1. FUTURE OF PUBLISHING -- SEYBOLD STYLE
2. NEED FOR A STYLE CHANGE MARKER
3. INDESIGN TO HTML
4. FONT PROBLEM WITH ACROBAT
5. TOO MANY FILES OPEN ON A MAC?
6. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
7. XTENSIONS AND PLUGINS
9. HINTS
10. SOURCES OF INFORMATION
11. LAST WORD
1. FUTURE OF PUBLISHING -- SEYBOLD STYLE
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A few significant comments from the ZDNet coverage of the Seybold Seminars in San Francisco early this month <http://www.zdnet.com/>:
Tim Gill, chairman and chief technical officer of Quark Inc, said the Web is becoming "PrintTV." Sites would have to figure out how to repurpose content to get more value. He noted that Quark's new offering, avenue.quark, which enables users of the Quark Express publishing system to output to HTML, is the first product the Denver company is delivering to help customers repurpose for the Web. He promised more, while reassuring print production types in the audience that printed materials like packaging will always need to be developed: "No one's going to get their Wheaties on a CD-ROM anytime soon," he quipped.
Chuck Geschke, president and chairman of Adobe Systems Inc. focused on technologies the San Jose, Calif., company has developed to take advantage of content already developed in its Acrobat and PhotoShop products. He reviewed Adobe's announcements of new server technology for encrypting Acrobat PDF (Portable Document Format) documents called PDF Merchant, and its associated plug-in for Acrobat Reader called WebBuy.
"There is an awful lot of money that is going to move from conventional distribution retail channels to the Web," he said. Adobe is helping customers make that transition, he noted, much as it helped businesses develop catalogues for mail-order sales.
WebBuy will be available in the fourth quarter and PDF Merchant server components in the first quarter of next year, he said.
2. NEED FOR A STYLE CHANGE MARKER
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Several people on newsgroups and email lists have recalled the days of the style-change marker that does not exist in any of the current crop of page layout programs.
How it worked was that a series of formats could be set up that were created to apply in sequence and took the style-change marker (we used to call it a "merge symbol") as an instruction to change to the next style.
This applied without regard to line ending or paragraph codes (which could in fact be included in format instructions). Therefore a style could apply for any number of paragraphs, or for only part of a paragraph, and then change to the next format when it the next merge symbol was encountered.
This enables multiple styles in a single line, and for a simple symbol to be used to indicate a subhead and then the change back to body text style.
It seems so obvious, but it doesn't exist in QuarkXPress, PageMaker or InDesign, and we haven't seen it mentioned in other commercially available layout programs.
4. FONT PROBLEM WITH ACROBAT
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The latest version (4.0) of Acrobat obeys the licensing restrictions of the font foundry for TrueType fonts so. if a TrueType font does not allow at least "preview and print" embedding, Distiller will not embed the font. The user can choose to have Distiller "abort" (error message in log file), "warn and continue" (warning message in log file) or "ignore" (no warning message) -- in the second and third cases the font displays with substitution font technology if the required font is not installed on system viewing the PDF file.
Adobe spokesman Dov Isaacs was quoted in a mailing list as saying: "We understand the inconvenience to users of this new 'feature'. However, Adobe cannot morally or legally continue to supply product that ignores an explicit electronic licensing agreement which this embedding protection field in fact represents."
Apparently Adobe and Corel have been unable to resolve this problem so WordPerfect fonts in particular are a problem with Acrobat files.
5. TOO MANY FILES OPEN ON A MAC?
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Too many files open? It's a problem which seems to be becoming more common with the newer versions of the Mac operating system. So what's going on? It seems that Mac OS 8.6 can have 348 files open, which would seem enough for anyone, but then we learned that this figure can include fonts opened by word processor and page layout applications, with Word 98 as a particular offender because of additional temp files.
One workaround is to make sure that most of your fonts are in suitcases as a suitcase counts as one file -- but there are a couple of little programs (28k and 4k) which can help. List Open Files is an application and Open Files Count is a Control Strip Module. Both programs have ReadMe files which explain the problem.
Switching virtual memory off can also help. But so can switching it on, according to some reports.
We understand the problem is solved in Mac OS 9.
6. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
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A question from Lee we couldn't answer, other than the usual "check latest driver" advice: "I'm wondering if you know of the problem with PM65 and HP LaserJet 6L. When I try to tile my 10" by 13" publication using legal paper and I adjust the software to reflect the change in paper size it still prints it in 4 tiles instead of two. PM60 doesn't have this problem and prints it to two pages."
Any ideas?
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Lee also suggested an answer to the funding query in our last issue: "Pay commission to someone to sell ads! We were scared at first but found that the commission money lost was offset by all of the new ads we gained."
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Mike Evans in the UK reinforced our comments on problems with starting in a specified folder from Win98, which worked easily from Win95: "In W98, I have tried 'Start in PM6' on the Shorcut tab of Properties =- PM6 just ignores it and I still have to start from 'My (blasted) documents!' Very time-wasting."
We hope we explained in more detail how to use the script method we described, but it isn't really the kind of workaround anyone should be forced into. There must be a better way.
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We had more questions too about emailing files and fonts... Our suggestion is that you stuff or zip anything other than a straight text file for sending as an attachment, not necessarily to make the files smaller, but to save them from corruption. For Mac files going to a Mac we routinely turn them into a Stuffit self-extracting archive and binhex it (so it gains a name like file.sea.hqx. This solves occasional problems between old and new versions of Stuffit as well as crossing the Dos/Unix divide with ease.
For Mac to Win or Win to Mac, we just stuff or zip to .sit or .zip, as all recent versions of each program will decompress the other's format.
Even a 1kb PageMaker script file gets zipped.
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Wade Sawyer in the UK asked us: "Is there any way of including a self updating date/time function into a Pagemaker publication?"
A *really* hidden feature:
From your open file, go to File>Place and change the Files of type setting to All files. Now go to the pm65 folder, and look for a file called:
Datetime.tym
Place this, and you'll get a dialog box asking what format you want the date and/or time in and the typeface. (You can also create your own format using the conventional system of dmy and hms characters). You'll get what appears to be a graphic to place but it updates. You can use it as an inline graphic.
It's been in PM since version 4 but very little has ever been said about it. This leads me to wonder whether there are any problems but I haven't heard of any.
You can also create fixed date/time stamps of file close time etc. with scripting but this would mean using a script to close the file, so that it would get the system date and time, then insert it at some place on the page or the pasteboard and then close the file.
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Ward also asked: "I am trying to establish if there is a plugin or some third party software on the market which allows for an Autosave from PageMaker."
We replied: We don't know of any Autosave plugin for PageMaker, but it would be relatively easy to create a script to do a backup, though you'd still have to persuade people to run it. Maybe one of the macro programs (QuicKeys etc.) can do this by running a macro at a set time interval. Any other ideas?
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Allan Bock from St Anthony, Newfoundland, wrote: "We produce a weekly broadsheet newspaper using PM 6.52 for Windows. We export PDF files to our printer via FTP. We used to use PM 6.0. We've now noticed that our PDF files from 6.52 are three to four times larger. We're aware that Adobe is working on solving a problem involving file sizes through Distiller 4.0, but these pages are distilled using 3.0. Can someone tell us why the PDF file sizes are so much larger from 6.52? This is important because our PDFfiles are posted to our web site where they are accessed by electronic readers. No one likes huge files."
We replied: We'll include your query in the next issue of Format, but in the meantime a couple of comments. The PDFs you need for the printer will have high resolution graphics, which you can reduce considerably for web use, so you probably need to produce another PDF from the PM file for this purpose, selecting lower resolution options until you get what you consider to be an adequate compromise between size and quality.
The other potential problem is the way PM6.5 creates previews of EPS files and placed PDFs -- the default for screen previews can be huge and I suspect that this can have an influence on a resultant PDF.
If you still have PM6 installed on any computer it may be worth checking whether all the options selected in Distiller for making a PDF from that are the same as when it is done from 6.5
Creating a postscript file and then trying various options in Distiller may be better and quicker than going through the whole process each time until you know what settings you need.
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Paul Chu asked: "Recently I'm getting a lot PageMaker files from customers. When I save a file as EPS, I lose all the bleeds. Please advise how do I keep the bleed when saving as EPS and assign to Quark."
We replied: This is probably caused by printing to EPS using the page size as specified in the PM document. A workaround may be to increase the page size in PM to include the bleed area. However the only times it would seem worth taking files from one program to the other would seem to be with publications and catalogues etc where they have to be converted as part of a bigger publication -- we have similar problems in converting QXP files for use in newspapers produced using PageMaker.
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Bob Mallet wrote from Jersey, one of the Channel Isles: "There always seems to be problems associated with the type of artwork/clipart types that should be used e.g. tiff, jpg or pict etc, It seems that every time I use a different print house they always want me to convert the images to another format for all sorts of reasons, either they use Illustrator, QXP, or Mac instead of PC etc. Has anybody produced a book on the reasons for using EPS as opposed to TIFF etc, something that will explain the differences in formats and what happens and why one is better or worse than another."
We replied: The widest recommendation without doubt is TIFF and EPS for any graphics going to a service bureau or printer.
EPS (encapsulated postscript) can be vector (lines etc) as well as bitmap (rasterised) but is suitable only for postscript output. A TIFF turned into an EPS is basically a TIFF in an EPS wrapper -- the original TIFF is still within the EPS file.
Vector EPS files can still have problems if they have text within them as some such files have the fonts within them and some don't, so, for small amounts of text it is best to ensure an EPS has all text "converted to curves". EPS files with fonts can have problems across platform.
The format of the future is PDF, as such files can include graphics and fonts and suit any platform, but there are still printers and service bureaus who don't know how to use them.
Avoid formats such as WMF and PICT which do not cross platform very well.
Jpeg is ideal for web use but be wary of using them for print -- they can be useful but the users at both ends need to know what they are doing.
Real World Scanning and Halftones by Blatner and Roth from Peachpit Press is one of the best books I've come across for advice on formats as well as on scanning in general.
7. XTENSIONS AND PLUGINS
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A Lowly Apprentice Production, Inc. (ALAP) has announced ImagePort an XTension for QuarkXPress that allows users to import native Photoshop files into their QuarkXPress documents.
Currently, if a user has layers in a Photoshop image, the image must be 'flattened,' or stripped of all layering information, before it can be imported into a QuarkXPress layout. ImagePort eliminates the need to flatten Photoshop images, and retains full control of layers, channels and paths once the image is imported. Layers can be turned on and off, and the user has full control over layer opacity and blending mode. Channels can be turned on and off, or designated to print or not to print. Paths can be designated for use as a clipping path or for text runaround.
ImagePort is compatible with QuarkXPress 4.06 for Macintosh and Windows. Scheduled release date is September 30, 1999, with a suggested retail price of US$99.99. More info at <http://www.alap.com>
9. HINTS
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In PageMaker, you can find out what the details are of your styles with a script called Styles Info in the text folder of the Styles palette. Unfortunately it hangs on non-standard rule settings in styles, but there is a patch on <http://www.magma.ca/~rnstrong> go to the pmscripts section and look for "rulespatch". It's not the easiest of items to install, so it is a good idea to create a copy of the original script first. If it still hangs, maybe you have a style which sets, for example a rule width but does not check the box to use that rule. Change that rule width to a zero and it should work.
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If you've imported any text into PageMaker and see that disk icon against a name in the styles palette, then do one of two things quickly. If the style is needed, then control(command)-click on the style name and save it again, which transforms it into a native PageMaker style. If you don't need the style, then go to the menu and choose Type>Define Styles... and delete the style from the dialog box there -- not from the flyout menu in the style palette.
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If you can't export to PDF from PageMaker in Windows, see Adobe techdoc 322159 entitled "The Distill Now option is dimmed in the Export Adobe PDF dialog box in Adobe PageMaker 6.5x for Windows."
10. SOURCES OF INFORMATION
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A places to find logo and trademark clipart, <http://www.onlineclipart.com/>.
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A good place to keep track of Mac updates etc: <http://www.versiontracker.com>
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There's a new PageMakr FAQ at <http://www.makingpages.org/pagemaker> or <http://www.worsleypress.com/pubprod/pm-faq.htm>. This is the FAQ for the PageMakr email list and includes a lot of general help for PageMaker users. It is maintained by Gordon Woolf, owner of The Worsley Press and of this Format newsletter, who was also recently appointed a co-owner of the PageMakr List, hosted by Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.
11. LAST WORD
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There was a discussion of PDFs on the InDesign Talk email list which led to the comment : "AP AdSend delivers millions of ads that you see in magazines and newspapers every day in PDF format."
David Cole of the well known Cole Group <http://colegroup.com/> caught our attention when he replied: I was interviewing the advertising production manager at a major metropolitan newspaper yesterday and I asked how the paper was handling PDF. Great, the guy said. Well, I asked, how did you handle the transition when AP AdSEND first came in. 'When AP AdSEND first started here, we would print out the ads on a laser printer and paste them into the pages,' he said. 'We didn't have any way to handle PDF and we didn't make up all our pages digitially.' When was this, I asked. 'Oh, a long time ago,' he said. '1997.'
Gordon Woolf
The Worsley Press
Hastings, Australia.
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