CONTENTS
========
1. WHAT'S IN PHOTOSHOP 6.0?
2. PC FONTS ON A MAC WITH INDESIGN
3. THAT INDESIGN BOOK
4. WHAT'S DIFFERENT IN PAGEMAKER PLUS
5. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
6. XTENSIONS/PLUGINS/SCRIPTS
7. UTILITIES/UPDATES
8. HINTS
9. SOURCES OF INFORMATION
10. LAST WORD
1. WHAT'S IN PHOTOSHOP 6.0?
===========================
Photoshop 6.0 is expected to ship in the third quarter of 2000 and will include new ways of combining clipping paths with layers of images so that soft and hard edges can be maintained. Price has been announced as US$609 with an upgrade offer of US$199.
The new version will include vector-based tools and will allow type export in resolution-independent form.
Other features include better integration with ImageReady 3.0, which is included, on-canvas text entry and advanced formatting, layer styles and new effects, image warping and distortion, a context-sensitive tool options bar and preset manager, consistent color management with Adobe Illustrator and a web workflow with Adobe GoLive (of which a time-limited trial version will be included).
More details at
<http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/>
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Adobe also announced at Seybold San Francisco their new high-end InScope publishing asset management system which controls throughput and availability of content from InDesign, the InCopy story editing program and other Adobe programs into a publishing system aimed at the top end of the publishing market. In a press release Adobe announced that Time Inc. "intends to adopt Adobe InScope as the centerpiece of its next-generation publishing environment. Based on the results of a pilot program underway at Fortune magazine, Time Inc. intends to migrate production of its 35 magazines worldwide, including People, Time Magazine, Sports Illustrated, Entertainment Weekly, Money, Life and InStyle, to the InScope system."
2. PC FONTS ON A MAC WITH INDESIGN
==================================
InDesign has an indicator of things to come: If you are on a Mac and receive an InDesign job done on a PC, and with PC fonts, just pop the fonts into the Fonts folder in the InDesign folder (then relaunch InDesign) and lo and behold, they are available to you to use in the Mac version of InDesign! (This also saves having to load even Mac fonts into Suitcase or ATM for a single job, which - if you are constantly receiving them from all over -makes life easier). Sadly it doesn't work from Mac to PC because Mac font files are in the resource fork which converts to a PC as a zero-length file. There may be an answer, but it hasn't been found yet. Perhaps one of the several Mac-to-PC font converters holds a clue. With OpenType, for which a few fonts are now available in the US only until next month, the font files are the same on both platforms. Keep a watch on Eyewire <http://www.eyewire.com> who will be distributing OpenType fonts worldwide (as this issue of Format closed, the Eyewire site returned "No product found" messages to·a search about OpenType).
All the 91 OpenType fonts (10 packages, 6 families)can be found on Adobe's "New Releases" page. <http://www.adobe.com/type/newreleases/main.html> and can be downloaded and paid for by credit card if you can give a legitimate US address and phone number.
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Adobe have also come up with some new terminology to indicate the sizes within a font which are designed for use at certain sizes. Remember that fonts were originally designed for a particular size and that the same font would be quite different at small sizes to what it was in large sizes.
Thomas Phinney of Adobe explains: "We needed some way of designating optical size designs intended for use at different sizes. The term 'display' had already been used in existing fonts to refer to something intended for use at quite large sizes. We came up with 'subhead' and 'caption' for the intermediate sizes and very small sizes (with 'regular' or 'text' in between). These labels do NOT mean that just because something happens to be a subhead or a caption, you should use that font; you should use whichever font is the right optical design size for the task at hand."
He adds as an example that the intended design sizes for the new Warnock fonts are:
Caption: 6-8.9 point
Regular: 9-13.9 point
Subhead:14-24.9 point
Display: 25-72+point
Anyone alive who remembers when every size had its own name -- for example nonpareil for 6pt?
3. THAT INDESIGN BOOK
=====================
Real World InDesign -- the book on that program which we've been recommending despite it not yet being published, is really on its way. Our latest quote from author Olav Martin Kvern: "The whole shebang may be off to the printer in the next couple of weeks."
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A book on InDesign we omitted from our list in Format31 <http://www.worsleypress.com/format/format31.htm> is David Bergsland's "Publishing With InDesign" published by Delmar through OnWord Press. Price is US$39.95.
David writes on Amazon: "Finally I have a vehicle to share all of the page layout techniques I've learned over the past 30 years (OK, not all of them ;-) Although the book has a good solid entry to InDesign 1.5, its main advantages are found in the separate chapters for style and character palettes, layout options, formatting, paper usage, brochures, newsletters, posters and so on."
4. WHAT'S DIFFERENT IN PAGEMAKER PLUS
=====================================
Thanks to Adobe Pacific I've been having a close look at PageMaker Plus, Windows version, and I have to admit that despite my previous comments I think the extras have been added well.
Yes, I'd miss the extras of PageTools for productive work, but the included toolbar does incorporate many of the most used buttons from the standard PageTools toolbar.
The templates window -- which opens mid screen by default -- can be turned off via a checkbox in the bottom right corner so that it appears only when you click the first button on the toolbar. And you can store your own templates in a new folder which can be set to open as the default.
Similarly, the picture palette, which is used to display the included clipart, can include your own regularly used jpg, gif, tif, bmp, wmf, eps, ai and pcx graphics -- so it effectively becomes a second library palette.
The catalog data for both new palettes is stored in a new folder called Catalogs at the same level as the plugins folder; the graphics remain wherever they were when added to the catalog, as do extra templates, though the templates themselves are in a folder level with catalogs called template. They can be opened directly from this folder if you wish, being standard PM files, unlike the templates in the previous version of PM6.5, which were scripts. The palettes themselves are in the plugins folder with accompanying configuration files.
5. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
========================
Jukka Saukkonen wrote from Finland about our comments on XML: "You mean there are no XML-native authoring editors available? That's not true, there are Arbortext Epic and SoftQuad XMetal, which are both excellent products. Especially the technical documentation world uses them a lot already."
I didn't put that very well, did I? I realised there were text editors capable of XML creation, but none of them seem to have been marketed to general publishers as a replacement for word processors currently being used. They seem to be primarily high-end solutions. Perhaps this is because XML isn't yet an accepted print origination format, though publishers are being told it will be.
We would be interested in hearing more from anyone using such a program to produce XML (or other tagged format) for both print and web production.
You can find details of the two systems mentioned at <http://www.arbortext.com> and <http://www.softquad.com>
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We were asked: "Importing a PDF file into PageMaker, some characters came out as boxes or large dots. Do you know what might be wrong?"
One possibility is that the PDF is from InDesign or other program which creates version 1.3 PDFs (the kind which is produced by Acrobat 4). PageMaker can only correctly read version 1.2 PDFs (those created by Acrobat 3) but it tries to read the later version (as do earlier versions of Acrobat), sometimes with strange results like blobs in place of some characters.
There were also some problems with the first release of Acrobat 4 which were corrected by the free release of the 4.05 update... though InDesign has always created correct PDFs compatible with Acrobat 4.05.
Printing the PDF from Acrobat 4 to an EPS or even as a PS to recreate an Acrobat version 3 PDF should create something you can bring into PageMaker provided the fonts have been correctly embedded or are available to the system. Other options include rasterising the file which can be done in Photoshop.
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We had a request from a Format subscriber in Denmark for permission to forward Format to fellow workers as a basis for a discussion group. We gave that permission of course, but it provides a reason to mention that anyone receiving format can forward it on. If you only want to take extracts, please mention the source.
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Gaetan Montenot from Mauritius wrote: "We've tried to copy some text in .txt format in PageMaker 6.0 but it doesn't keep the attributes i.e. the bold , italics etc. We've tried the Format copy downloaded from internet but it does not work (doesn't even appear in the plug-ins menu)."
We replied with details of the two methods of tagging text in PM6 and 6.5, which have appeared in a previous issue of Format <http://www.worsleypress.com/format/format26.htm>. Only the more complex one retains details of type attributes. This system is described in detail in the PM6 and 6.5 manuals, but one point often overlooked is that, to use this system, you have to choose tagged text as the format in the export dialog, but leave the "export tags" checkbox UNCHECKED.
Another answer to retaining formatting in exporting text from PM6 is to export to RTF (rich text format) which works well. You may need to install the RTF import and export filters from the original installation disk(s).
Most advanced scripting functions will work directly from scripts within PageMaker only from version 6.5. Our 'Format copy' script <http://www.worsleypress.com/pubprod/scripts.html> works only from PM6.5 because it uses many query commands. They are scripts, not plugins.
It is theoretically possible to send PM's query script commands to version 6.0 via DDE (in Windows) or Applescript (on the Mac), and you are welcome to use the format copy and paste scripts as a basis for working out the necessary commands to do this. The DDE commands under Windows have to be sent from a suitable program such as MSWord, Excel, WinBatch or VisualBasic.
6. XTENSIONS/PLUGINS/SCRIPTS
============================
The FixIt QuarkXTension now available on the Quark website fixes a problem in QuarkXPress and Passport 4.11 where moving picture files from their original location (after they have been placed in a QuarkXPress document) causes the images to be loaded into the operating system's memory multiple times. It also fixes a problem with the path to DCS 1.0 files being lost when you "Collect for Output" and move the folder containing the collected files. These problems occur in both Mac OS and Windows versions of QuarkXPress.
The problem is one cause of "Too Many Files Open" messages on a Mac where it can also cause error messages that a file cannot be deleted, or a disk put away, because it contains items that are in use.
On Windows the error can take the form of "Cannot delete [filename]: Access is denied..."
The 411FixIt XTension (44kb for Mac, 16kb Windows) can be downloaded from Quark's web site at: <http://www.quark.com/>
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Also new from Quark is the XML Import XTension allows you to import content from an XML file into QuarkXPress document by letting you insert "placeholders" into your document. These placeholders can be formatted as you would regular text. Then the XML arrives in the QuarkXPress document with the necessary formatting already applied.
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There are a swag of QuarkXPress Xtensions at Meadows Information Systems <http://www.meadowsinfo.com> including several free ones such as Font Collector (which collects fonts including those in EPS graphics -- Mac only), and Page Printer (which creates PS or EPS files from pages or spreads -- when used in conjunction with Font Collector XTension, this will embed Type 1 and True Type font information with the EPS files as they are created). Both these are Mac only.
7. UTILITIES/UPDATES
====================
Enfocus will be making some of their PDF tools available for free download from their web site on September 14.
Beginning at 9am PST on September 14, the first 1000 unique users who sign-on to <http://www.enfocus.com/webperfectpower> and the first 1000 unique users who sign-on to <http://www.enfocus.com/powermeup> will receive serial numbers enabling full versions of the new products. All other visitors to the site, beginning September 14, will be able to download 30-day, full working versions of their three new programs. We suspect many of our readers round the world will be calculating what 9am in California will be for them.
The new programs are WebPerfect PDF to optimise PDF files for web posting, PowerUp PDF, a US$99 PDF editor, and PitStop Professional, a highend program for PDF preflight, editing, global change and repeatable action lists.
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Quark have posted an update to their PDF import filter for QXP4. It now allows placing PDF version 1.3 (those from Acrobat 4 and InDesign). It is at <http://www.quark.com/>. It's 4.7MB for Mac, 3MB for Windows.
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FontIncluder2 by Callas makes sure you embed fonts into EPS files. There's a demo version (for Mac and Win, around 600KB) at <http://www.fontincluder.com/>. The US$149 program allows "watched folders" and will automatically embed required fonts into any EPS saved to those folders.
8. HINTS
========
In InDesign, if you are having trouble deleting a return character, try putting the text cursor at the end of the line (use the End key on keyboards which have them), hit Shift + Right Arrow, and then delete.
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By default InDesign does not reset the overrides when applying a style, which might result in nothing changing. By pressing ALT while applying a style InDesign DOES reset the overrides and you truly get the style you selected.
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Ever set up lots of ruler guides in PageMaker and want to copy them to another file? You can. Use the plugin for grid lines. Set the guides the way you want them to be in one publication, then open the Utilities menu > plugins > Grid manager, save the current layout in the guides folder and then you will be able to access them in any publication. You can use the same system to copy guides from one page to another in the same document.
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Another PageMaker hint: If you are checking multiple stories or a story running over multiple pages in Story Editor, such as spell checking, and want to return to the layout view at the correct page and with any highlighted text still highlighted in layout view -- use Control-E in Windows or Option-E on a Mac.
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To combine two QuarkXPress files, go to the View menu and choose thumbnail view for both docs. Arrange the windows so that you can drag pages from one to the other. Select the pages you want in the first doc and drag them to where they belong in the other doc. Make a copy of the doc you want to drag pages into, so you don't have to worry about hitting Ctrl-S", by force of habit, and not having the original doc as well as the "new" one.
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You have your PageMaker styles nicely defined, and you alter one paragraph. Now you want to apply that changed style definition to all instances with that style.
Go to the Control Palette, hold down shift and control and click in the style name box (which will now have a plus sign next to the name). A dialog box will appear which states: "Press OK to update style with current setting". That's the Windows way -- on a Mac it's the command or splat key plus shift.
InDesign 1.5 has the same functionality -- as a menu item (Redefine Style, from the flyout menu of the Paragraph Styles palette).
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Do you have to return floppies? We've seen a couple of references recently to US publishers just giving a blank floppy to anyone who gives them a floppy now that they cost less than the postage to return them. Additional ideas are to use cut-down DL-size envelopes as a wrapper (even wrongly printed ones with the bad or old return address cut off), and to include a PDF on the floppy of ad rates and forthcoming promotions.
9. SOURCES OF INFORMATION
=========================
For an informative FAQ about CDs and CD-ROMs check out <http://burks.brighton.ac.uk/burks/pcinfo/hardware/cdrfaq.htm>. Some of it goes deep, most is understandable.
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Try this for information on ligatures: <http://macworld.zdnet.com/1999/11/create/createtinkel.html>
10. LAST WORD
=============
Sadly the November/December issue of the US edition of Adobe Magazine will be the last -- unfortunately a likely event we foresaw when it changed to a paid circulation from being free. Editions for other regions of the world ended some months ago. Congratulations are due to editor Wendy Katz who is awaiting an impending birth of a different kind.
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Erik Schut of WoodWing Software wrote to thank us for the "great stories" on their software in Format41 --unfortunately we got their country wrong. They are based in The Netherlands. <http://www.woodwing.com>
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Forbes Magazine has spent US$2 million mailing out free handheld digital readers to its 810,000 subscribers. You connect your scanner to your PC and use it to read small barcodes printed in the magazine (in articles and ads). This takes you straight to a Web site, just like clicking on an on-line link. Digital Convergence is said to have deals to use the system later this year with some newspapers.
Gordon Woolf
The Worsley Press
Hastings, Australia.
====================