CONTENTS
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1. INDESIGN CONQUERS AUSSIE PEAK
2. THE .DAT PROBLEM
3. HANDLING FONTS IN OS X
4. RETURN OF READY SET GO
6. QUESTIONS AND COMMENTS
7. UTILITIES/UPDATES
8. HINTS
9. SOURCES OF INFORMATION
10. LAST WORD
Firstly season's greetings to all Format subscribers. The next issue will be in January but may be towards the end of that month.
1. INDESIGN CONQUERS AUSSIE PEAK
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Adobe have long been working on getting InDesign accepted by major publishers, and there have been mentions of the battle for acceptance within Time-Warner and especially for Time itself. However, there was no mention until it happened of the battle being waged over Australia's major magazine publisher, Australian Consolidated Press owned by multi-millionaire Kerry Packer (OK, it's a public company, but the Packer family says what happens and Kerry is a hand-on owner despite recent illhealth). And you can be sure that the Murdoch empire will be watching closely -- the sons of both media barons have jointly lost millions and will not be wanting to do that again. There are about 65 consumer and trade magazines in the ACP group.
Quark systems distributor, Modulo, is reportedly fuming about the decision by ACP to dump QuarkXPress for InDesign. Modulo's head in Australia Amanda Russell was quoted as saying ACP head Kerry Packer had made a huge mistake and that most users "hate" InDesign.
ACP project manager, Linda Harkin was quoted as saying "the service we have been getting from Adobe has also been a factor." (Adobe has had an application engineer on site to assist with the migration.)
One ACP designer was quoted in ITNews as saying that using InDesign was a timesaver. "Basically it has a lot of functions, tools and shortcuts that really seem to perform functions with half the number of steps it would take to do them in Quark. And while the palettes take a bit of getting used to, they really put everything you need at your fingertips."
Other advantages of InDesign included: "It crashes a lot less".
Modulo’s Russell predicted a number of staff would leave ACP as a result of this change and was dismissive of Adobe's product. "Honestly, most people who work with InDesign hate it."
ACP has been changing over group by group. ACP Men's Lifestyle designer in chief, Glen Smith, said there had been relatively few problems in his department. "The transition is probably easier for those who know Illustrator well, but certainly it hasn't been too difficult for our designers.
"There's a few things it doesn't do that Quark does, but there's a whole lot of things it does do. After the initial slight change of keyboard commands it's been pretty smooth and it [InDesign] makes up pages very well," said Smith.
The IT News story said the high cost of purchasing QuarkXPress (around $3000 in Australia) has always been an issue with users. Adobe InDesign is about half the price.
Sources: <http://www.itnews.com.au/> and ITgraphics magazine.
Around the world the press is also being kinder to InDesign 2 than it was to version 1, such as this from MacUser in the UK: "Desktop publishers and designers have a treat in store for them in the new year. Having booked InDesign into the garage for servicing these last couple of years since the initial launch, Adobe has taken the five-door saloon apart and is about to roll out a spanking new Lamborghini."
See <http://www.macuser.co.uk/adobedavid/printreview.php3?id=35848>
2. THE .DAT PROBLEM
===================
Once again we've had a problem with emails from someone that have files attached called winmail.dat. And as usual we've had problems getting the sender to understand that these files can only be decoded by someone who uses Outlook to receive email. So it has to be done at the user's end.
How to turn off winmail.dat attachments?
In MS Outlook: On the Tools menu, click Options, and then click the Mail Format (or "Send") tab. In the Send in this message format list, select Plain Text, and then click OK.
The Eudora site puts it: "WINMAIL.DAT is a proprietary Outlook file that allows Outlook users to send Transport Neutral Encapsulation Format (TNEF) information. This TNEF information is unopenable and irrelevant outside of Outlook."
Just as we completed this issue we came across a claim that they can be opened by:
Launching Word, creating a new document, clicking on Insert > File, navigating to the location of the dat file and double-clicking it? However, this will not work if the .dat file contains file attachments which are in other formats.
3. HANDLING FONTS IN OS X
=========================
Extensis have released version 10.1 of their Suitcase font manager for Mac OS X. The company comments: "If you have more than 20 fonts on your system, then you really need a font manager. Storing too many fonts in your System’s Font folder can slow down your system considerably and make it unstable. Mac OS X’s multiple font directories make managing your fonts much more complicated than it needs to be. Details at <www.extensis.com/suitcaseten/>
At present Suitcase is the only font manager software for OS X, but DiamondSoft's Font Reserve is not far behind (note that Adobe will not be producing any new versions of ATM).
On the CreativePro website Dennis Sellars writes (at <http://www.creativepro.com/story/news/14986.html?cprose2-44> that for single users, Font Reserve is "right around the corner" and that all registered owners of the full Font Reserve 2.6 product will receive a free upgrade to the Mac OS X version.
Font Reserve Server, designed to provide font management across a workgroup is available now. With that an administrator manages font files, access, and usage. Users access fonts through their Font Reserve Browsers, which continually update to reflect changes to fonts on the server.
The new Font Panel in Mac OS X provides some font management features, but it's only accessible to Cocoa-based applications, and it doesn't provide the same level of functionality as Font Reserve, said DiamondSoft.
4. RETURN OF READY SET GO
=========================
I know of at least one user of Ready Set Go for a magazine who very reluctantly moved to another program because RSG fell several versions behind updated operating systems on the Mac (and wasn't available on PC). But a while ago ownership changed again, and the program is not only being developed again but a version for PC has just been released.
For the Mac it is now at version 7.2 and as well as the standard version at US$150, there is a dearer version called RSG Global that will handle Asian and Eastern European fonts. It is now from Diwan Software Ltd <http://www.diwan.com/> who have actually been involved with RSG since its early days, but not as owners. The PC version 1 sells for only US$99. I've been playing with their 14-day 9MB demo and am quite impressed.
This program (originally launched in 1985) was PageMaker's main competitor before QuarkXPress came on the scene, so it has a major place in the history of desktop publishing. It is a workmanlike low end page layout program, well worth considering by anyone who might otherwise otherwise be looking at MS Publisher. Their "Global" edition, claimed to support any world language, costs US$850 but also adds support for transparency and an impressive range of other features: <http://www.diwan.com/ready/prsg.htm>
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We will be adding RSG to our brief summary of the options in page layout software for PC users which you will find at <http://www.worsleypress.com/pubprod/DTPcontenders.htm>
6. QUESTIONS AND COMMENTS
=========================
Jeff Stephens wrote as a QXP user having a problem with a job he had to do in PageMaker: "I need to link a text box to another to flow a series of prices through several pages. How do I do this?"
We suggested that if using text frames, he just had to click in the loop at the bottom of one frame and the cursor would change to look like a link of chain, then just click in the loop at the top of frame he wanted to continue in. However, this did not work as he was in fact working with text blocks rather than frames. In this case the answer is to use a script which comes with PageMaker and is found in the Text folder within the script palette.
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We suggested in Format 57 a way to get at an ad sent as a QuarkXPress file when you don't have QuarkXPress. Adrian in New Zealand told us of "another work around we use...":
Open the Quark file in the demo. Print to Acrobat format. Open the Acrobat file in Freehand (or I guess Illustrator). Delete the text blocks that say QUARK DEMO. Relink to the images (to lose the FPO ones generated by the PDF).
"..and voila, a completely editable Quark file in Freehand."
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Another Adrian, this time Adrian Hennessy from Norwich in the UK, had a comment on the same section: "The piece on retrieving text from a QuarkXpress doc was informative, but if you want to expand/unzip a file there's not need to install a demo of the full version of Stuffit -- there's a free version of Stuffit Expander available at <http://www.stuffit.com/expander/index.html>
"It's available for Windows, Macintosh, Linux and Solaris systems It's not a demo and there's are no restrictions on its use (as far as I can tell from the website). It certainly beats having an unregistered copy of WinZip on your machine!"
7. UTILITIES/UPDATES
====================
BigPicture XT, for managing picture links in QuarkXPress, is new from Badia Software. See <http://www.badiaxt.com/bigpicture.html>. US$59.99 with a 349kb demo available (Mac only).
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The QuarkCopyDesk Filter lets you import text from QuarkCopyDesk or QuarkCopyDesk Special Edition articles into QuarkXPress or QuarkXPress Passport documents. It also lets you save QuarkXPress or Passport text in QuarkCopyDesk format. This can be used with QuarkXPress 4.1 and later or QuarkXPress Passport 4.1 and later and can be downloaded from <http://www.quark.com/>
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Users of QuarkXPress Passport, which requires a hardware key (or dongle), and who upgrade from Windows 95, 98 or ME to Windows XP, will need to download a driver for the key. Windows NT and Windows 2000 already needed such a driver.
8. HINTS
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If you are having problems with PageMaker's Build Booklet plugin, one way you may be able to isolate a particular page which is causing the trouble is from within the Build Booklet dialog. Progressively select a page in this dialog and click on "Delete". This will remove that pages from the imposition, so, if the new publication is then created, you will know that the problem is with the "deleted" page. Because the page has not actually been deleted, just not included in the imposition, you can then go back to that page to see if you can find the problem. Causes could be empty text blocks, linked text blocks on master pages, and damaged items could be on master pages. Check too that it is the 1997 version of the plugin and not an earlier one, that linked graphics are stored locally and that there is ample space in the temp folder for the working files used in creating the new file.
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If you are having troubles in any page layout program with styles imported from Word documents, it can be worth placing or importing the Word document into a new file in the page layout program first, applying styles in that, so they become native styles, and then copying the text into the working file.
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One of the new tools in Illustrator 10 is the "envelope distort" tool that allows text and other items to be distorted based on an envelope shape created either with the warp tool or with the mesh tool (which used to be gradient mesh). I have to admit that it does it well, and maybe now I can get rid of the ancient copy of CorelDraw 3 which I've managed to transfer from computer to computer. (CorelDraw 3 won't install from the CD on modern systems, but if you copy the files across from a working system, modify the configuration .ini file to reflect any new drive letters, and make a new shortcut, it continued to work well).
9. SOURCES OF INFORMATION
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"An American Time Capsule: Three Centuries of Broadsides and Other Printed Ephemera" found at <http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/rbpehtml/pehome.html> is "a collection of over 7000 advertisements, catalogs, newspaper clippings, leaflets, menus, pamphlets, proclamations, programs, timetables, and other ephemera." The collection can be searched by keyword, title, genre, and originating location. Most of the items are either free of copyright or the Library of Congress has been unable to trace any such rights though a credit to their source is requested if used.
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If you are looking for any of the many useful articles from the old Adobe Magazine, the archive disappeared from the main Adobe website for a while, but you can now find the back issues at:
<http://www.adobe.com/products/adobemag/pastissues.html>
10. LAST WORD
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There could be a lesson in this for print publishing as well as the Internet. I read that the response to banner ads on web pages is less than one per cent. That is, one in a hundred of people who see the banner ad will click on it to find out more. Two words will increase the response by more than 40 per cent. What two words? They are: "Click here".
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A member of the Publisher's Forum reported the effects of her "worst ever" virus. It wouldn't let her open folders, and then when she typed it produced just a series of hyphens. When she rebooted it would not even let her type in her system password -- just those darned dashes. Turned out to be a bunch of flyers she had been folding -- and pushed aside to send an email. The flyers were resting on the "minus" key at the top right of the numeric key pad.
Gordon Woolf
The Worsley Press
Hastings, Australia.
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