1. MAILBAG
7. RESIZING SCREENSHOTS
1. MAILBAG
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"I work at the University of Canberra -- part of my job is recovering files from bung disks. I've got a charming(?) student who has brought in a broken Zip disk - bad sectors (You know the drill). On it is (was?) her "oh-so-important-that-I-didn't-bother-to-backup" file created under Pagemaker 6.5. I cannot open it -- I tried recovering it using Norton's Disk Doctor. Recovered file won't open (and no sign of auto-recovery temp file in Trash) and attempting to open it crashes my Mac. I had given the file back to her and she has now re-submitted it with claims that 'patches have been issued for known Pagemaker bugs'. Any help/knowledge about these 'patches'?"
We had to advise that while the 6.52 "patch" and other updates do solve a good number of "problems", these didn't include fixing Zip disks which have gone bad. We did suggest a number of "last resort" actions including trying to open in the same version of PM on the other platform, or trying to "place" the file either as a PM file to extract the stories or using any filter (or a word processor) to open the file, delete the rubbish and find some text (the Xywrite filter is quite good at this). If it had been a PM6 file, the last resorts might have included trying to use the Quark XPress converter and then bring it back into PM with the QXP to PM converter.
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"Do you know of a book that would explain all of the important tricks I need to know about seps and the color process?"
THE book on this subject is Real World Scanning and Halftones by Blatner and Roth (Peachpit Press).
7. RESIZING SCREENSHOTS
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This month's tip from the "User Friendly Manuals" website by Peter Ring is on how to produce good quality screenshots, and that is becoming more important as many publications start to use illustrations of web pages for all kinds of articles and for other web pages.
An important, and often overlooked point is that, while downsizing is almost universal for most illustrations, it can produce some odd effects on images which contain fine lines -- like screenshots. A line which will become one pixel wide when reduced in part of an illustration could reduce to zero in another part of the same illustration, giving a very uneven result. He shows screenshot examples of what can be achieved by antialiasing and sharpening.
The address is: http://isa.dknet.dk/~prc/
And if you take too long, it will still be there, as "last month's tip".
Gordon Woolf
The Worsley Press
Hastings, Australia.
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