CONTENTS
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1. TYPE IS BOLDER NEAR DROP SHADOWS
2. ACROBATS OF MANY KINDS
4. MORE ON PDFs
5. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
6. UTILITIES/UPDATES
7. HINTS
8. SOURCES OF INFORMATION
9. LAST WORD
1. TYPE IS BOLDER NEAR DROP SHADOWS
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This started life as one of our minor hints, but it would seem to be potentially one of the major problems within InDesign files, caused by the ability of InDesign to so easily create transparency effects, often used with other popular effects such as drop shadows. The problem is that in creating a postscript file from the InDesign file, whether directly as a ps file or as a PDF, the transparency effect has to be "flattened", in other words, the transparent and base objects have to be combined -- turned into a rasterised object.
This can have a dramatic effect on type, making characters somewhat bolder, especially if the resolution is fairly low -- say 1200dpi. Where it will show dramatically is if part of a line of text is combined with a shadow and the rest of the line is not.
You could convert the text to outlines, which will make all the text appear slightly bolder at lower resolutions, but then you may have to constantly explain, for high resolution work, that it is just the proof that looks this way, and that "it will be OK on the night". With the lower resolutions of newspapers that may not be true.
The answer is to make sure the type is always on a layer above images, especially those with drop shadows, feathers, or transparency effects. And always to choose the "high resolution" option in the "transparency flattening styles" in the print dialog.
The problem also decreases as we become more used to the new toy and use fewer drop shadows.
2. ACROBATS OF MANY KINDS
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You don't always have to have something new. That may be a lesson which is hard to comprehend in the computer software business, but the lesson that just having something, and learning how to sell that something (in other words, to explain it to people who can use it and benefit from using it) may have dawned on Adobe. That company have produced some very good financial figures, and within those, the best return was from the ePaper and Acrobat division. It has been two years since there was a new version of what most of us know as Acrobat, and the really big value server-based Acrobat products are so new that they didn't have much effect on the quarter's figures.
Kurt Foss reported on PlanetPDF that "Q1 2003 revenues for the ePaper segment were US$90.9 Million, which broke down to $75.5M for Acrobat/desktop versus $15.4M for ePaper server solutions. (In terms of comparison, the Acrobat for the desktop sales figure for Q1 2003 would rank second highest for all previous quarters.)"
Foss added that indications were that there were going to be several additions to and segmentations of the Acrobat line: "Shantanu Narayen, executive vice president of worldwide products at Adobe, said 'with the launch of the next version of Acrobat, we intend to significantly grow Adobe's Acrobat desktop business by increasing our penetration into enterprises and governments.' Toward that goal, he said, Adobe is 'segmenting Acrobat into different products' to increase its appeal to all levels of users, budgets and market segments. Among the differentiated products -- with varied features and pricing -- will apparently be what Narayen called a 'high-end version of Acrobat' designed to 'meet the demanding needs of customers such as creative professionals, architects and engineers.'
Incidentally, when you are considering software prices, the same report showed that "high end" in ePaper server terms is in a different range to that considered by most of us. The average purchase price for the top ePaper server transactions in Q1 was US$254,000.
There's a report on at least part of the plan for Acrobat at <http://www.planetpdf.com/mainpage.asp?webpageid=2429> but we were more confused at the end than at the beginning.
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While mentioning the twin tasks of producing something new and then persuading people that it is something they need, there's another remarkable product from another company which seems headed in a wrong direction: Macromedia's Contribute. It only deserves a mention here because it could be of use to publishers who have a web site and would like some non-web-savvy editors to make changes to some parts of it. That is what Contribute does -- allows a site administrator to set up any combination of access such as specific pages or folders, and whether the user can just change text, or replace graphics, or add pages, and whether any of those tasks have restrictions such as using only existing styles, or limits on graphics size, and so on. These limitations are imposed by a keycode which can either be created in Dreamweaver, or, for those using GoLive or FrontPage etc, in a copy of Contribute which can be configured as an administrator's copy.
Unfortunately, several of the reviews we've seen emphasise its inadequacies as a web editor, and only in passing mention some of its abilities as a controller of sites. It is also offered at US$99 a single copy where we would have thought it was most likely to sell in multiple units to administrators, for their own contributors, or perhaps for advertisers who might be granted control over a page on that site which they have paid for. Its licence agreement would not seem to allow the handing out of copies by an administrator who can demand the program's return when that person's use has ended. Thus it might be nice if the access key could include a time limit.
The market exists, now the product exists, but it seems unlikely the two will meet. <http://www.macromedia.com/software/contribute/>
4. MORE ON PDFs
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You may know that, with Acrobat, you can "Save As..." a Rich Text Format (RTF) file, and of course you can then cut and paste text. You can also re-save images in other formats, such as TIFF, JPEG or PNG, often with fine-tuning options, such as compression quality and resolution. Complete PDFs can also be saved as images, with each page saved as a separate image file, and you can also save Adobe PDFs in PostScript and Encapsulated PostScript formats. It works in reverse, too. If you need to convert a foreign file format into an Adobe PDF, simply use the Open As Adobe PDF command in Acrobat 5.0. This works for BMP, GIF, HTML, JPEG, PCX, PNG, TIFF and text files into new PDF files, or added to existing PDF documents.
Adobe recently emailed these hints to those who had registered and opted to receive occasional news from Adobe. It also shows that a lot of people do not know the tools they have.
5. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
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LaQuita asked: "I want to start a magazine and right now I don't have any money. How do I get started and how do I make my magazine a success? Please help me out!"
LaQuita filled in a wrong email address in the form on our website, so we could not answer, but basically, the answer is the email newsletter. For example this one is kept going as a free, no-advertising newsletter by the small proportion of our subscribers who buy our books. Many established publishers will also know that opposition publications can be started by people with very few funds behind them. In such cases the biggest problem is success. Our book "How to Start and Produce a Magazine or Newsletter" tells of a would-be publisher who managed to bring out several issues of a local magazine on a tiny budget -- having just enough to bridge the gap between the printing bill and the incoming ad revenue. That worked until he had more than the usual success, selling extra ads for a special event. The print bill was on 30 days by then as he'd paid several bills which were cash-with-order. Unfortunately most of the advertisers took at least 60 days to pay. That bigger issue was the last.
It should not have happened, because that publisher had previously worked for us and had sold advertising for a special issue which did so well that we had to tell him to stop selling ads because if the paper got any bigger we could not afford to pay for the printing. A quick calculation had also shown that the margin was also not enough to borrow money to cover the time gap.
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Arlene Ditzler wrote from Pennsylvania: "I was thrilled to discover your site. So helpful. I've been using PM 5.0 for years. Suddenly, when printing, only 1 copy of a document will print at a time regardless of what number I put in the 'number of copies' box. Can you help?"
We replied: We've seen this problem reported a few times, and when we have seen a solution it has usually related to the printer driver. If it is a postscript printer, try a different PPD file, perhaps for a different model of your brand, or for a similar specification printer of another brand. For a non-postscript printer see if there is a newer driver on the manufacturer's web site. If this doesn't help, it may also be worth looking for an older driver. Also, as it has just happened, think whether you have made any other changes to your system recently.
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Daniel Gold in Arkansas wrote: "Thanks a million for posting my question and fwd'ing the replies. You've been a tremendous help."
Among advice to Daniel in overcoming his problem with returns within Access database fields were a VB script from Ralf Köster in Germany and a function and an update query from Robert Sendek in New York state (either or both of which we'll be pleased to forward to anyone else with a similar problem). Ivan O'Brien suggested a similar search within VisualBasic using a String analysis.
John Nurick, who is a Microsoft Access MVP, also suggested "The trick is to use an Update query to change the data: these are much more versatile than the Find and Replace system." He also included a detailed method which we'll also be happy to forward.
Cormac Bracken, localization support manager for QTranslation (Thailand) Co, Ltd., of Bangkok suggested: "A quick method is to open the Access table in data view, select the relevant field(s), and copy/paste into Word, where it will appear as a Word table. Then using Word's search/replace, set "Find What" to the special character "Paragraph Mark" and replace (typically) with a blank space rather than nothing. Then copy/paste the Word table back into the Access field. I've used this technique on large-scale data migration projects without problems. Of course, make sure nobody can make changes to the table while you're working."
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An additional point to our answer for Geoff Ward on handling fonts came from Richard Hunt of Calcaria Software Services, Tadcaster, UK: "The major issue is that for Suitcase 9 to work under Windows XP, you must be logged in as an administrator. Obviously not a problem if you are one-man band but could be an issue in a bigger office. It also look as if Extensis are not doing any further development work on Suitcase for Windows."
6. UTILITIES/UPDATES/PLUGINS
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Acrobat users who have had problems creating clean PDF documents for print now have a new weapon in their arsenal: Chameleon CMYK PDF Creator, an add-on for Acrobat Distiller that creates CMYK PDF documents with a single click on the 'Print' button from within any Windows application. <http://www.grafikhuset.net/international/chameleon/>. Windows. A 4.45MB demo is available. It costs US$149.
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The Mac OS X version of Mask Pro 3 is available from Extensis. A new Windows version will be available later in 2003. Details at <http://www.extensis.com>. From the same source comes a free Mac OS X Upgrade for Intellihance Pro 4.0 users. The new Intellihance Pro 4.1 supports Mac OS X, Photoshop 7 and Photoshop Elements 2.0, and is a free download to registered Intellihance Pro 4.0.x users. Intellihance 2 and 3 users can upgrade for US$99.95.
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Default Folder(X) forces a program to look in a certain directory each time the program is started: <http://www.stclairsoft.com/index.html>. Mac only, and works in OS X and classic. A 30-day demo is available (2.7MB) and the program costs US$34.95
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In PageMaker one way of creating tables is by using tabs in ordinary blocks of text. However, this isn't easy if columns are different styles of type. A while ago, we created a script to do this and now the publisher we did it for is changing to InDesign and has agreed to us putting this out in the public domain. So you'll find it at <http://www.worsleypress.com/pubprod/scripts.html>. The first time the script is run it will create styles with names such as Style1, Style 2 etc if they do not exist, sufficient for the number of tabs in the first line of the selected area. It will then ask you to define these styles and run the script again. The base style already applied will continue to apply from the lefthand side of the column to the first tab. Style1 will apply from the first tab, Style2 from the second tab, and so on. The script picks up font, size, leading, case and if bold or italic are invoked in these styles. It should run on either platform.
7. HINTS
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In InDesign, to easily see page numbers on thumbnails, create a new layer, put a large auto-page-number on the master page on that and turn the layer on just for thumbnails.
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Many Mac OS X applications require a version of Helvetica (any version) to be active.
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To read Word files on a Mac, try icWord from Panergy <http://www.panergy-software.com/products/icword/welcome1.html>. There's a 2.5MB trial version and the full cost is under US$19.95. A Windows version is on the way.
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Another InDesign tip: To quickly find overset text, zoom out so that you're looking at your pages at 25% or less. This causes the overset handles to be proportionally larger so they are easier to spot.
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Lots of Acrobat tips at <http://www.yeardley.demon.co.uk/morepdf.html> including a useful free 135kb PDF diagram of where the tools are in Acrobat 5 (both the full version and Reader).
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With low costs for drives, it is becoming increasingly a backup solution to install a second harddrive, of equal or larger size, and just drag the entire drive across. A removable mounting makes even more sense.
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If you are having problems on a Mac with things such as missing characters (apostrophes seem one likely subject), then suspect a conflict between the font you are using and the Mac's system dfont version. This will apply particularly to system fonts such as Times and Helvetica. You may need to do a Find/Replace to substitute the fonts -- a recommendation is several places being to make sure you use a postscript font to ensure that it doesn't conflict with either of the fonts which are TrueType variations. Another answer is to be wary of using fonts such as Times and Helvetica.
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Another InDesign shortcut: Opt(Alt)-PageUp or Opt(Alt)-PageDown moves a full spread up or down. If the spread isn't fitted into the window, the first time you press the keys, it fits the spread in the window, and then the next time you press them, it moves up or down a spread. Shift with PageUp or PageDown moves through page by page.
8. SOURCES OF INFORMATION
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The very useful Xpressobar site for QuarkXPress users at <http://www.xpressobar.com> has a new look. Also all the tips have been consolidated and sorted into subjects, and the whole site is searchable. The person to thank is Amy Rothstein.
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Adobe has introduced a Photoshop plug-in that lets you import and work on raw files rather than JPEG. It is mainly intended for high end use, providing a number of white balance presets and controls usually found only on the cameras, and only operates with certain cameras. It also adds support for the new JPEG2000 files. Cost is US$99 and there is a warning that the facility will be included in an upgraded Photoshop. Details at <http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/cameraraw.html>.
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Adobe are putting up an increasing number of stories of successful conversions to InDesign in magazines around the world: <http://www.adobe.com/products/indesign/customerstories.html>
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Good tutorial on Photoshop and resolution at: <http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/understanding-series/und_resolution.shtml>
9. LAST WORD
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We've seen a couple of reports recently of publications putting out detailed specifications for PDFs and EPS files, and then telling advertisers who produced files to those specifications that the files were not acceptable. One response was that the person at the publication said he had not read the specifications and did not think anyone else did. One such problem is that some old versions of FlightCheck report that InDesign originated EPS files have Windows encoding even when they are from a Mac (not that it should matter provided fonts are embedded). As a partial answer, the next version of Acrobat will not report whether fonts have Windows or Mac font encoding. In the meantime, since Windows fonts can now be used on a Mac, it will probably lead to even more "faulty files". For the record, an Adobe staffer reports that "Quark XPress on Mac happily snarfs up EPS with PC/Windows-compatible TIFF preview headers every bit as well as it does EPS with PICT in the resource fork".
Gordon Woolf
The Worsley Press
Hastings, Australia.