CONTENTS
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1. MAILBAG
2. QUARK AND ADOBE
3. FIRST SIGHT OF K2
5. SURCHARGE FOR FILM
6. HOW THE PARAGRAPH GOT ITS INDENT
8. HINTS
9. THE "CURE-ALL" HINT
1. MAILBAG
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Ed Jones wrote: "I'm hoping that you can help me. As a teacher, I use Pagemaker quite often for classroom activities. But, I have a problem that I can't seem to find an answer. When I try to place a TIFF image, a window appears announcing "Document could not be opened because the application Photoshop could not be found."
My first thought was -- you're using a Mac (which was confirmed by the headers on Ed's email). Turn off Mac Easy Open from its control panel in the system folder. This extension needs to be loaded, but turned off.
2. QUARK AND ADOBE
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Quark's supposed bid for Adobe seems to have brought little result, except scorn from some major publishing media. In the Reuters report on the Seybold Publishing Seminar in San Francisco at the beginning of this month, reporter Duncan Martell stated: "The hands said it all. After a debate over whether Quark Inc. should swallow chief rival Adobe Systems Inc. and what it would mean for the publishing community, not one designer raised a hand in favor of Quark's surprise bid."
The difference in culture between the two companies was illustrated by Mr Martell with a quote from the discussion: "If we have problems (with Quark products), we end up having to troubleshoot and debug that
ourselves," said Michael Cates, head of publishing technologies for Hallmark Cards.
"Adobe is more open to developers and more devoted to customer service." was a comment from the Seybold conference quoted in MacWeek's report.
MacWeek's online editorial was headlined "Keep them separated" and commented: These very public moves may prove to be a simple marketing ploy aimed at capitalizing on Quark's strong quarterly numbers and Adobe's recent financial woes.
Other media comments were that in large part Adobe's recent problems were due to a lack of new products -- or of not following up product developments with actually selling those developments to the market.
Bruce Chizen, Adobe executive vice president of worldwide products and marketing, is quoted by emedia weekly <www.emediaweekly.com> as saying Adobe's new organization will return the company to a stronger market focus: "Professional publishing is our core business today. We will do whatever it takes to serve that customer appropriately."
3. FIRST SIGHT OF K2
====================
Emedia Weekly stated that Adobe Systems Inc. had planned to show K2 at the March 1999 Seybold show, but that Steve Jobs said Adobe CEO John Warnock asked at the last minute to show the software at the September conference.
The report <www.emediaweekly.com/1998/09/07/k2.html> states: "Although brief, the demo wowed many graphics professionals, showing a range of integrated image and text editing features. Product manager Ben Rotholtz manipulated graphics in an oddly shaped box, displayed multiple views of a single layout with a Navigator palette, created text links and showed off a 4,000 percent zoom capability. He
concluded with a dramatic rotation of an entire page in 3D space -- after which text remained editable."
But Adobe had no more to say. So, all that can be said with some certainty is that K2 will have drawing and image editing capabilities. It will sit on top of Bravo, Adobe's next-generation multiplatform graphics architecture. There were hints that K2 will read and write PDF and a variety of other file formats, including QuarkXPress.
One problem with capturing the QXP market is that users have invested
a lot in third-party extensions. They will either want those abilities included in any alternative, or will want an easy and guaranteed crossgrade path.
5. SURCHARGE FOR FILM
=====================
Apparently, electronic ad transfer is the norm for newspapers in Sweden... a writer in a PDF list put it as "90% of all ads in newspaper are distributed in eps format with full color, all pages, even CMYK broadsheet works. Several thousand ads are sent daily (please remember that Sweden is smaller than New York)."
More importantly, the writer added: There are several newspapers that do NOT accept film from any national company and I think they will begin to bill extra for film stripping in the near future.
6. HOW THE PARAGRAPH GOT ITS INDENT
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My thanks to Scott Bonner on the Typography List for the following: According to Jan Tschichold, in an essay titled "Why the beginnings of Paragraphs Must be Indented" ...The medieval paragraph symbol ¶ originally could also appear in the middle of running lines and was colored. It signified the beginning of a new group of sentences.
During the late Middle Ages such groups of sentences were introduced with a new line, but the habit remained of beginning the new group with the symbol for paragraphs, usually written in red. Some of the early printers even cut it as a type sort and printed it in black.
Previously, though, it was inserted by hand in red by the rubricator (whose job description stems from the color: rubrum = red). The space for the symbol had to be left blank by the typesetter. But rubrication often did not take place, and it was found that the em quad indention or indent, as we call this empty space today, was sufficient by itself to define a new group of sentences, even without the red symbol.
8. HINTS
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If you want to take an ad file from one PageMaker file to say a composite page file, without having differences in style specifications upset things, highlight all the text in the original ad file and click on "No style".
In PageMaker you can't alter the colour "Black" to make it overprint instead of knocking out, but you can create a copy of it, set it as a 100% tint of Black (so it prints to the same plate), and set that to overprint. If you do this with no file open and call it something like "Black overprint", you'll have it available on every new file you create.
In QXP, hold down the shift key when importing a TIFF to get a low resolution (and quicker-to-view) image.
9. THE "CURE-ALL" HINT
======================
If you are having problems, getting error messages, or just finding that PageMaker or whatever program you're using won't do what it used to do, the first answer is:
1. Save a COPY of what you are working on (so you have an extra backup)
2. Restart your computer -- or at the very least, with Windows, restart Windows.
3. If you don't think you have time to do the above: do it anyway and have a coffee or whatever. Make it yourself -- the walk will do you good. Chances are, when you come back, everything will be back to normal.
-- The first hint from "Newspaper Production using PageMaker 6.5"
Gordon Woolf
The Worsley Press
Australia.
====================