CONTENTS
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2. CHANGING FONTS
3. GENERATIONAL CHANGE IN LAYOUT
4. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
5. UPDATES AND HINTS
6. SOURCES OF INFORMATION
2. CHANGING FONTS
=================
It was about 15 years ago, when involved in a joint venture with a computer dealer installing systems in small newspapers that we agreed "every time we think we are beginning to understand fonts, they change the system".
Well they've done it again. CID fonts (Character IDentification fonts) are double-byte fonts and were commonly used in Asian language fonts from, I think, around 1996 -- and you needed special Japanese or Chinese, Korean etc software versions to use them. Then came OpenType and support for CID was included within OpenType fonts and in InDesign. However it still necessary to have Acrobat 4 (or the equivalent Reader) or later to view them in PDFs.
Do I understand it? No -- but I think I'm right in saying that a lot of non-Postscript 3 RIPs have trouble with such fonts until they are upgraded, and that most RIP manufacturers are working hard on the problem. Adobe have a reason to gloat because support for CID fonts was part of the postscript level 2 specifications, and was in all genuine postscript installations, plus a few clones. However it seems some clone postscript makers decided it wasn't used so why bother spending time programming it from the public ps specs.
The workaround: it seems that if you are having trouble, for example with PDFs distilled from InDesign (which uses its own postscript interpreter, separate from Distiller), you can fall back on printing to Distiller, or printing to a postscript file and then distilling it. Then it depends on your settings whether you end up with a file where CID fonts are a problem. It may be possible to also solve problems in PDFs by printing to postscript and redistilling to an earlier form of PDF.
It also seems that if some RIPs see any mention of CID fonts in the code, they throw in the towel and admit defeat, even if the font only uses the first 255 or so characters, which I've been told are common with non-CID fonts. (You can in theory use an OpenType font in a program as old as PageMaker or QuarkXPress, but you'll not see the special characters and options which are the reason for OTF).
I sent off a job to a US book printer about 10 days ago. They sent me an Acrobat job.options file, which refused to load in Acrobat 6 or InDesign, It seems Acrobat 6 has changed the specs of that file, so even though they are supposed to to load old-style job.options files I could not get it to do so. So I opened the job options in Acro 4 on my other computer and set up a PDF style in InDesign to what seemed to be the same specs. Where I could not be sure, I guessed.
The resulting PDF did print to a colour copier at a local print shop, but that is pretty low res in comparison to a 4-color cover for a book. So I sent it off.
The job was supposed to print today and perhaps it is just that I'm too far from Michigan to hear the screams.
Incidentally there is a useful FAQ from a publisher/printer viewpoint at <http://www.cascadilla.com/faq/faq-publishingpdf.html>
3. GENERATIONAL CHANGE IN LAYOUT
================================
In answer to our previous issue item on a "generation" problem with publication design, Dick Margulis wrote: "The title of article number one caught my eye, and I was anxious to read it as soon as it popped into my mailbox. I suspected the 'generation' referred to the difference between human generations, and I was not disappointed.
"I don't know whether The Starch Organization has ever published any studies or books available to the general public (I don't see anything online), but they know what they know; and what they know is everything there is to know about the way people read newspapers and magazines, both ads and editorial matter. They have tested EVERYTHING that there is to test, from fonts to point size and leading and column width, to page dimensions, to layout strategies...
"So it really isn't fair to state, 'few rules, only established conventions.' That said, all the points you made are supported by Starch, so I wouldn't want to contradict anything you wrote.
"I would add a factoid that came out of study Starch did for The Peoria Journal-Star in the mid-1960s. The paper had the luxury of being able to issue a split run in which the front-page stories in half the papers were the usual Associated Press feeds, in AP style, and in the other half of the papers all the numbers (including money amounts) were spelled out rather than using numerals. Starch found that women, in particular (this was the 1960s--not sure the results would be the same today), tended to stop cold at the first numerals they encountered but read well into the article when numbers were spelled out.
"It's interesting not so much for the one fact about Peoria readers but for the concept that the subtleties of composition and editing matter when you are trying to get an expensive message to as many people as possible."
Starch (later Roper-Starch and now RoperASW <http://www.roperasw.com/>, part of United Business Media), apart from a few surveys such as that mentioned above from decades ago, seems to have been involved mainly with "market intelligence". There is, without doubt, much of interest hidden in their archives.
Another Format subscriber, the managing editor of a financial newspaper, pointed us to "Editing by Design: the classic guide to winning readers," by Jan V. White, described as "an awesome book which is a must-read for editors & designers alike" adding that it "gets into the psychology of the reader to show the editor & designer how to optimally layout a page. There are good visuals so the instruction is clear--and Jan 'practices what she preaches.' I work with many different graphic designers who create ads, and there's no way that they'd be instantly qualified to lay out a newspaper--it's a totally different genre. Thankfully, our newspaper has a creative director with 16 years of newspaper experience, and the designers we outsource the ads to do a great job to keep the aesthetic value of the paper high."
4. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
========================
Raimond in Albania wrote about a problem he has in printing from Freehand or PageMaker to a Newgen Imagepro 94E imagesetter from Mac OS9.2: "I import the photos from Photoshop in EPS format and my imagesetter does not practice the screen rotate as it does with other formats from Photoshop, like Tiff." Raimond also asked about drivers for that imagesetter to use with OS X.
We replied: Is that a level 1 postscript imagesetter? That's the immediate thought for such a problem, and it will become increasingly difficult to find a way to achieve output other than by perhaps using older software which will create an older version postscript file. However, as I don't know the machine other than as a name, I could be completely wrong.
It may be worth putting such a question on the comp.publish.prepress newsgroup -- one of the few newsgroups which still has an active following with expertise in this area.
It is possible to edit postscript to specify the screen angles in the postscript code -- but while I know it can be done, I have no idea how.
Other thoughts: it may be worth asking on Macromedia's Freehand forum <http://www.macromedia.com/cfusion/webforums/forum/index.cfm?forumid=17> or on the PageMakr email list of which you'll find details at <http://www.makingpages.org/pagemaker>
We suspect that was not much help. Anyone with better ideas?
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Collyn wrote "from the Australian outback with no access to local computer experts": "Possibly foolishly I changed from Win 98 Series 2 - to Win 2000. Most of my work is in PageMaker 6.1 and to my horror, whilst the program does everything else fine, it absolutely will not let me access any but my C drive (i.e. it does not indicate any or other drive). I can however copy from (say) my CDROM drive to C:."
We replied: You may have problems getting version 6 of PageMaker to work with Win2000. Basically our advice is that to keep a legacy program going happily, it is usually necessary to keep a computer with an operating system of the day. However, you will find some useful advice at <http://www.atlantictechsolutions.com/pmfaq1.html> on a website run by Peter Linnell who probably knows more about running PM under Win2000 than anybody.
Having said that, the lack of access to any drive other than C: seems like a permissions problem, and I know that for Win 6.5 or 7 to work under Win2000 or later, it is necessary for the person installing and using the program to have administrator access rights.
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In answer to a question last issue we replied that "We've only ever seen comments that there is no equivalent of PopChar for Windows." Well now there is. It still lacks some of the Mac versions features but is well on the way. See <http://www.ergonis.com/products/popcharwin/>. The price of US$29 includes two years of updates and you can download a demo with some characters unavailable. The size of the download varies between 800kb and 2.7mb according to Windows version.
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In response to the question from Rosalee about some PageMaker 6.5 files opening in InDesign when others would not, Pete Masterson told us of similar problems with a set of PM files, first created in PM 6.5 then "converted" to PM 7.0. "InDesign will not open these files -- exiting with a really unhelpful error message: 'Can not convert document. An unknown error occurred during conversion.' He added that the documents were "very large, in full color on every page and include many photos and maps saved as EPS with combined TIFF images and vector text and graphics. Frankly, this document was a bear to deal with in PageMaker -- and had various levels of corruption in 6.5 (which, to our surprise was apparently fixed when converted to PM 7.0)." He had other PM files that refuse to open in InDesign... "most of the time they have involved fairly complex documents with many links. But a few were fairly simple without links."
He added that he either creates a PDF of the PM pages, exports the PM material to text then import to ID, or just re-create the PM pages in ID from scratch.
Pete then wrote again to say: I just purchased and installed the PageMaker for InDesign plug-in. The files that ID refused to convert now _do_ convert. (Since the links were lost moving the files from one computer to the other, I receive a query to "continue" without links? -- answering "yes" opens the document as an InDesign file with the photos and graphics displayed with their low resolution proxy images. I can then re-link them from InDesign (a tedious, but not difficult task). In this particular case, I also discovered that none of the fonts used in the document were installed (something I didn't realize)... and that may have contributed to the errors that stopped ID from opening it without the PM for ID plug-in.
5. UPDATES AND HINTS
====================
Some QuarkXPress 6.1 users who load a lot of fonts from sub-folders inside one or more of the OS X Fonts folders have experienced an unexpected quit when exporting PDF, importing PDF, setting PDF or EPS pictures to Full Resolution Preview, or quitting the application. The problem may also be experienced when using 3rd party font management software to load fonts from other locations. The fix, a replacement of the "QuarkPDF.dylib" file located in the XTensions folder, is available at <http://www.quark.com/service/desktop/downloads/details.jsp?idx=544>. It is a 2.71mb download.
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Markzware's latest XTension for Quark 4, MarkzTools 5.5, allows you to open v5 and v6 docs in v4. <http://www.markzware.com/markztools5/>. It can also overcome file much corruption and in the event of corruption which cannot be overcome has a "scavenge text" feature. It costs US$199 and is Mac only. Upgrades from v.5 cost US$99
6. SOURCES OF INFORMATION
=========================
Lots of logos at <http://www.brandsoftheworld.com>
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Many useful links at "E-resources for Copy Editors" <http://www.nyu.edu/classes/copyXediting/eresources.html>
Gordon Woolf
The Worsley Press
Hastings, Australia.