default setting will only send enough information for a proof as this is what it is for. Hope that anyone who has or will experience this will use this fix and avoid a major excedrin headache or won't feel stupid because the answer is on page 400 of the PM 6.5 manual.'
"I tested this solution on one of my newsletters and what a difference it made! Boy, do I feel stupid!!!! I recommend people take a look at http://www.adobe.com and click on "User Forum." There's a lot of information there."
The Optimized subsampling setting, in theory, should send sufficient information to print a good quality image at the definition selected for the printer, but it doesn't always seem to work like that -- so the Normal setting is slower, but safer, far safer.
3. ZOOMING IN AND OUT
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Aleksandar Stojkovic of Yugoslavia commented on our reference to the loss of the right-mouseclick zoom in/out action from previous versions of PageMaker. (We said you can double clicking in the toolbox, on the magnifying glass to zoom in and double clicking the hand to zoom out as a one-handed way). Mr Stojkovic mentioned the Windows Registry way: "In Windows 95, 98 use regedit and go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Adobe\PageMaker65\USENGLSH\PageMaker65 change RightButtonZoom to 1."
Apart from the usual warnings about registry editing for the unwary, the problem is that this loses the right-click context menu which has, when using the Text tool, immediate access to Character and Paragraph dialogs, to a fly-out menu of styles, and, especially useful, a single click which opens the text editor and then the Find, Change or Spelling dialogs. Try it.
4. PRINTERS AND PPDs
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Nick Laflamme wrote that on their new NT system there are two Linotronic 330 definitions, "Linotronic 330 52.3" and "Linotronic 330-RIP30 52.3" which seem to mimic the Win95 driver name of "Linotronic 330". He asked: "Are they the same or how to we figure this out?" and added: "If a service bureau sends us a printer driver for Windows, as at least one has in the past, will it work on NT, and is there something we can do to keep PageMaker calm and happy that we haven't really changed the printer we're composing to?"
What's in a name? If PM can find a printer on the new computer which is the same name as the one on the Win95 machine, you can swap files without having that annoying box about not being able to find the printer and composing to screen. So, install a common printer NAME on each computer by installing another postscript printer on the same port and calling the PPD by the same name as it is on the other one. It doesn't even have to be the same PPD, just have the same file name, but, as PPDs are universal files -- the same on all versions of Windows and on Macs -- you might as well install the real one. So yes, a Win95 PPD (or a Mac one) works fine in PM on NT. We even tried just renaming (in the Printers window of Control Panel) a printer that was already connected to the correct port -- and it worked, but we'd rather do it the longer way until we get some confirmation that there are no problems.
The dummy printer will be the printer you compose to, and as long as it allows the same resolution as you will finally print to, all will be well.
In Nick's case it actually is the same printer, it just ended up with a slightly different name on each system -- and a check showed that both installed the same PPD. Being on a network the port name was might be different (though in this case it was probably FILE) but the dummy printer solves that.
So, if you have to copy files from one machine to another and are being annoyed by that box with a black on yellow screamer that says "Cannot load your target printer..." and which leads to the file rerunning the text as it is composed to "Display on none", just create a dummy printer with the correct name and port.
7. HINTS
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The Zapit! engine was intended for Macs but Ian Warn of New Zealand tells me it works on a PC if you add the word Return as a command at the end of the Zapit engine subscript. And where did he discover that? From an email I sent to the PageMakr List passing on a tip from PMScript creator Vladimir Samarskiy that all scripts should have Return at the end. Pity I didn't take my own advice earlier -- the Zapit engine (written by Ulrik Gade of Denmark), which handles multiple find-and-replace functions, is very useful, especially on those articles from people who just cannot write to style.
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Despite what you've been told, you CAN create a TIFF from a PageMaker graphic for use in other programs (such as mastheads for use on letterheads). The same principle would apply to other layout programs.
1. If you don't already have a postscript printer, install the DRIVER for a postscript printer and connect it to print to file. You don't need a postscript printer, just the driver which is on the PM CD.
2. Create a new file with a page size just big enough to hold the type and objects you need to make into a graphic.
3. Download the latest PDF import/export filters from the Adobe web site if you don't already have them.
4. Select File>Export>PDF and select the (Print) style
5. Open a new file in PM and place the PDF you created, holding down the shift key as you select Place. This will give you a dialog box in which you can set the preview resolution. Set this fairly high -- around 300 at least.
6. Select the graphic you have just placed, and go to File>Export>Graphic. You'll get a dialog box in which you can select TIFF and give it a name.
You have a TIFF file of your PageMaker image which you can then use in any other program.
You can do the same with printing to an EPS file, but, at least for me, the import filter for EPS into PM has been nowhere near as reliable as the PDF filter in producing a good preview, or any preview at all.
Gordon Woolf
The Worsley Press
Hastings, Australia.
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