CONTENTS
========
1. WHAT FONTS CAN BE EMBEDDED
2. QUARKXPRESS 6 "BAYING TO GET OUT THE DOORS
3. MORE ON INDESIGN
4. UNUSABLE OUTPUT FROM A SCANNER
5. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
6. UTILITIES/UPDATES
7. HINTS
8. SOURCES OF INFORMATION
9. LAST WORD
A quick reminder that all Format subscribers are entitled to a discount price on all our books bought from our website: <http://www.worsleypress.com>. This will be at least 10% but at times there will be larger discounts on some titles.
1. WHAT FONTS CAN BE EMBEDDED
=============================
How can you check what fonts can be embedded in PDF files? We'be seen lots of advice, but none as simple as that given by Dov Isaacs of Adobe on the InDesign Talk email list at <http://www.listsearch.com/indesigntalk.lasso?manage>:
Physically, all Type 1 fonts are embeddable in PDF files. That is not to say that the EULA (end user license agreement) that you have for any particular font doesn't prohibit embedding, but certainly neither Acrobat Distiller nor InDesign have any way knowing and enforcing written EULAs.
In terms of TrueType and OpenType fonts, under Windows, checking the ability to embed is fairly simple. Download and install the "Font Properties Extension" from Microsoft at <http://www.microsoft.com/typography/property/property.htm> (477KB). After installing this, right clicking and selecting properties on any TrueType or OpenType font file yields multiple "tabs" of information about the font, including number of characters, character set support, and surprise-surprise, embeddability. As far as I know, there is no such goodie for any version of MacOS. (If someone knows of such a program or finder extension, please-please-please advise us!)
The alternative is run Distiller and go to Settings>Job Options>Fonts. Under "Embedding", you have a pull down that defaults to "Base 14 fonts". It also has entries for the other locations from which Distiller searches for fonts (and you can add to these via the "font locations option"). If you select any one of these locations, the resultant list shows all the fonts from that location. Fonts that are unembeddable in PDF files (i.e., do not have at least "print and preview" embeddability permission) display a "lock icon" to the left of the font name. This is true under both Windows and Mac. Again, though, what is physically allowed may or may not reflect the conditions you agree to with the font's EULA.
2. QUARKXPRESS 6 "BAYING TO GET OUT THE DOORS
=============================================
There has been no announcement yet, but according to MacUser on 2nd August 2002, sourced from eWeek, QuarkXPress 6.0 would be "cosy with OSX" and was "already baying to get out the doors".
The forecast is that it will be off the leash at next January's Macworld Expo in San Francisco. The new version is also said to add a new XML engine and support for PostScript 3. However, it will also kill off any third-party plug-ins for earlier versions of the software, with Quark said to be was working with third-party developers on extensions that will be supported.
Xpress 5 is currently supported only in OSX's Classic mode - where the OS is running MacOS9 as an application. Quark is also said to be almost ready with an upgrade to its DMS (Digital Media System) with new and improved modules for 'enterprise-class' workflow.
See <http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,429670,00.asp>
3. MORE ON INDESIGN
===================
Seinet announced an 800-seat editorial system deal with South African publishing chain Media24. The contract is by far the largest editorial system deal in Seinet's history, and the system, the Xtent Publishing Suite, will eventually be used to handle more than 60 South African newspapers, including four major dailies. Xtent will also be used to publish more than 30 Media24-owned magazines comprising more than 60 percent of the South African magazine market. Titles include South African versions of Golf Digest, Sports Illustrated, FHM, Cosmopolitan and Runner's World."
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InDesign scripting in Windows is written in Visual Basic but it does not yet support Microsoft's latest incarnation of that language, VB.Net, and while we'be seen a few retail references to VB6, they won't be around new for much longer. Olav Kvern of Adobe suggests that the best interim solution is to download the Visual Basic 5 Control Creation Edition (VB5 CCE). This version of VB has the advantage of being free and it is in fact the full edition of Visual Basic 5 -- which works quite well with the InDesign example scripts.
VB.Net has a setting called "Option Explicit" turned on. This was an optional setting in previous versions of VB, and is intended to force "good programming practice". It means that all scripts need to start by declaring the type of all of the variables used. Olav describes it as "pretty tedious", and adds that it tends to discourage non-programmers from approaching the script. The result is that if many of the scripts which come with InDesign are opened in VB.Net, you'll get green underlines on each instance of a variable such as myDocument and a message that they are "not declared".
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If you are using type which will overlap drop shadows, even marginally, try to make sure the type is over the drop shadow layer. The problem, which shows up only with relatively low resolution use is caused by the Transparency Flattener converting the text to outlines at print time. Outlined type at low resolutions looks different to normal text -- so there is a potential lack of consistency with text. This is also more noticeable on serif text at small sizes. Other options, if the type has to be behind the shadow layer, include turning that item of text (plus any other text which has to match) to outlines.
In workflow situations it would be possible to create a Transparency Flattener style with "Force Text to Outlines". Any text on any page that is sent through the flattener is outlined out print time. Therefore, all text on the spread/page will be consistent.
Nick Hodge of Adobe Pacific comments that the recommendation of "bringing the text to the foreground" is the *best* answer, leaving "Force Text to Outlines" off, unless type needs to interact with transparency (say, headline dropped behind an image). At high resolutions (2400dpi/133lpi up) it is difficult for the naked eye to pick "outlined" versus "normal" type with serif text at low point sizes -- even in opposing pages in a spread once printed.
Nick also reminded that, unlike QuarkXPress, where layering is important for text flow, in InDesign text flow is independent of layers.
4. UNUSABLE OUTPUT FROM A SCANNER
=================================
Don Drozdenko was having some problems with placing files output from a new scanner, bought because the old one would not work with Windows XP for his Grinder Finder newsletter (about antique coffee grinders). The default output, JPEG, would open in several graphics program but could not be placed in PageMaker (and, as it turns out, likely not in several other layout programs) coming up with a message of "invalid data".
Our suspicion was confirmed when Don sent us an example. It was a progressive JPEG, identified as ""JPG/JFIF progressive 300dpi". Resaved in Photoshop as a standard or "baseline" JPEG, with the same pixel size and at the same bit depth, it would place in PageMaker without problems. In most scanning and picture programs, creating a progressive or interlaced JPEG has to be selected as an option. It was also reasonable that a hat a print-based program could not deal with progressive JPEGs as they are intended solely for web use, so that a low res pic shows first and gradually improves as the rest of the pic file downloads over a slow connection. However it can be placed in InDesign, perhaps because it is the first of the new generation of layout programs.
Don confirmed that he can place pics saved in any of the four additional formats offered by the scanner (an Epson 1650): bmp, pict, tiff and pcx. All of them imported into my PM 6.5 just fine with no glitches. Of those we'd suggest TIFF.
I suppose the assumption is that JPEG is a format used for the web, but, with careful use (high quality settings only, and not reworking and saving the file while it remains a JPEG), it can be a useful format where pictures have to be transmitted for print use or where space is at a premium. The same kind of problems can also be expected with the new specifications of variations on the JPEG format.
5. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
========================
Jeff Ennis wrote: We bought your Newspaper Production book a while back, and it has been a great resource. But, I'm having a problem I hope you can help me with. We output postscript files and then distill to PDF and we'be been having a recent problem with our color pages. Text/fonts used for body text, headlines, and related is 100% BLACK (0%,0%,0%, K = 100%) in PageMaker. But when we send PDF files to our printer and they output the color pages (to a Konica) the text has become PROCESS Black, making registration difficult and we end up with everything blurry. HELP...or point to a good resource."
We replied: There are several Acrobat plugins which can check and if necessary ensure that black is 100K and not a combination of CYM (or, even worse, RGB). However, as a first check, try printing separations to a laser printer, or printing to a postscript file as separations and then distilling this. The latter will produce a preseparated PDF with each color as a separate page, and you can see clearly whether all text is on the black plate.
If you use the PPD for the printer's RIP this might be a satisfactory workflow -- set up the letters CMYK in their appropriate colors so the seps can be easily identified, and maybe even set up your own registration marks on a larger page template so that the indicator of which sep is which falls outside the trim area.
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Barry Fredrickson wrote: "After reading your book (How to Start and Produce a Magazine or Newsletter) I downloaded, and started using NoteTab Light. I found it very good, and recently I turned on NoteTab Std for a 1 month trial mainly for the Outline features - again I'be found this very useful. I plan to upgrade now however I'm not sure whether to go to the Std or Pro version. In the comparison chart Pro has more features yet drops 2 features which are in STD 1. No use of Variable-width fonts. 2. No Multiple tabulator settings. Are these features which I would need?"
I replied: I use the Pro version. The choice depends on how you plan to use the program. As I use it almost entirely for work which will be then placed in a page layout program such as PageMaker, QXP or InDesign, I prefer to have plain (non-proportional) text. Similarly, the multiple tab settings might be nice for presentation purposes but it is a feature which isn't needed if the file is then transferred to another program where tab setting would usually be applied via a style.
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Manfred Werneburg wrote from Germany: "In the PageMaker FAQ '8.2 How do I use the more bizarre characters?' is written, that I can copy and past characters from the Character Map to PageMaker 6.5 document. It works for characters up to hex 00FF. Above 00FF appears a question-mark. When I paste it into Word 2000, the correct sign appears. I have the same character sets used: Lucida Sans Unicode. Can you help me?
We replied: It is one of the problems of old core code. Not long ago, there was nothing above ASCII's 256 characters. A few such were available on the Mac, like the fl and fi ligatures, and none on Windows, even though they might be in a font. The limitations of available characters are as shown in the character template Charset.t65 in PageMaker 6.5, or Charset.pmt in PM7 (in the Extras folder).
Accents etc in the areas above 256 (decimal) require the use of a specific old format font, as would have been needed with previous versions of Word. InDesign copes well with the full Unicode range of characters.
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Jackie Sheader asked: "Could you help me out|there is a way in PageMaker to change files to ps files though the print settings, rather than by doing it through the exporting to pdf command. Can you tell me how to do this?"
We replied: You can print to a .ps file. I would assume that you have a postscript printer driver installed, as part of the process of being able to export to PDF. From your mail headers you seem to be using Windows, in which case, you should be able to select Acrobat Distiller as an option in the print dialog (it may say something strange like Acrobat Distiller on C:/Windows/.../*.pdf but that does not matter). Make sure you also have the Distiller PPD selected in the second box.
Now go to the print options tab in the dialog and you'll be able select a checkbox to "Write Postscript to file" with an entry box for a file name and a browse button to select which folder.
This will create your .ps file. You can then open Distiller directly and set the options as required before going to File>Open and selecting the postscript file you just created.
If you have a physical postscript printer set up you can do the same by selecting that in the print dialog, and you can also set up a dummy printer which is permanently set up to print to file. This is useful if you need to supply postscript files to a printing company as you can set up a dummy printer on your own machine with the correct PPD for the imagesetter they use. (They should be able to supply you with the PPD file, which is a straight text file and is the same file for Mac or PC)
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Cormac wrote from QTranslation in Thailand in reply to an item in Format65: "Regarding exporting from PageMaker to MS Word... In my opinion, the assumption that PageMaker is at the end of the production line is a slightly dangerous one today. In the translation/localization industry, for example, it's normal to start with a DTP document, moving to a word processor etc. to allow the translator to work on the text, then importing back to the original application. Even for other industries, I imagine that it's not uncommon for an author to want to revise text in a "simpler" editor, then move back to the DTP app, without losing all the previous formatting...
Curtis doesn't describe the intended purpose of exporting his text, but a reminder about 'ITP Filter Pack', mentioned in Format issue 26. Together with the PageMaker plugin that is included with it, this allows you to export to text; importantly, it allows you to decide the order of different stories, so that the text order in the output file is correct. The output rtf is "tagged", but the tags are colored to clearly distinguish them from the editable text. If you don't want the tags (ie won't be re-importing to PageMaker), you can easily remove them in Word by doing a Search/replace, Advanced options, Find text that does Not have the font formatting of Black; replace with [nothing]. Or you could replace them by doing a similar process, but replacing with [Find What text], font formatting of "Hidden Text".
"Unfortunately, the original owners of ITP, Trados.com, sold it to SDL International (sdlx.com). SDL had it available for free on their website for a while, but when I checked just now, it seemed to have disappeared. Hopefully it will re-appear soon..."
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Richard Adhikari wrote: "Love what I'be seen of your newsletter so far. I'm a journalist who's launching a tabloid-sized monthly newspaper. Never had to use page makeup software before - began as a reporter in the days when the IBM Selectric was the latest and greatest innovation, and have been supporting myself only by my pen for the past 15 years or so -and I viewed the process of using page makeup software with trepidation.
"But PageMaker 7, which I purchased and taught myself to use in a relatively rudimentary fashion over the past 8 weeks or so, seems to be a breeze. I am employing simple layout and design, of course. I have one question: When I export a PageMaker file to Acrobat, there is an option titled 'Enable Web Buy' (Edit - Preferences - Enable Web Buy) in the PDF doc which seems to allow me to purchase documents, or parts of them, online for a fee. Can I use it to sell such documents online as well? I'be been searching all day for an answer to this question, and am, quite frankly, stumped."
We replied: The Adobe program which creates the licenses and locks the PDF file is PDF Merchant. and I recall seeing some press releases from Adobe about it when it was launched a couple of years ago.
The most common method of selling PDFs used by small publishers seems to be of having a password which is provided by email once a credit card sale has been approved.
The Web Buy system involves a plugin for Acrobat Reader and getting the license file which then enables the PDF to be opened without having to enter a password every time.
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Daniel Gold wrote: "I'm running PageMaker 6.52 on Mac OS9. I commonly import PDF advertisements into my PageMaker catalog-layout. It allows me to import PDF1.2, which I have been told can be achieved choosing "Compatible with Acrobat 3.0" in your distilling options. I get an error when trying to import PDF1.3, which I believe is made by/for Acrobat 4.0 and above.
"I only have Acrobat Reader & Acrobat Distiller; not the full version of Acrobat. Would the full version Acrobat 5.0 allow me to convert the PDF's to the correct format for PageMaker? Do you expect Adobe will release a patch, allowing the import of PDF1.3 into PM 6.5 files?
"Today I had an advertiser say: 'We checked our settings from yesterday's distilling and we believe that the compatibility WAS set for Acrobat 3. We are using Acrobat Distiller 4.0, set to Reader Version 3.0 Compatibility, but it still informs under Document Info that the PDF version is 1.3 after distilling -- any suggestions? Do you want us to go backwards to Distiller 3?'"
We replied: The full version of Acrobat 5 would let you create PDFs in any of the last three formats so, while the latest version PDFs only be openable in PageMaker 7, Acrobat could create files which would open in PM6.5. It would also be possible to print an incoming PDF file of the wrong format as a PostScript file and redistill it to PDF 1.2. It is just possible that a PDF recreated in this way could lose some features (mainly in transparency) but you would be able to check against what you could see in the original PDF via Acrobat or Acrobat Reader.
Getting version 5.0 of Distiller is a good reason in itself for the upgrade to PM7.0. While you don't get the full Acrobat program, the Distiller part could possibly be all you need.
On the other point, I wonder if they are confusing Acrobat 3 with PDF version 1.3? I haven't seen any problems with Acrobat 4 producing Acro 3.0 compatibility.
6. UTILITIES/UPDATES
====================
Badia Software offers DragNCopy XT 1.0, a free XTension for Mac QuarkXPress 5 that allows you to duplicate items by dragging and holding the Control key. You can now drag and copy single, multiple or grouped items interactively, without using a dialog. DragNCopy also remembers the offsets of the last drag and copy operation, so you can generate additional copies of the last operation simply by pressing Command-D. For normal use press the Control key after you start dragging the item(s) and until you release the mouse. <http://www.badiaxt.com/demouserinfo.html>
7. HINTS
========
Thinking of changing to OpenOffice or SunOffice as a word processor/spreadsheet set, but worried that there just might be the rare occasion when those programs don't show exactly what is seen in Word or Excel? What you need is the range of free viewer programs for several editions of Word, for Excel, even for Publisher and reports from Access. The viewers for Word and Excel are a little over 3MB each and install as stand alone programs for those who do not have the program itself.
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Harry Brelsford asked about problems with spell checking some text in PageMaker. We suggested that a cause could be placed text which has a setting for a dictionary not available in his layout program, in this case PageMaker, or which has come in with a dictionary setting of "None".
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InDesign defaults to exporting as Tagged Text when you have a type cursor inserted in a text frame. Otherwise, the default is PDF.
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A PowerPoint tip: Ungroup a chart to break it up into individual elements, then Copy and Paste into Illustrator or other illustration program for modification.
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To move one or more pages from one PDF to another, you can, in Acrobat (4 or 5), go to Document>Insert Pages, or, in thumbnails view, just drag the pages from one document to the other. If you need to do it often (such as to get single pages out of a multipage PDF), keep a PDF of a blank page and delete that page after shifting the one(s) you want into the file.
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In InDesign, the eyedropper is a powerful for importing color from one document to another opened side by side. Sample a color with the eyedropper from the first document, click on the second document, go to swatches/new color swatch, and it will open loaded with the chosen color. Hit OK.
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QuarkXPress 5 will allow you to anchor a group of objects within the flow of text. And, if they are locked, the elements of the group cannot be accidently moved in relationship to one another but will still all flow.
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One way of speeding up the loading of Photoshop is to remove or disable plugins that you don't use. For example, the Digimarc plugin which detects digital watermarks. You can achieve this with a tilde (~) in front of the folder name. The same can be achieved with file formats not used regularly: add a tilde to the beginning of the seldom needed files in the FileFormats subfolder.
8. SOURCES OF INFORMATION
=========================
ScriptWeb <http://www.scriptweb.com>, the collaborative site for information on Mac scripting, has been revised with new layout, fixed broken links and new items including references to books. One new feature is a checkbox to optionally open links in a new window.
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For a Photoshop discussion list, try <http://www.listmoms.net/lists/>. There are a number of other lists based there, on Windows, Mac, Eudora, Graphics etc.
9. LAST WORD
=============
A Texas company has reportedly laid claim to the JPEG file format and is demanding millions of dollars from companies which offer the file format in software or equipment. In a news release the JPEG organisation suggested that if this is so then Phillips and Lucent may also hold rights. They plan to publish art in JPEG format which predates the patent claimed by Forgent Networks Inc. It could force a change to the upcoming JPEG2000 standard where the JPEG committee state they have agreements from 20 firms which hold patents which could impinge on the area. For Forgent's press release see <http://www.dpreview.com/news/0207/02071803forgentjpeg.asp>.
The JPEG site is now password protected (which it was not when this issue of Format was originally published) so we cannot point to their press release.