1. BATCH CONVERSION? TRY PHOTOSHOP
2. A BOX THAT FOLLOWS YOUR TEXT
3. A FUNDING QUESTION
4. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
5. SCRIPTING
6. UTILITIES/UPDATES
7. HINTS
8. SOURCES OF INFORMATION
9. LAST WORD
1. BATCH CONVERSION? TRY PHOTOSHOP
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Need to batch convert or modify picture files? Then don't forget that Photoshop 5 has good batch conversion.
For example, we've just used it to work on all the pics scanned for a publication and which we placed in a single folder. Then we told the File>Batch command to play an action on all of them which applied levels, an unsharp mask, and converted to greyscale, placing the resulting file in another folder.
Anything you can record as an Action can be batch processed.
The plan is that this will leave the originals in place to be worked on again by a similar system for possible web page use. I can't believe now that I used to do them one by one.
Yes, a few need further modification and one was redone because the defaults didn't suit -- but all the boring work was done while I had a coffee.
2. A BOX THAT FOLLOWS YOUR TEXT
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This works, with slight adjustments, in both Quark XPress and PageMaker, and maybe in other programs.
Set up a style with, for example, a 24pt type size. Now give a rule above setting of 30pt (click on the Custom rule setting in PM, which is hidden above the "none" setting), colour of Black, and no indents. In QXP you'll need an offset setting of around -18pt, while in the options setting of PM's rule dialog you could try 1p11.
Now give the rule below settings of 24pt, colour of white or paper according to program, and indents of 3 points either end. The offset in QXP could be -15pts while in PM we'd suggest the bottom rule is set to be 0p10 below the baseline.
Now you can play with baseline offset -- maybe around 2 or 3pts down.
Your result is a box which will follow single line headings around in your text. It could be useful for subheads, and, with a little thought could give you boxes open one end, or hoods, and a script could calculate the depth of a paragraph and make the settings appropriate for multiline boxes.
3. A FUNDING QUESTION
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Maybe it's a little out of the normal run of production problems, but Katherine Miller wrote to us pointing out that one of the major production problems for a small newspaper can be to have the funds to go on producing the paper.
She wrote: "Do you have any solutions relating to funding? I am trying to assist a very small local newspaper to discover any funding support. I have had little luck. I thought some of the papers you produce might have some suggestions about how they keep printing."
We replied: A good point. I have come across newspapers that have received arts council and local education grants for things like running an arts page or a page (and sometimes a lot more) for one or more local schools -- especially if they involve the students doing most of the preparation work (I've been paid a few times to go along to schools and explain how a newspaper is put together). I've also seen schools and other organisations divert funds they used to produce a newsletter to a newspaper which agrees to run a regular column.
However, in general, appeals for "support" don't seem to work in the long term -- much better is to encourage people to show their support by placing paid classifieds whenever they have something to say, something to sell, or someone to thank.
For a local publication, or one which serves a very specialised field where a number of people agree that they would lose substantially (either economically or socially) if the publication ceased, there could be an argument for a "Friends of ..." organisation that maybe gives some benefit such as discounts of some kind that don't cost the publisher anything.
Another point is to chase local politicians for inclusion on government advertising budgets, though this seems to be getting much harder to get.
This isn't covered in any great depth in my book How to Start and Produce a Magazine (or Newspaper) but it will get more coverage in the next edition.
4. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
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Michael Peak in the UK writes: "Format regularly mentions PDF files and until recently I used Acrobat Reader V 3 to read them. My big gripe was that you had the option either to print out the whole document or just selected pages. This is fine until you want to print out a 100 page booklet and want to save paper by printing on both sides. Unless you were prepared to print one page at a time, it was impossible.
"Version 4 of Acrobat Reader, which I have just downloaded from Adobe's site, has the print odd or even page option, which is wonderful! Thanks for a great magazine."
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Marc Zeedar of the PageMaker Scripting Center answered the Format 28 question by Dr Mary Sullivan Esseff about PageMaker 4.0 (Mac) files that won't open in PM 6 because she is asked to locate PM 4.01 RSRC.
"The PM RSRC file is located in the Aldus folder in the System Folder. Just copy the whole Aldus folder to the newer system and it should work fine (You might try moving it to the same folder as PM4, but I haven't tested that). PageMaker 5 also used a RSRC file which was in the Aldus folder. After Adobe took over PM, they made it so PM didn't work this way.
"As to converting, there's the batch convert Addition (plug-in) in 6.x -- I'm not 100% sure if it's part of 6.0, but I believe so. It will scan your hard drive and convert all older PM formats to the newer one (changing the name in the process)."
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Jack Gregory replied to our comments in Format 22 about problems with emailed PageMaker files and suggested that part of the problem is caused when a Mac user attempts to "save to PC" and creates what is called MacBinary -- a form for making Mac files saveable -- with the "resource fork" -- on a PC. He adds: "This unfortunately, cannot be handled by a PC PageMaker -- it actually wants the Mac file. This caused no end of frustration for me on a PC getting art from a Mac colleague."
We now have TransMac <http://www.asy.com> installed and our answer to anyone who wants to send a Mac file is "just send it stuffed on a Mac disk". This allows us to receive it by email on a PC and use it on either PC or our iMac. Those who know how to send a suitable PC disk don't have to ask. However the strange file which caused our problem was actually from a PC user and was caused by a change in email program to Outlook Express which has caused more problems in getting files than we ever had from Mac users.
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A. Lee Bennett, Jr, wrote: "There seems to be a bug in the p65 Save For Service Provider plug in. I created a file in Freehand which contained a bitmapped imported image. (I doubt it makes a difference, the bitmapped image was saved from Photoshop as an EPS rather than TIF because of the need for duotone information).
"The EPS imported, linked, and printed just fine from PageMaker. However when I finished my project and used the Save For Service Provider plug in then gave the zip disk to my printer, they called me later that day to say one linked image was missing. You guessed it, it was the one embedded in the EPS file.
"Fortunately, I was able to just shoot the file off to their FTP server and all was well, but this could get to be quite an annoyance if people always have to remember to manually copy over any linked images that are embedded in EPS files in a manner such as I described.
"Do you know if Adobe has released a fix for this, or if there is any other workaround?"
We replied: I usually try to make sure there are as few links as possible under Links Manager beforehand (removing any that aren't needed for printing and of doc files etc.) which seems to help -- and certainly makes it easier to spot anything the plugin leaves out.
However we hadn't realised that graphics linked within EPS files were among the problems (which probably makes PDF a preferable format).
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Mike Koewler wrote in answer to our mention of the Library feature in PM and QXP: "Thanks again for another useful e-mail of advice. PagePlus has a portfolio. Ads, headlines, graphics, basically anything created as an abject can be moved into it. The portfolio is available for each and every file, and every object can be dragged from it and put on a page. This is extremely useful for newspaper or newsletter publishers who use ads or headings week after week or month after month. It's much easier than DMI and drag and drop, in that one doesn't have to remember where the object was at."
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Massimo Mezzini wrote from Italy about our distribution having reached 1020 last issue: "1000 and running... I would have expected a zipped pavlova or lamington with this issue ;-)"
Incidentally, Massimo also pointed out that we made the update on the spreadsheet filter for PM sound fairly recent -- it will have shipped with many copies of PM as it was issued for both platforms in December '97, about a year after the original launch.
5. SCRIPTING
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Jonathan G. Bressel wrote: "I'd like to write a script that will check each frame to make sure that its text is not cut off by the bottom of the frame. Is there a way to test for this condition (text cut off by bottom of frame) inside a script?"
This was a relatively easy one to answer because there's a script by Vladimir Vladimir Samarskiy that comes with PageMaker: Scripts>Text>Other>Find Overset Text
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Jim Maygothling in Melbourne asked us about setting up a default data directory for PageMaker. We replied: If you're using Win95, or NT, you can create a shortcut to PM and enter a "Start in" folder under the Shortcut tab of Properties for that shortcut -- different shortcuts can point to different startup folders.
However, there seems to be a problem with Win98 and I haven't come across an effective answer other than a script. Such a script only needs to have two lines:
DefaultDir "C:\folder"
return
We use this kind of script a lot for switching between default folders for ads, graphic, edit etc.
6. UTILITIES/UPDATES
====================
PDF Creator (previously called NikNak) is an alternative to Distiller. It creates true 1.2 version PDF files, as does Acrobat 3, but you may prefer its interface and the way it saves configurations. There's a release version for Windows and a Mac beta in several languages.
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QXPort 1.55 operates as a Word 97, 98, or 2000 macro (Mac or Windows) to convert Word files to clean XPress Tags files, retaining numbers and bullets created with autonumbering and autobullets.
A full-working version is available free at <http://www.dtpro.de> (with a slow-countdown reminder splash screen and it always opens with default preferences) or can be purchased for US$39 for an unhindered version.
Tables are converted to text with tabs and footnotes and endnotes will be placed with all their formatting at the end of the document.
Symbol characters are supported (Symbol, Wingdings, Zapf Dingbats) and manual line break, soft hyphen, non-breaking hyphen, non-breaking space will be converted.
Local character attributes are converted, if they are not part of a style sheet (bold, italic, small caps, all caps etc)
Local font and fontsize changes will be converted, if they are not part of a style sheet but there is an option to turn this off.
You can set the target document to be either XPress 3 or XPress 4 in either Macintosh or Windows format.
A fairly simple test file also came in well to InDesign, (placed as an XPress Tags file) though its opening line created an error message, which was easily deleted.
7. HINTS
========
The Thumbnail Drag in QuarkXPress is a useful way of getting pages from one document to another -- set the two documents in thumbnail view and drag from one to the other. If the receiving document is a new one, you need to drag in just below the first page (and you can then delete the first page). It is also a suggested way of trying to overcoming some file corruption problems. For more info see Quark technote 010023 at <http://www.quark.com/support/>.
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According to MaxFixit <http://www.macfixit.com/>, the slowdown some people experience after installing Apple's Font Manager update can be overcome by zapping the Mac PRAM.
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You can control the dictionaries in PageMaker via the Dictionary Editor, which will be in the linguist/prx folder. This will allow you to import and export word lists and to check in bulk the changes made via the spelling command, where it is all to easy to add a word that will result in text reflows when the file is transferred to another computer.
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In Suitcase you can drag an entire folder on to a set, and let Suitcase sort out the fonts in a clients file from among all the QXP and PM files, graphics and so on. This is a lot easier than dragging the font files one by one. This works best if your Mac system folder has only the basic essential fonts and that all others are in Suitcase Sets.
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What do you do about clogged heads on an inkjet printer? Have a look at <http://www.weeno.com/art/0899/140.html> where Blake W. Patterson describes how he overcame the problem, which is mainly a problem where the printhead is part of the printer itself, as on some Epson printers, rather than in the cartridge. Be sure to read the comments from others at the foot of the article.
8. SOURCES OF INFORMATION
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Blueworld has some useful email lists including the fairly new InDesign Talk list and the Acrobat Talk list that you can sign on for from their web page: <http://www.blueworld.com/blueworld/lists/>
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Rich Sprague is now writing a bi-weekly column for PDFzone.com that focuses on his areas of expertise -- some 40 years working in the prepress and printing industries. His inaugural column looked at some of the changes in PDF, along with an overview of some real-world uses. Also linked from his introductory page were single-topic tutorials on some aspect of working with PDF, such as the currently available "Creating Acrobat 4.x PDF files for Press," a step-by-step tutorial on creating Acrobat 4.x PDF files for press using QuarkXPress (Mac). It's a free download in PDF. <http://www.pdfzone.com/>
9. LAST WORD
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"English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment, and education -- sometimes it's sheer luck, like getting across the street." (E.B. White)
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