1. MAILBAG
3. CHECK THOSE ZIP DRIVES
4. A CD PROBLEM
5. COMMUNITY NEWSPAPERS
7. HINTS
8. SOURCES OF INFORMATION
9. LAST WORD
1. MAILBAG
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Miraz Jordan wrote from New Zealand to say: I've been catching up on some overdue reading and was most pleased to read about the medieval paragraph symbol in the Format newsletter #9. In fact, I read it yesterday and then in a class I teach, Computer Confidence for Women, the topic came up, and it was great to tell the students what I'd just read. The remaining question though, is: is there a name for the ? I generally talk about it as "that back-to-front-P-thing". Thanks, too for the great newsletter. Amongst other things I teach a PageMaker course, and shall be sure to tell them about Format.
We replied that the answer could be on <http://www.SYMBOLS.com/> is an on-line encyclopedia of symbols searchable by a description of the symbol or by the name of the symbol, and received a quick reply: "Found the para symbol at the first attempt but no specific name was given. What a fabulous resource at symbols.com!"
3. CHECK THOSE ZIP DRIVES
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Steve Gibson, author of SpinRite, a well-known mass storage data recovery and maintenance utility, has come up with a free checking utility for Iomega Zip disks which should remove some of the fears of people who have heard of the so-called Click of Death. Steve explains that it is quite common for a Zip drive to click occasionally.
Sometimes, however, there have been more serious problems, and checking the condition of both the Zip drive and the disks helps avoid them. This is a tiny (66k) Windows program (sorry for that Mac users, but the information on his web site will still be worth reading). "Trouble in Paradise", as it is called, gives you an on-screen report; it takes most of an hour to carry out, so it is the ideal test to set going at a meal break.
The program, now at version 2.0, will also offer to download updated drives from the Iomega site if they are needed (they doubled the write speed on our drive), and, as it also did in my case, an updated ASPI driver for Windows from his own site.
We quote from Steve's program: "The clicking sound itself is nothing more than the sound of the heads being retracted from the cartridge into the drive then immediately reinserted. This deliberate strategy is employed by the drive when it is having trouble locating, reading, or writing any of the cartridge's data. This removal and reinsertion of the heads recalibrates the head positioning mechanism, 'scrubs' the heads to remove excessive oxide deposits, and eliminates any electrostatic charge build-up on the heads. It is important for you to understand that the clicking sound itself is NOT the problem. The clicking is just an audible indication of a drive that is having trouble accessing the data on the cartridge."
He puts the problems down to a variety of sources: bad external power supplies, loose power connectors, excessive magnetic oxide build-up on the drive's heads, magnetic and radio interference from nearby sources, media damage from excessive wear or mistreatment, and an array of internal electrical and mechanical problems from causes ranging from rough handling through to defective manufacturing.
<http://grc.com/tip/clickdeath.htm>
4. A CD PROBLEM
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There are three basic formats of CD which you are likely to come across in receiving copy for publications -- basically these are Mac, PC and the international ISSO format which should be readable by both provided you conform to certain file name conventions.
However we just ran into a problem with some CDs we received from a Mac/Quark house with some ads we needed in our PC/PageMaker combination. We couldn't read them, even with TransMac, which usually has no trouble with Mac disks of any kind.
It turns out that they were written to the CD with a Mac program which allows you to write to a writable CD just as if it was another floppy or hard drive, file by file. Similar programs exist for the PC, such as DirectCD.
The local Apple dealer copied them to another CD in what was in theory a PC CD format and sure enough they showed up in Windows Explorer with the original Mac long file names.
Most copied with no problems, until we reached another hurdle: Many of the files were named with the advertiser and the size of the ad. For example: "Fred Smith 1/4 page". Windows baulked, and told us the file didn't exist when we tried to copy it or open it in PageMaker. This problem occurred with any file names that had a slash, forwards or backwards.
Windows NT and Win95 had the same problem. Then we tried opening it across the network on our old 486 accounts computer which still runs Win 3.11. It told us the file was called Fredsm~1 and dealt with it with no problems. We copied it via that computer from the CD to a hard drive, both on our production machine. There we renamed it "Fred Smith quarter page".
Another little problem was that while opening the file as a text file showed clearly that it was an EPS file, Photoshop refused to recognise it, even with an .eps extension. However, when we changed the extension to .ps, Photoshop told us it was rasterizing an EPS file and did it perfectly.
7. HINTS
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Some long-time users on the PageMakr List admitted they have only just discovered that the open and save file boxes in PM under Windows can be used just like mini-Explorers. You can double click files to open in associated viewers, and move, rename or delete them in the same way.
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Hold down Control (Command) when you have a print dialog the way you want it in PageMaker and the Print button will change to Style, and create a Printer Style with those settings.
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You may know that you can apply styles one to 12 in the style palette of PageMaker (Mac only) by using Command and the function keys 1 to 12. But did you know that, you can apply styles 13 to 23 by using command-shift and the same function keys... just take a dozen off the style number or give your styles names that start with numbers to conform.
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In Photoshop you have the Levels dialog open and realise you haven't got the info palette, and you can't click on the tab? You can get there by going to Window in the menu and selecting Show Info. Same applies to many other palettes.
8. SOURCES OF INFORMATION
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If your job involves laying out pages for a newspaper you are invited to join the News Designers Club on Yahoo. Go to <http://clubs.yahoo.com/clubs/newsdesigners>. There you can look at the postings so far without joining (we were put off by the probing questions asked by Yahoo to join any of the groups they host. We did post a question via clubmaster Don Serra and must get back to see if there were any responses.
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There's a Freehand list which you can join by sending a message of SUBSCRIBE FREEHAND-L to LISTSERV@GALILEO.ADMIN.UAF.EDU -- leave the subject blank and don't forget to switch off your signature.
9. LAST WORD
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It is always interesting to look at the search engine requests that reach our web site. Among the most common are requests for things like newspapers and/or books and PageMaker, but just occasionally we have to wonder how a search engine came to the decision to offer our listing -- and even more so, why the person who was asking then clicked through to our site. One last month asked Altavista the question: Where can I sell a soda fountain?
Gordon Woolf
The Worsley Press
Hastings, Australia.
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