CONTENTS
========
1. THE FUTURE IN FONTS
2. ACTUALLY USING XML
3. WHEN AUTOMATION DOESN'T PAY
4. HELP WITH SETTING AD RATES
5. DROP CAPS AND MORE
6. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
7. UTILITIES/UPDATES
8. HINTS
9. SOURCES OF INFORMATION
10. LAST WORD
1. THE FUTURE IN FONTS
======================
What is the future for fonts? Will OpenType take over with the demise of Type 1 or will we have another font format to deal with?
The answer, based on several Internet discussions, seems to be: "It all depends."
One point on which most seem to agree is that the Multiple Master fonts were a detour that has led nowhere. With font managers such as ATM you will probably be able to go on using them for years, but you won't see any new ones.
OpenType is being promoted as the future, but so far it seems to have attracted few font companies other than Adobe, who recently announced the release of 600 of their fonts in OpenType versions.
These do seem to be little more than Type 1 fonts in an OT wrapper -- for that seems to be the quick-fix advantage. Slip Type1 and TrueType fonts into the guise of OT and they have the cross-platform advantages and easier access to some glyphs, but not the full choice of options available in the fonts which, in the Adobe range, have the suffix "Pro".
For the non-professional user, TrueType has all they currently need. To offer ligatures and alternative character forms will generally be met with blank stares. As someone who uses fonts, and wants more fonts with the features found in the free "Pro" version fonts which came with InDesign, I want more fonts like those -- but I doubt whether they will go at the top of my list for upgrade expenditure in the coming year. I will not be buying "conversions" to OT of fonts which I already have.
If I buy an OT font, I want it all -- discretionary ligatures as well as the common ones, alternative letter forms, old-style and lining numerals, true small caps and on and on. Otherwise, why bother? But a "Pro" version of an OT font will be expensive, and at present there is some chance that my next software upgrades may include one or two "OT tasters". I'd hate to buy an OT font and then find that I could have got it as part of an upgrade.
Incidentally, OT fonts are now close to their Type 1 predecessors in price. For example the Caslon Pro package is US$169 (individual fonts: US$35) whereas the type 1 package is US$135 (individual fonts US$25.99). On that basis the OT font is much better value, but I still recall that when they were first released I was almost at the point of buying the Caslon Pro package as a good working set and now have it as part of an InDesign upgrade.
For more info on OT see <http://www.adobe.com/type/opentype/main.htnl> and several PDFs which can be reached from there, including the 1.3MB OT Guide.
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It is still early days in the OpenType world. Mistakes can happen, as instanced in a strange kerning problem with Adobe Garamond Pro Italic, Warnock Pro Italic, Myriad Pro Italic, and Cronos Pro Italic.
If you have optical kerning on in InDesign and you have an italic period (or period) followed by a "regular" double quote, the double quote appears much farther to the left than acceptable... so far to the left that one might think the positions of the period and quote mark are reversed.
A workaround is to have both the comma (or period) in regular following the italic text. But we are not used to having to apply "workarounds" in the use of common fonts from major foundries. Adobe is aware of what it now regards as a "bug", so we can expect it to be fixed in later versions of the fonts.
2. ACTUALLY USING XML
=====================
Marc Zeedar is soon to publish a magazine for the developer in the REALbasic language: <http://www.rbdeveloper.com>. It will appear in a printed version, created in InDesign, and a web version.
Marc will be well known to many PageMaker users for his "PageMaker Scripting Center", his help to many in solving PageMaker problems, and also for his Mac-only word processor Z-Write.
This new magazine is something we would normally regard as outside the scope of Format. However, Marc is asking for all submissions to the magazine to be in XML...which might seem an impossible task, were it not for the tools he is providing to all his writers. These include the first guide to the use of XML which I can actually understand, and a tagging program which will convert straight text into XML with the tags he requires.
The application he has written is for Mac Classic/X only, and you can try it at <http://www.rbdeveloper.com/downloads/rbdxmltagger.hqx>
Marc states: "The XML tags are stored outside the application in separate text-only documents and the app generates XML tag buttons dynamically, so you can use the app for any kind of XML tagging system by simply creating your own lists of XML tags you use. (I have separate lists for the various kinds of articles my writers will write. i.e. feature, column, review, etc.)
"There are instructions in my style guide if you need them: <http://www.rbdeveloper.com/pdfs/rbdxmlguide.pdf>"
Those instructions are, as I've said, the clearest explanation of real life use of XML I've seen -- and as this is for a complex publication, with code listings and code examples in text, most publications would be much simpler. If you have thought of using XML, or read of it and have not understood how it can be used in day-to-day publishing, then this PDF is a must, whatever your platform.
3. WHEN AUTOMATION DOESN'T PAY
==============================
We did a mailing about our books to all Australian libraries a few months ago, and were persuaded by Australia Post that we should go for the full modern system. We even got use of a trial version of software that would produce the postage sorting barcode.
It worked perfectly -- our little bubble jet printer chomped away at the envelopes, being reloaded every time someone walked past -- individually addressed to the librarian by name. The list merchant even gave us a trial section of the list so we could make sure everything worked, and then a discount on the rental of the full list.
We duly handed in our post-office supplied sorting trays with the completed multiple forms and a payment which saved us about 30 per cent on individual postage.
It all worked brilliantly -- except for no sales.
Well that's an exaggeration, I think we sold 4 books.
More recently I did just the major public libraries in our state --with stamps, no-presorting, dumped in the postbox in two or three loads as we prepared them between other jobs. Already we can see orders for 18 books direct (which pays the mailing cost and more than the production costs of the books)..
We didn't get the bulk postage discount, but we got orders. Libraries generally don't act quickly and in both cases we don't know how many of the library jobber/wholesaler orders are a result of the same mailings.
But I'm a firm convert back to sticking on stamps!
I've mentioned the results to many other people -- all of whom have admitted that in looking at their morning mail they tend to open the envelopes with stamps on before those with franking imprints or a postage-paid stamp.
Our US distributor, who organises mailings to US libraries and colleges, has since told us that even with mailings of several thousand, he has his staff use postage stamps, and the more attractive ones that are available the better.
Incidentally, stamps from letters we receive are sent to the Red Cross, for whom they are a significant fundraiser.
4. HELP WITH SETTING AD RATES
=============================
Kimberley asked: "How do I best determine a break-even point in balancing ad space vs. editorial space?"
We replied: You've asked the hardest question in publishing! Most publishers give up, take someone else's rates for a similar publication, and hope it works!
One way is to set up a spreadsheet in something like Excel. Enter the number of ads of various sizes you can accept, and have a total so you can see they don't go over the maximum ad space you want for a particular number of pages.
Now give rates to each size of ad and have the spreadsheet calculate the total revenue. Maybe work entirely at the discount rates for series if you have many like that.
You'll see all kinds of problems -- expect lots of little ads but have mainly big ones booked instead, and down drops your income or up shoot your costs for a bigger issue.
Other things to consider are whether it takes much longer to typeset, chase copy for, and collect the money from, a lot of small advertisers or a few big ones -- or whether the small advertisers will accept what you give them whereas the big ones will want everything absolutely right.
We have prepared just such an Excel spreadsheet for purchasers of our book "How to start and produce a Magazine or Newsletter". The reprint of that book (received from the printers last week) includes a label with a password to the website but this "extra" is also available to anyone who has bought this book in the past. Go to our website at <http://www.worsleypress.com/pubprod/Magbook.htm> for more information including a PDF which shows the calculator in use.
Also available is an Excel spreadsheet to calculate the check digit of ISSNs and convert an ISSN to the numbers required in an EAN barcode. (Most barcode programs generate these numbers automatically along with either creating a barcode as a graphic or with special fonts -- this spreadsheet just gives the numbers).
5. DROP CAPS AND MORE
=====================
A couple of files of interest specifically to PageMaker users are available for free download on our web site at: <http://www.worsleypress.com/pubprod/template.htm>.
DropWord.pmd shows how multiple characters can appear in drop cap style, while Newsletter1.pmt is a newsletter page template showing how a larger reversed numeral in a box can be produced to achieve a popular newsletter style.
PC users can download the direct files (and just change the extension to suit for PageMaker 6.5 users) while the stuffed archive provides a version in PageMaker 6.5 format for use in either v.6.5 or v.7 by Mac users.
The key to using and reformatting multiple drop letters in PageMaker and many other layout programs is to move the tab which is used after the drop cap (or drop word) and to manually adjust the characters after the drop in the first line, by pasting or typing after the moved tab in the second line.
Once you get the hang of it, this drop phrase can be very effective -- contents lists for magazines, dates to start diary lists etc.
6. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
========================
When Olly Cozens in Australia asked us how he could overcome the problem of a grey script palette in PageMaker which could be hidden and recalled, and even enlarged, but which was stuck beyond the bounds of the program box, we were stuck too. So we asked on the PageMakr List and soon had an answer: to delete the specific preference file for the script palette.
But the next question Olly asked is not so easily answered: "Have you received any feedback from designers moving from PM6.5 to 7. We seem to have a fundamental problem, where every one of our 11,000 files will need to be converted to 7 in order for 7 to recognise 6.5 files. This is particularly evident when updating a 'book' to build a new table of contents. Whilst 7 will happily open 6.5 documents it fails to recognise other documents yet to be converted. It seems that unless our whole office converted to 7, 6.5 users can't open 7 files. I notice you had a DOS type fix in the newsletter archive for just such a problem."
We replied: We'd realised the peculiarly Mac problem with PM7 of having to save back to PM6.5 format in order to open in PM6.5, but had not realised the implications of this on the Book command.
It would seem to mean that not only do all the files of a book have to be opened in PM7 and saved, but then they would all have to be saved back to PM6.5 format.
To Olly it seemed a good reason for upgrading to InDesign and we agreed that if there was going to be disruption, then it would be better to suffer that with the benefits of the improved typesetting of InDesign. Version 2.0 does handle long documents much better than the previous versions and it does now have TOC and Index functions built in.
Just to check, we opened a PageMaker file of a book and it did carry the index entries through, so I would imagine that rebuilding an index from a set of book files would be straightforward, if not exactly rapid.
We've also recently played a little with the beta version script palette included on the Indesign 2.0 CD, and the existence of the script palette does make the creation of "on the fly" scripts much more feasible. At present I'm concentrating on scripts under Windows on a basis that I should get to understand one system first and I have more experience of VisualBasic than Applescript.
See details of the PageMakr List at <http://www.makingpages.org/pagemaker>, and of the Blueworld Indesign Talk list at <http://www.listsearch.com/indesigntalk.lasso?manage>
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Bob Hurt wrote from Florida: "I saw your template for the newsletter and wondered if you might have a template, any template, for producing a book. I am flabbergasted that in 15 years the makers of PageMaker have not started providing a stack of templates for books to their customers. There are templates for everything but books."
We replied: The real problem with templates for books is that there isn't a standard, or even a group of standards for book specifications.
Even with the international standard sizes reducing the vast ranges of page sizes somewhat, book publishers/printers commonly make use of the B range of sizes as well as the A range which most printers use.
There's hope as print-on-demand presses start to standardise some measurements, but we just had to resize a book with the same page area but with a lesser width and greater height because we got a better quote from another printer late in the process. (The auto-layout-adjustment feature was really put to work!)
The classic proportions for margins are also much greater than most publishers today would regard as good economics. But few can agree of just how much narrower they should be.
The same problems exist with newspaper templates -- the sizes are dictated by the press cutoffs and by reel widths, so a different press means a different page size. We thought we had an answer to this and produced a VisualBasic program which would ask the questions: paper size, print area, number of columns, where to put the folio, a selection of style choices, text and headline type sizes etc. It would then produce a PageMaker template to those specifications.
The response to the free test release was underwhelming. Few downloads, even fewer comments. So we haven't gone any further.
We are preparing more templates to go with our Publication Production using PageMaker book -- and I've added the suggestion of a book template to our "to do" list (maybe just the template we used for that book would be a start).
-----
David Kunkel from Buffalo, NY, replied to our item on logos in Format61: "I've had very good luck getting repro quality national logos with two techniques relying on Adobe Acrobat or Reader:
1. I go to the subject firm's Web site and search for a PDF file containing the client logo, such as company newsletters or annual reports. (Using the Google toolbar's 'Search Site' function works very well).
2. Once I've viewed the PDF and confirmed that it contains a current client logo, I save it to my disk.
3a. If the PDF is not secure AND the logo is in vector form, I use Acrobat's "Touch up object" tool to select the logo and the "Edit graphic" function to open the logo in Illustrator and save it to disk. Presto--vector art in five minutes.
3b: If the PDF is not secure AND the logo is a bitmap the same technique will open the logo in Photoshop at its original resolution, which may be repro quality depending on the settings used when the PDF was saved.
3c: If the PDF is secure then the graphic can't be selected for editing. Acrobat's Graphics-select tool produces an image that's too low-res. I zoom in to fill the screen with the logo and then perform a screen capture using the Mac or Windows key-combination.
If you set your monitor to its highest resolution you'll capture the maximum amount of pixels, depending on whether the art you are capturing is vector or bitmap and the settings used when the PDF was saved. Don't let the color depth fall below 24-bit, or the color will not be accurate. This works with the free Acrobat Reader as well as the full Acrobat program, and often produces a bitmap with resolution sufficient for many repro situations.
Of course these techniques don't resolve the issue of copyright. The designer must obtain the necessary permission to use the logo. This also serves as a caveat to readers of this mailing: secure and password-protect your PDFs.
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Patrick Quill <pquill@quantum2000.com> replied to the item in Format61 which stated: "One of the major enquiries we get is for software to manage ad bookings and pagination of publications. A number of those we have mentioned in the past seem to have disappeared and those which remain are at the top of the price range."
He added: "We have developed a full Advertising Management front end and integration systems for Quark, PageMaker, and InDesign. This plus a full 32bit version of our Quicklay dummying programme.
While we usually prefer to give web sites rather than email addresses, Pat told us that their current website only shows their programs for major publishers, not those now available for smaller operations.
7. UTILITIES/UPDATES
====================
The new version 4 of CrackerJack has several new features including separations preview, spot color mapping, a font embedding "fixer", expanded RGB conversion options, support for Acrobat 5, and for Mac OS X.
The separations preview includes controls to turn off selected inks and to see the effect of overprints, knockouts, and transparency, as well as the effects of media size, orientation, scaling, offsets, tiling, mirror and negative print, printer marks, RGB to CMYK conversion, spot color mapping, custom transfer curves, etc.
Users can now selectively map colors to other spot colors, useful for eliminating extra separations for spot colors with similar names or for reducing the number of inks in a print job.
The Font embedding "Fixer" allows Crackerjack to check a PDF document for non-embedded fonts before printing. If fonts are not embedded, but can be found on the userıs system, printing will proceed without interruption. Otherwise, the user will be notified and given the option to embed fonts or to cancel printing.
Crackerjackıs traditional use of UCR/GCR for RGB-CMYK conversion has been extended to all separation modes. The user also has the option to specify that images are to be converted using UCR/GCR, the standard Adobe "Red Book" method, or ICC profiles.
Crackerjack 4 requires Adobe Acrobat 4.05 or above. The price is US$495 with upgrades from Crackerjack 3.x to 4.0 at US$199.
Check out <http://www.lantanarips.com/crackerjack_info.html>. In Australia try <http://www.postscriptsolutions.com.au> where there is info on a lot of other PDF plugins.
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MadeToPrint and AutoPilot for Adobe Acrobat are output and automation programs from Callas for processing PDF files.
MadeToPrint saves standard settings for print and file conversion as profiles, and can save multiple page PDF files as single page PostScript files and create output profiles for IN-RIP separations
AutoPilot is a high-level automation tool for Adobe Acrobat which creates systems for processing PDF files and automates a number of plug-ins for preflighting, printing, trapping etc.
See <http://www.callas.de/home.htm>
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InBooklet 2.0 expands InDesign's printing capabilities by impose InDesign documents into printer spreads, selecting what pages or range of pages to impose and what spreads or range of spreads to print. InBooklet also contains a Preview for impositions allowing for necessary changes before you print.
InBooklet does not rearrange or shuffle the pages in a document; all the reordering is handled in the print stream.
It handles 2-Up Saddle Stitch, 2-Up Perfect Bound, 2-Up Consecutive, 3-Up Consecutive, 4-Up Consecutive and can start an imposition at any page in the document. It can control plate margins, horizontal and vertical gaps, bleeds, crossover trapping, and creep, and set Printer's Marks for Crop and Registration
See <http://alap.com/products/inbooklet.html>
Currently for Mac only (System 9.1 or later and InDesign 2.0 or later) at US$79.99 for a single user license. Upgrades from 1.x to 2.0 are priced at US$19.99.
8. HINTS
========
One of the perennial problems with PageMaker has been that if you use auto page numbering on the master pages, these numbers will sit behind anything in the same position on other pages. Not so with InDesign, although it may initially seem to work the same way. The answer is to create a second layer on the master page and to put the page numbers on it. Then, on the document pages, put the item on the lower layer.
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A trouble free way to get Word files into QuarkXPress without losing attributes: Try the QuarkConverter plugin for Word from www.editorium.com. We quote: "converts edited Word documents into XPressTag files that can be imported into QuarkXPress while retaining style names and character formatting such as italic and bold. Fixes bad hyphenation and other typographical problems. Provides cross-platform character conversion from PC to Mac or Mac to PC. Converts Word index entries into QuarkXPress index entries, allowing editors to index in Word. QuarkConverter may cut your typesetting time and expenses in half." Free for 45 days, US$29.95 to register. About 180kb download according to Windows version, for Mac and Windows.
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In QuarkXPress, you can toggle between a document page and its Master page by pressing Shift-F10.
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Applications that have been carbonized for Mac OS X, and the Mac OS X system itself can have trouble with a slash in a file name, and can stumble on beginning periods and spaces (all things which also cause problems in other operating systems). So, Mac users may want to stop using a period or space at the beginning of a file name, or a slash anywhere within it in preparation for OS X. For example, we've seen many people using a slash to indicate a half-page or quarter page ad by using 1/2 or 1/4 in the file name. Again, the PC and Mac worlds come closer.
9. SOURCES OF INFORMATION
=========================
Eleven Ways To Ensure Your Web Page Is a Failure: Gordon Woolf combines some true conversations into this essential advice on how many businesses are catching up with the dot coms and heading for the harbour floor. <http://www.melbpc.org.au/pcupdate/2112/2112article11.htm>
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There is a useful desktop publishing glossary on the PageMakr List web site: <http://www.makingpages.org/pagemaker/glossary.html>
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A utility called Extension Overload can tell you the origin and purpose of nearly every Mac extension in existence: <http://www.ExtensionOverload.com/>. It is shareware; registration costs US$29.
Similar is InformINIT. <http://www.informinit.com/>
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Remember all those Dover clipart books -- well they can now be ordered on line at <http://store.yahoo.net/doverpublications/by-subject-art-dover-electronic-clip-art-series--cd-rom-.html>. There are many books in the series complete with CD at prices from US$9.95. Among the more expensive is "1500 Decorative Ornaments CD-ROM and Book (Hundreds of attractive copyright-free designs from all periods and styles)" for US$14.95.
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A useful chart of equivalents in US paper weights for different sizes of base paper sheets, with a rough guide to international gsm weights as well: <http://www.ipcommercialprinting.com/Tools/EqWeights.asp> There are links to other charts for paper caliper (in thousandths of an inch), to the conversion factors for various paper weights and qualities, and to other items such as ream weights and a calculator to convert caliper to pages per inch.
10. LAST WORD
=============
Yes those drop shadows in InDesign are addictive, so much so that there have been calls for Adobe to sponsor a support group. Drop Shadows Anonymous...
Gordon Woolf
The Worsley Press
Hastings, Australia.
====================