CONTENTS
==========
1. APPLE MACS AND QUARK XPRESS
2. WORKING WITH THE NEW WORLD OF FONTS
3. TEN YEARS OF PDF
4. THE BOOK ON INDESIGN
4. ADVERTISEMENT DUMMYING SYSTEMS
6. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
7. UTILITIES/UPDATES
8. HINTS
9. SOURCES OF INFORMATION
10. LAST WORD
1. APPLE MACS AND QUARK XPRESS
==============================
Apple announced in September last year that new Macs built from 2003 would not be able to start up in OS 9 but would of course be able to run Classic.
More recently Apple changed their policy, allegedly due to pressure mainly from Quark-users, to the following: "Apple's professional customers are rapidly adopting Mac OS X, with more than 80% now choosing Mac OS X as their default OS. This past September, Apple announced that starting in January 2003 all new Mac models will only boot into Mac OS X, while retaining the ability to run most Mac OS 9 applications using Mac OS X's ?Classic? software. To accommodate a minority of our pro customers still running Mac OS 9 applications such as Quark XPress, Apple will continue to offer a 1.25 GHz dual processor Power Mac that will boot into Mac OS 9 until June 30, 2003."
Some machines cannot start up from Mac OS 9 if you attempt to load an OS 9 other than the one that came with the machine itself as it needs the original Mac OS ROM file that is installed with the original CDs for the particular machine.
In a report on the CreativePro website, Sandee Cohen tells how, at events linked to the San Francisco Macworld Expo this month, such as the Power Tools Conference on QuarkXPress, two employees of Quark revealed that QXP6 was currently in alpha stage and that the beta cycle would start shortly. They spoke about June as the release date.
Other hints were that QXP6 would be able to import formatted tables from Excel, that you'd be able to convert a print page to Web. And that under OS X it would be able to output directly to PDF. <http://www.creativepro.com/story/feature/18670.html?cprose=4-03>
Apple CEO Steve Jobs conceded in his Macworld Expo keynote address that "We've got a few laggard apps that we have to still get out ... we all know which one we're talking about." This is in the Think Secret report on QuarkXPress 6.0 at <http://www.thinksecret.com/news/quarkxpress6.html>. This suggests QXP6 features will include multiple undo, and selection of options to print layers from a print dialog. Most intriguing is the suggested ability to include multiple layout spaces for different formats in a single document, so that editing text, for example, in one place, will alter all uses of that text.
2. WORKING WITH THE NEW WORLD OF FONTS
======================================
FontLab have released Mac version 4.5 which runs natively under Jaguar, and among almost anything else you could want to do with fonts, converts Type 1 to Open Type. There's an upgrade, and a crossgrade available for Fontographer users at US$199. Adobe's font chief Thomas Phinney commented on a mailing list that FontLab does have "a bit of a learning curve" but that as with Photoshop, you can be pretty productive while using only a fraction of its capabilities. A particular improvement is the new Fontographer- and Illustrator-like drawing modes.
He added: "If you want to merge existing Type 1 fonts and produce OpenType CFF fonts, FontLab and DTL FontMaster are really your only options today. FontMaster is new to the scene, and is "clearly aimed at people who do font production for a living, perhaps even more so than FontLab".
FontLab, for Mac or Win, is at <http://www.fontlab.com> and FontMaster at <http://www.fontmaster.nl/>, not to be confused with <http://www.fontmaster.com/> which is a source of free fonts.
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In another confusion for Mac users in the DTP world, the following is from the FontReserve FAQ page at <http://www.fontreserve.com>
"After running System Font Handler, Apple's new iCal application won't launch. What happened?
"Apple's new iCal application requires the dFont version of Helvetica Neue, which can be activated from the Font Reserve Browser.
"I want to use iCal, but I also need to use the PostScript version of Helvetica Neue for my documents. What can I do?
"If you need to use a different version of Helvetica Neue, you will need to quit iCal and activate your version. If you keep the Helvetica Neue dFont in the System and activate a different version in the Browser, it will cause a name conflict which, in turn will stop all PostScript fonts from working and some apps to crash."
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Managing fonts in a workgroup environment is a challenge, and that is claimed to be solved by the new Suitcase Server from Extensis. See <http://www.extensis.com/>, a US$999.95 program including 5 client licenses.
There's also a free Suitcase 10.2 update to registered Suitcase 10 users. The update includes global auto-activation for Mac OS X, AppleScript support in Mac OS X and compatibility with the New Suitcase Server. It's at <http://www.extensis.com/suitcase10.2update>. As Extensis comments "you may have noticed that Mac OS X has more than a few places where your fonts can hide." See <http://www.extensis.com/suitcase10.2>
3. TEN YEARS OF PDF
===================
This year marks a full decade since Adobe Systems officially announced Acrobat and PDF. The project really started some time before when Dr. John Warnock published his "Camelot paper" in 1991, but on June 15, 1993 in New York, Adobe formally introduced the Acrobat product family's availability for public use.
4. THE BOOK ON INDESIGN
=======================
"Real World Adobe InDesign 2" by Olav Martin Kvern and David Blatner has been published by Peachpit Press. Strangely for a book that potential buyers have been waiting for for so long, it is being discounted by Amazon to US$31.49. See <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0201773171/theworsleypre-20>
5. ADVERTISEMENT DUMMYING SYSTEMS
=================================
We mentioned the Paneconomics ad booking system last year and had lost touch with the program developer. Now they have a web site at <http://www.paneconomics.com> where there is just a link to a downloadable 8MB PDF presentation. Nigel Williams tells me they have now included dummying within the program.
He comments: "Newspapers and magazines would normally export run sheet information from their booking system to a dummying program and then export an electronic adstack from the dummying program to their page layout program. We decided that the expense of purchasing and operating a dummying system was beyond many publications and have devised a method to export the adstack directly from our booking system into the page layout program (to include Indesign and Quark).
6. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
========================
Jeff Greensmith writes from Tarragona, Spain: "I wonder if any Format subscriber can help with this one: I have a lot of texts for property ads in Word that consist of a simple list of property descriptions, but with the text for the section headings (apartments, houses, land, etc.) in Word text boxes. What I need to do is to extract the text for each heading, and insert it *in the same position* in the main text.
"I would prefer to solve this within Word itself rather than at the page make-up stage (Quark 3.3, Mac), as we already use Word macros to format most of our property ad texts prior to placing them in Quark, but all suggestions are welcome.
"My macro knowledge goes no further than recording wildcard search and replace routines, and I don't know how to search for a text box. I already have a macro that copies the text from ALL the text boxes on a page and pastes it in a new document."
We will forward any suggestions, or put anyone who may be able to help in direct contact.
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A subscriber wrote from the UK: "We have been using the Quark Publishing System for about 5 years but the company has decided to ditch it and go back to the old fashioned way of working with word files and a folder system. One of our titles is going to have to change its way of working drastically and the only way I can see is to let editorial onto the Quark pages to do their subbing which is a very frightening prospect. Now I know there is at least one Quark extension that can 'lock' all the tools so editorial wouldn't be able to move any items or change any styles or colours. I believed the extension was called 'lockout' but I cannot find anything on the web like that. I found one small reference to something called 'lockprefs'."
We replied: I'd suggest if you can you work with anything that is not going to be editable on layers which you can lock before handing over a file. That's if you are using QXP5 with layers, and the useful abilities to lock and/or hide them. The XTensions you may be thinking of are probably FCSLock which is available only for versions up to 3.3 or LockMenue which has a version for QXP4.x. Both these are listed in the XTensions section of Quark's website.
I presume the editing includes cutting to fit, so other ideas such as exporting text wouldn't work. As a last resort maybe a system of copying selected items to another file with identical styles could be AppleScripted. One script could cut the items and paste them to another file and a second script could put them back afterwards.
Another possibility is CopyDesk SE, Quark's standalone version of the Quark Publishing System editing module. The user saves the text in QXP as CopyDesk format. In CopyDesk SE this gives a text box with a PICT image of the rest of the page. You can edit on the page or in galley view, which shows line breaks, loose lines and displays line numbers. There is also a full screen view, more like a word processor. A measurment palette displays number of words or depth in units or lines.
Using the Get Text command to bring the story back into QXP, a selection can be made by component. There remain version control issues, which is really the overall problem which the full QPS solves, though I've seen a suggestion that this be handled by deleting the text in QXP once it is saved to CopyDesk SE.
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Diane Wagner wrote from Washington State: "I was disappointed to learn PageMaker 7.0 does not enable wheel mice to scroll through documents. Neither does 6.52. Although, you can wheel/scroll in both versions' Help menus? Any workaround?" Diane clarified that her wheel will not work in either story or layout view and said an Adobe Help person told her that the wheel isn't included in 6.5 and 7.0! "I'm actually getting used to using the moving hand method, but it is a pain in the patooty!"
I replied: My Microsoft wheel mouses(?) work more or less OK in the layout view of PageMaker 6.5 and 7 (a standard model on one machine, the one with two extra side buttons on the other). I say more-or-less because although it normally does as it should, and scrolls up and down, it occasionally decides to work sideways, and only a reboot (or two) will stop that. However, you are right that it doesn't work at all in the text editor.
My other thought is that, in Windows XP, my mouse has taken to asking for permission to access the Internet, and after refusing several times, I eventually let it go and it did seem to update its driver.
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Scott Petersen criticised my comment that "Until that event, DTP, as it was to become known many years later, was really a number of black boxes -- complete systems locked away from any changes." He wrote: "I very seldom disagree with you, but I was doing desktop publishing long before 1983 when I worked on IBM mainframes. Using IBM 3270 terminals (with TSO or VM) and IBM 3800 laser printers, the software was IBM's Document Composition Facility which had a very powerful markup language and macro facility. IBM used it internally to produce all their manuals and many other documents from the late sixties on. Obviously not WYSIWYG (in fact, it could even work using 80-column punch card input from a card reader) but it worked very nicely and could produce single page documents or thousand page books with all the bells and whistles. All done using the markup language. Even allowed inclusion of pictures and graphics objects from other programs.
"I remember we compared DCF to one of the early versions of PageMaker and DCF won hands down in both speed, accuracy and overall capability. Not surprising given DCF had 15-years of development and the power of mainframes at the time. Pagemaker had WYSIWYG, a shorter learning curve, personal printers and access to a lot more fonts and those were big selling points."
I have to admit to being unaware that it was called DTP rather than desktop publishing back before 1983, but I suppose it comes down to a question of definitions rather than on what happened and when. In comparison to much that had gone before, the quality from early DTP programs, as led by PageMaker, was poor. The achievement was that it was accessible to more people. I first saw PageMaker 1 running on a Mac in the bedroom/study of a university student, and while he was obviously not the traditional penniless student, few individuals could afford what had gone before.
7. UTILITIES/UPDATES/PLUGINS
============================
Silhouette is a new vectorization plugin for Adobe Illustrator that converts bitmap images to vector images with new correction tools. A 15-day trial version is downloadable at <http://www.silhouetteonline.com> (for Macintosh and Windows). Trial versions range in size from 295kb to 1.92MB. The plugin has tools to straighten a logo, sharpen rounded or truncated corners, delete useless points, convert flat curves into straight lines, align segments of straight lines on the same axis, smooth curves, and simplify curves while keeping their appearance. The company, FreeSoft, which first produced Free Sign for the signmaking market on the Mac in 1992, sees its only competitor as StreamLine which it describes as "less sophisticated and less complete software".
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In an issue of Format some time ago we mentioned Gluon's XPressImage for QXP, which enables export to an EPS with fonts embedded. Peter McClard of Gluon writes to us to say that they have "many more serious products developed over 10 years such as: ProScale (blows XPert Scale away), DocuSlim, Slugger, Cropster, QC (blows FLightCheck away and it's Free in 03--got 5 stars in Publish), WebXPress and many more!" <http://www.gluon.com>. Demos are available if you fill in a form.
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SoftCare of Hamburg, Germany, have released version 2.0 of Text-O-Meter for InDesign 2.0 and InCopy 2.0. This is a floating palette which remains open while editing to monitor text development while writing. It can automatically show or hide overset frames for the selected text flow or all text flows on the page, allowing the user to see and edit overset text. The overset text frames are also printable, so that overset text can be proof-read on paper. Price is 59 Euro with a 25 Euro upgrade from Text-O-Meter 1.2.9. Details at <http://www.softcare.de>
8. HINTS
========
One of those strange things that go wrong: From version 2 of InDesign, a time written with a colon may break at the end of a line. Thus 7:00 may break with the 00 at the beginning of the next line. Substitute a full point for the colon, 7.00, and it does not break. This can be a good reason for looking at the many meta characters which can be used in the Find/Change boxes. Rick Strong suggested on the InDesign Talk list that he'd search for ^9:^9^9 and replace it with nothing in the Change box but with the no-break character formatting in the Change Format Settings area. You'd have to do the same with ^9^9:^9^9 to catch times after 10:00. The meta character ^9 searches for any digit, ^$ for any character and ^w for any tab or space (in other words any white space) while ^? finds any character.
Check now how the Find/Change command works with formatting, for which you click on "More options". To me it is not intuitive as you leave some settings with gray ticks and make sure the one you require has a black tick (Do this by clicking on the description, in this case "No Break", as otherwise you have to cycle through the checkbox options of gray tick, no tick, black tick). Fortunately the Change Format Settings area of the dialog box gives the precise settings InD thinks you are looking for; don't give up until it is precisely what you need, in this case "+ no break".
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In QuarkXPress, if the Delete tab is greyed out in the style editor when you have imported text with unwanted styles, try right-clicking or ctrl-clicking on the style name in the Styles palette. The Delete option may still be available in the contextual menu.
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In older versions of PageMaker you may find that the "Calendar 1" script ends at 2002. How do you create calendar pages for 2003? The answer is to just add "2003" (and "2004" if you like) to the script. You'll find two places where there are lines which start with the word listbox followed by a list of years; one is for the Mac dialog box and the other for the Windows dialog box. That's all there is to it. The script, created by the man who wrote the script engine, Vladimir Samarskiy, does the calculations to create a calendar, including working out that 2004 is a leap year.
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When we suggested to Chester Washington that he should check for an updated driver as a possible cure for some intermittent problems he was having with odd margins in printing from PageMaker to an HP Laserjet, we set him on a route to the answer. He replied that there was no new driver, but there was some advice on the HP website which may apply to many of their printers. A small program called hpwapflg.exe, found on some of the HP install disks, provides a settings-per-application utility. The HP site mentioned the three specific settings required to make PM6.5 stop doing what he had described, but it could be used to set many more settings specific to printing from other applications.
9. SOURCES OF INFORMATION
=========================
InDesign's unicode abilities make typesetting in many other languages much easier, but there is still a need for the additional capacities of the Central European and Middle East versions of the program to handle some hyphenation and formatting features in central european languages and, for example, Arabic. Ujwal Tickoo, product marketing manager, of Winsoft S.A., told the InDesign List recently that all who have bought the (Roman) US version are eligible for standard upgrade prices on InDesign CE and ME. Details of the programs are at <http://www.winsoft.fr>
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Useful info for InDesign users, including scripts, at <http://www.adobeevangelists.com>. Also the new Adobe InDesign User Group Website at <http://www.indesignusergroup.com>. Adobe Pacific's Nick Hodge also has a "blog", or has he calls it, his MungeNet, with useful and not-so-useful info at <http://www.nickhodge.com/>.
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Planet PDF has a new list of PDF tools at <http://www.planetpdf.com/tools>
10. LAST WORD
=============
A couple of examples recently of people reaching that stage where a piece of equipment is failing and the owners might decide that since they were facing the cost of a replacement, anything was worth trying. One problem was some "weird streaks" on Epson 1600 scans. On the QuarkXPress List, the owner continued: "I first tried the 16 screws on the bottom before realizing I really only needed to unscrew 4 at the top. I sprayed everything inside with compressed gas, including some fragile-looking hidden areas like the lamp. Closed it up. The streak is gone."
On the Publishing Forum, the owner of an old HP printer, having been told that parts were no longer available, was pointed to a site which keeps tabs on third party parts suppliers. Sadly in this case the old machine had already been replaced with a new one. The site we pointed to was <http://www.flashweb.com> who publish Flash magazine and also make toner, giving them an interest in keeping old printers going. The site is a little sparse as part of a redisgn but they've also published books and CDs of do-it-yourself advice. Some of those old HP printers have now done millions of pages. We wonder if the newer ones will give the same kind of service.
Gordon Woolf
The Worsley Press
Hastings, Australia.