This is the latest in my posts about building a new show building. Click here to go to the beginning of the story.
After straightening out the issue of the Scenic Highway and Railroad Code, I was required to sign a host of documents sent by the county planner. These included notes about proper removal of construction waste from the property, inspection responsibilities, and acknowledgements about workers’ compensation insurance coverage. I signed, initialed, and returned the documents, and then I heard nothing for a few days.
This is not at all what a building permit looks like. They are 8.5 x 11 white paper with the words “CONSTRUCTION PERMIT” printed across the top. This one is more impressive!
When I asked about the status of the permit I received a prompt reply that my permit was approved and ready for download. Really? Seriously? I went to the County’s contractor portal, and as promised, the permit and several associated documents were there, ready for me to download. I did it quickly, paranoid that they would rescind them again, and require me to prove that my building is not visible from the Moon.
The master drawing set is now “stamped” with construction approval notices in red on every page. All of these transactions have been done digitally so far. I have not (until today) committed anything to print, which has saved me an immense amount of time, paper and ink. My drawings, and all of the drawings submitted by the various engineering firms, soils engineers, and strucural consultants, have been electronic.
The first page of the document is dated on the original application date: February 14, 2024.
Today, in honor of the approval of my application, I started printing the final drawings for the contractors to use in construction. I have 38 pages of primary drawings – structural, design, electrical, topographic, grading, and more. These are currently printing on my wide-format Epson printer. I bought two rolls of engineering paper (plain paper) to use for this. I’m printing at low resolution (720 ppi), and it’s going quite quickly.
This is my Epson printer printing pages for the contractors to use when building my new shop!
My printer software is treating it as one big job – 76 feet in length. I will have to cut the individual pages and then bind them for the builders. I will use copper grommets, set with a hammer, to hold these large (24 x 36 inch) pages along the short dimension.
This is getting exciting! I have a few tasks to complete before the grading is started. I need to revive my time-lapse camera and its weatherproof box, and then set it up on the hillside to photograph everything that happens from cutting into the hillside to erecting the building and having an open house party!
This will be fun. Stay tuned for progress reports. I’m sure it will be months before I can show you a photo of the finished building.
I have had considerable success with Artificial Intelligence tools. Most of my success has been inside Adobe Bridge and Photoshop, but I also have had tremendous success with Chat GPT for publishing a catalog from an out-of-print booklet. Click here to read how that project was done.
I’m most impressed with Photoshop’s AI Noise Reduction. That one is the most productive for my photo work, and it is the one that has me gushing in praise of what AI is capable of. You can read my praise of AI Noise Reduction here.
And, I have also been toying with some of the AI engines to create images from digital whole cloth (whole pixels?).
A few months ago I purchased the blognosticator.com domain, after years of trying, and I wrote about that in a previous blog post. On that post I needed an illustration of a man putting up the .com suffix. I started by looking at stock images of men putting up things, then I used one of those images as a model to draw my own man putting up the .com suffix. I made it look like a blueprint (a technology largely unknown to most people these days). But I liked the motif so I did it that way. Click here to see that illustration as I published it.
After completing that post, I moved on, working on my building permit application, getting ready to teach again (I’ve been hired back at Cal Poly for the year), and going off to Burning Man again (no rain this year).
But there was a nagging thought in my head… could I have asked an AI engine to draw the man putting up the .com suffix? I decided to give it a try.
Attempt No.1: Chat GPT: I put in a prompt asking for a man putting up a poster, the man’s back to the viewer.
Response: Chat GPT told me it can’t create images.
I tried Chat GPT 4.0 today, and got the same response.
Attempt No. 2: Google Gemini: I entered a prompt asking it to:
Create a photo of a man putting up a poster on a wall. His back is to the viewer, and he is wearing a hard hat.
I received this response: Generating images of people is only available in early access with Gemini Advanced. Get early access to new Gemini features when you subscribe to Advanced here. I signed up for the free trial period and proceeded.
I tried, and succeeded in getting a photo quality image of a man putting up a poster. With “refine” prompts I was able to get Gemini to include more of the ladder. In the end, I was pretty happy with those images. Here is my favorite:
I liked this one the best. It allows me to have the man installing the .com suffix on a sign.
When I tried, as a stand-alone assignment, to get Gemini to draw the letters .com as a large sign on a building, I didn’t fare so well. I got Gemini to render the word “blognosticator” in lower-case letters as a sign on a building. And, when I asked for the .com, it succeeded. I tried several “refine” prompts, each one got worse. Eventually I stuck with the first one, which is OK.
I put the man putting up the poster into that photo. He’s putting up the .com suffix now. It turned out pretty well.
I ended up not using the ladder at all! I put the man into the AI-generated sign of blognosticator.com. Both contributing images were made by Google Gemini.
My love of street art mixed with Artificial Intelligence
I have recently attempted to get each of the AI engines to draw the word “BLOGNOSTICATOR” on a red brick wall in graffiti style. I figured that this would be pretty easy for these brainiac applications. I was very wrong. It turns out that Chat GPT does words really, really well but not photos. The other AI engines also handle text quite nicely. But the photo-generating part of each one has a severe problem with spelling. I would have thunk that spelling would be easy for these programs because letters can be put into a matrix and then rendered.
I started in Adobe Photoshop, using its Generative AI tool. I put in the following prompt:
Please make a photo of a red brick wall. On that wall is the word BLOGNOSTICATOR in graffiti style, with bright colors and clever lettering.
Photoshop chewed on that for a couple of minutes and then presented this:
Badly spelled, but OK otherwise. I wasn’t thrilled.
Curiously, the word “BLOGNOSTICATOR” was misspelled. I thought it might be a one-off error, and added double-quotes to the word to get the AI engine to understand that it was literal. Usually problems in text processing or computer-learning are improved by specifying words that are not in any dictionary as literals.
And, Photoshop’s AI failed again. And again. And again.
I tried simpler words to see if it would misspell every word. I asked it to paint the word “STITCH” on the wall, and it came back spelled “STCH.”
Really?
I switched to Microsoft’s Copilot software to see if it could do the BLOGNOSTICATOR image, or any image with words.
Copilot fell on its digital face with BLOGNOSTICATOR, but it did succeed with the word APPLE. I was thrilled, but I didn’t need APPLE. I asked that application to generate more images of the word BLOGNOSTICATOR on a red brick wall.
Of all the AI systems I tested, Microsoft’s Copilot produced the most pleasing graffiti style illustrations for me – despite the misspellings. The three images it created are stunning. I love them. I saved them and opened them in Adobe Photoshop and edited the word BLOGNOSTICATOR by hand so that it is spelled correctly. Now I love these images even more. They are creative, showing real style, where the other engines I have tried produced more pedestrian images. They produced good images all the way around, but none showed the level of “creativity” that Copilot did.
If only my blog were called BLOGNOTISTTOR! I love the art, but the spelling is terrible. This, and several other extraordinary images were generated with Microsoft Copilot.With some hand modification in Adobe Photoshop, I was able to make this image perfect, and I LOVE the artwork! This exceeded my expectations.
One image produced by the Adobe Photoshop AI system proved that Adobe’s software is also capable of “creativity.” I asked for the man putting up a poster. The first result is incredible!
The man is beautifully rendered, and the composition is excellent. What showed “creativity” is that the man has drawn a self-portrait on the poster (I didn’t ask for anything to be on the poster). It’s by far the best AI illustration that I have received yet and the one that shows computer introspection.
This is my favorite image so far. It was created with Adobe Photoshop’sAI Generative Fill tool. I have not modified this image at all, except to reduce its size for this blog.
As I learn more about these tools, I will post more. Please stop by from time to time and see what I have wrought – by typing prompts on my keyboard. And, if you would like to be notified when I post new stories, there is a button way down at the bottom of this page that you can click to be informed of new posts. I have over 450,000 readers now.
This is one of a series of posts about building a new shop building. To read the first of these posts, please click here. Each has links to the next.
The Grading permit corrections document arrived the next week. That was round one for that process. Questions on that document included underground utilities (only water and electricity in my case), the replacement of soil after the utilities are delivered, and a number of questions about run-off and water capture. In our county, all rainwater that comes off of a roof must be captured and put into a catch basin so that it will percolate into the water table or run into a natural waterway. Uncontrolled storm run-offs are not allowed, in order to prevent erosion.
The catch basin is already built, and my building will ultimately be connected to the underground pipes that feed that basin. This is relatively simple for me; two rain gutters will be attached to the building, and the outflow of those will be connected to the existing pipe.
There is a paragraph about archaeological studies of the property. Since there are recently built structures on the same land, I asked the property owner for more information on that topic. I think it has been covered in the previous building permits.
This is one part of the grading permit application. My building is the rectangle on the lower-right. To the left is an existing barn. The catch basin is at the top-center. This drawing includes topographic, grading, soil compacting and water run-off and capture information.
The County eventually waived the archaeologist’s report, as one had been done earlier for the same property. They did insist that the building might be in sight of a scenic highway. I looked up “scenic highways in San Luis Obispo County” and the road near my shop is not on that list, so I asked the County for clarification. They insisted that the nearby road is a scenic highway. Further research showed that the entire ridge of hills adjacent to the property is included in the Scenic Highway and Railroad code. I had to either comply by adding landscaping and repainting my building a darker shade of gray, or showing the County that my building is not visible from a scenic highway or railroad.
I took my camera, and drove out to the nearby roads. Then I parked and hiked along the road, taking a photo toward my building site every 200 feet. Surprisingly, my building will not be in sight of this road. I submitted this photo and an explanation of the sight-line. They didn’t respond, but a few days later I got an e-mail telling me that my permit had been approved.
This is one of my photos, showing that my building will not be visible from the closest major road. The red arrow points to the location of the building site. This documentation was eventually successful with the planners. The Santa Lucia mountains are in the background.
Now all I have to do it send them another $1,600 for the permit, and I will be able to begin construction!
It took just over eight months and a tremendous amount of money to get this permit, and I plan to get started as quickly as I can.
Stay tuned! I’m resurrecting my time-lapse camera and outdoor box, and I will install this on the hill above my building site before we begin work. My plan is to document the entire process. I’ll post a link to it here.
Addendum: October 1, 2024: The County rescinded my permit, citing the Scenic Highways and Railroads code again. They were apparently not satisfied with my response. So I went out and took more photos. I showed views from two nearby roads with arrows showing that my building site is not visible from those roads. Then I took one more from the location of the closest railroad (2.3 miles distance). It is impossible to see my building from the railroad tracks, thank goodness. (I wouldn’t want any Amtrak passengers to be offended by my shop.)
I submitted a second draft of that document, and also called to talk to the planner, who, after some review, agreed that my building will not be visible from the roads in question, nor from the railroad. I received a note from the planner indicating that my document was accepted and that the clearance was granted.
Two small clerical items remain, but when complete, I think I will get the actual permit. Today? Probably not. It’s Friday.
Note: On my interactions with the county planners: I haven’t meant to demean any of the planners and inspectors with whom I have had interactions in this process. Each person I have conversed with has been professional and courteous. These posts show a certain level of frustration with the process of applying for a building permit in my county. It is obviously a complex process involving laws, codes, ordinances and local rules. Getting approval of all of the necessary steps in building is difficult, and I think that I have succeeded, in large part with the help of professional engineers, contractors and builders, and with the various county planners and reviewers.
In my previous two posts I have talked about features in the latest (currently beta) version of Photoshop that are worthy of your attention.
This is another. Many (many!) times in my career I have wanted/needed a photo to have a little bit more on the sides, or a little bit more on the top. Cropping was destructive, and it proved challenging to get the right result using the tools we had at our disposal. Even with a Crosfield drum scanner and film recorder, there was no easy way to expand the canvas under a photo. We resorted to clever cropping, and even used non-proportional scaling occasionally (only when it was not obvious).
This is a photo I took at Burning Man this year. The woman is Renée Rose, who was walking on stilts into the ring surrounding the Man on Saturday night, August 31. I took the photo with my Canon R5 and my 100-500 RF lens at 500 mm. The photo benefits from AI Noise Reduction (see the previous blog), and two small corrections using AI Erase in Adobe Bridge. Here I am using the Crop tool in Adobe Photoshop to expand the canvas on the photo. With the new AI Generative Fill feature, Photoshop will expand the canvas and fill with more of the background colors.
Here we are, years later, with artificial intelligence making it possible to stretch the canvas to increase its size, making it possible to make photos work better in spaces.
This is the Generative Fill option in the cropping tool in Adobe Photoshop (version 25.13 is the latest beta).
It works like this:
Open the image. Choose the Cropping tool, and instead of cropping inward, crop outward. This would normally cause the image to be expanded, with the expanstion being filled with the current background color. In the new Photoshop there is an option to choose Generative Fill for the expansion.
When you click on Enter or click the check mark at the top of the screen, you get a prompt box. If you enter nothing into the box, the program will fill with more of what it finds along the edges of the photo. This is what I needed all those times decades ago. In theory, you could also put text into the prompt, saying, for example, “Expand with tomatoes.” I tried this, and it did not work. Instead, it filled the new space with more of the photo, creating about the same effect as the empty prompt.
This is the same image with an expanded background.
Since I didn’t need to fill with tomatoes, I declared victory, and am adding this tool to my list of favorites in the new Photoshop.
At some point I will try to fill with tomatoes.
Tomatoes? These were generated by Photoshop’s Generate Image function.
Yesterday I wrote about using the new AI Erase function in Adobe Camera Raw. You can read about that here.
This past week I photographed the annual Festival Mozaic summer music festival. That involved 19 events in both San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara Counties. I drove over 600 miles in 12 days to photograph all of these events. It was worth it!
I have been the staff photographer for the festival for 20 years, I think. In that capacity I have the opportunity to shoot still photos of some of the world’s finest musicians in performance of – mostly – classical and baroque music. The music director is Scott Yoo, who has an award-winning television show on PBS called Now Hear This. Mr. Yoo assembles ensembles for the various performances during the festival by hiring the very best bassoonist, the very best flutist, the very best violinists, and more, for each performance. He does this by choosing the right people for each musical presentation.
This year’s festival ended with an orchestra performance of Mozart, Wagner and Beethoven, presented in the Performing Arts Center at Cal Poly, an auditorium that seats about 1,000 people. It was the first orchestra work presented by Festival Mozaic since the pandemic, and it was the finest performance I have seen in my life. Seriously.
Over the years I have developed techniques for photographing performers in the various locations used by the festival. At Cuesta College Performing Arts Center I work in the control booth, above the stage and at the back of the hall about 60 feet from the performers. From there I shoot with my 100-500 Canon lens on my Canon R5 camera. This combination usually works well because I can make a “portrait” of an artist from that distance and fill the frame, or close. There is an open window there so I don’t have to shoot through glass.
At the Cal Poly Performing Arts Center I shoot from the back of the hall, about 80 feet from the stage. It’s a bit far for these portraits, but I can take photos of groups of players, or I can crop a player out of a larger photo. The resolution of the R5 is high enough that cropped images are still adequate for small print work and perfect for social media.
And in that same hall I usually shoot a few panoramic photos. These are my specialty. Over the years the stitching software I use, PTGUI Pro, has gotten better and better to the point that it stitches these images with essentially no errors. It never creates distortions, never makes odd overlaps, and always maintains the images as they were taken – sharp, in-focus, appropriate for a panoramic image.
Festival Mozaic Summer Music Festival 2024 Orchestra performance, Saturday, July 27, 2024. This is the final image (reduced in resolution for this post). It was made from nine images taken of the performance, stitched with PTGUI Pro software. This image used the enhanced Noise-Reduction DNG files as source images. Click on the image to see an enlarged view.
But shooting photos indoors of musicians in motion requires that I use a relatively high shutter speed – usually faster than 1/200 second – to stop the motion of the violin bows and the tympanist’s drumsticks. This requires that I push the ISO way up, because I am also trying to get enough depth-of-field in these photos to get every face in sharp focus. At Saturday’s concert I was shooting at ISO 12800.
On modern cameras such high ISO settings are not a big deal. 12800 is perfectly reasonable. I can use these images for print at full page size without the sensor noise being distracting. It’s certainly visible, but it is not going to prevent the use of the photos for high-resolution printing.
My work flow is to import my Camera Raw images through the Photo Downloader program that is an adjunct of Adobe Bridge (See my essay on that topic here). Though it is not the best software in the toolbox, it does this conversion correctly and quickly. The Canon CR3 files from my camera are read from the memory cards, converted to DNG files, renamed, then saved to my hard drive – all in one streamlined action. The result is that my “original” camera images are all in DNG format.
From there I work in Adobe Bridge. There I view all of the images, score them with one to five stars, delete bad ones, rename them in groups to describe their content, and organize them for editing. I touch every image, with very few exceptions. Most often my technique involves adjusting the exposure, reducing the highlights, expanding the shadows, increasing the contrast, and often adjusting the color temperature of the photos.
I open photos in groups that are similar, and apply these modest (and sometimes gross) adjustments and click “Done” to return them to their folders. Every photo gets a title, often applied in batches. I also embed extensive IPTC data into every photo. These entries include lists of the performers, the venue, the location, sublocation, the event, copyright, contact information, key words, and more.
For the panoramic photos I look at the source images to be sure that they were stepped acceptably when I took them (usually a 20 percent overlap). I look for troublesome images that might cause the stitching software to hiccup. Then I group each set of photos into folders named for their content: Orchestra pano 2, for example.
Most of the panoramas I shot last Saturday were about one-half stop overexposed. I open the whole batch together into Camera Raw, Select All, then adjust the exposure on all of them at once. I often also reduce highlights, expand the shadows then check the color temperature (theatrical lighting can be a bit warm). Then I click Done, and move to the next step.
Enhancing with Artificial Intelligence Adobe Camera Raw has had a noise reduction control for several years, and it is quite effective. I usually consider its use when I zoom in on an original image and I see the telltale pattern of noise that is created by shooting at high ISO settings. This, I have always believed, gives me about one stop of noise reduction – it is the equivalent of setting the camera at a lower ISO setting – after the fact.
This is the location of the new AI Noise Reduction function in Adobe Camera Raw.
Artificial Intelligence Noise Reduction The new feature in Adobe Camera Raw is a button that says Noise Reduction – De-noise. When you click on that button, a dialog opens with a slider allowing you to set the amount of noise reduction. The text in that window says that the program will use AI to reduce noise. The default setting is 50 units. I have found that using this setting works well. When you click the Apply button, Camera Raw applies its de-noise algorithm to clean up the image(s). When finished, it creates a duplicate file and names it with the original name plus -Enhanced NR.
This is an enlarged view of one image (150% view) where the noise of ISO 12800 is clearly visible. Click on the image to see an enlarged view.This is a view of the image after AI Noise Reduction. Click on the image to see an enlarged view.
It’s important to carry out these steps in this order to reduce the work needed in Photoshop once these files get there. In my case, the duplicate Enhanced NR files also carry the XMP data for exposure, highlight suppression, shadow enhancement, color temperature, etc.
Once Camera Raw is finished, I click on the Done button and return to Bridge.
Sending the files to PTGUI Pro My stitching software – PTGUI Pro – can read JPEG and TIFF files directly, and I discovered today that it can read DNG files directly.
For the past few years I have been converting my DNG files into TIFFs, but perhaps that is no longer necessary. It would save one step, and might reduce the chances of errors occurring in the conversion (though I have never seen any). I ran a test of this work flow. I added exposure and color temperature modifications to the DNG files, then I opened them in PTGUI and processed the panorama. PTGUI read the files and stitched the image, but it ignored the embedded modifications I had made to the DNG files. So, this technique does not work for me.
This is my successful work flow for using AI Noise Reduction in Adobe Camera Raw, followed by converting the images to TIFF in Bridge/Photoshop, and finally stitching them in PTGUI Pro.
To get the files into PTGUI, I select them, choose Tools in Bridge, then Photoshop, then Image Processor (This opens the famous image conversion software invented by Adobe’s Russell Brown). Image Processor converts files in batches. There are numerous options in Image Processor; one of them is to convert to TIFF. I run this on all the selected images without changing resolution. Each image is opened momentarily in Photoshop, then saved in a new folder named TIFF.
From there, I open that folder, select all the TIFF files, then right-click and tell the computer to Open InPTGUI Pro. In that application I align the images as necessary, then stitch them into a cohesive panoramic image. This is so fast in recent versions, and with my new Mac Studio computer that its processing time is negligible.
Option: stitch in Adobe Photoshop It’s also possible to stitch panoramas in Adobe Photoshop, but this does not work as well. Photoshop often makes errors when stitching panoramic images. It is found under File>Automate>Photomerge. I tested this today and found that Photoshop did a fine job of stitching the panorama from these files.
Extraordinary noise reduction The final product clearly shows enhancement, and I think it is remarkable. It is visibly superior to manual noise reduction (or no noise reduction). The skin tones are smoother; shadows are free of the lattice-work of noise I usually find there. It took just one try to discover that this use of AI in the Adobe products is worth the effort, and it lives up to the hype that Adobe and others are making about artificial intelligence. This enhancement step adds about two minutes to the work for each image processed, maybe less. In the end, it is worth the effort, as your photos will look better immediately, and will not exhibit the tell-tale noise we usually see in high-ISO photos.
A few weeks back I wrote about my success in working with ChatGPT to manage some very complex text, making it editable, and making it possible for me to re-publish two out-of-print catalogs of matrices for Linotype and Intertype machines. It was an extraordinary success for me. You can read that post here.
Since then I have been experimenting with the AI systems offered by Google and Adobe, and hoping that these offer some assistance to me when working with high resolution images.
The first of these was a routine clean-up of a photo where a giant traffic signal was in the frame. I wanted it gone. I did it the old fashioned way first, using the lasso, content-aware fill, the clone tool, and paintbrushes. It took me the better part of an hour to complete, and it was perfectly acceptable.
When I showed this image to my friend Jason, he said, “I can do that with AI in 30 seconds.” I accepted his offer to demonstrate, and we arranged a Zoom meeting where he published his screen and demonstrated the process. In the end, including teaching time, it took about ten minutes, but the AI Erase function in the beta version of Photoshop (in partnership with Adobe Camera Raw) did the job much better than I had, and it accomplished it in a just minutes.
Following are the steps that he showed me:
This is the original image of San Luis Diagnostic Center with the traffic signals, a truck, and various shadows. These images were captured in Adobe Camera Raw. I have selected the traffic light on the right edge using the Eraser tool. Once that selection is made, I hit Apply, and the signal was removed from the image.My friend Jason cautioned me not to select too much for the AI engine to work on, as that will often cause it to fail. Instead, I have selected a street light at the top of the pole. This was easy for the AI erase tool to remove.Here, I have selected the horizontal beam of the signal with its many lights. Curiously, the AI erase tool had no difficulty removing the signal and repairing the tree.In this image I have selected more of the arm of the signal. It passes over the terra cotta tile roof and into the stucco exterior. I hedged, and selected the part on the end.Selecting the large vertical pole and its signals was most challenging for the AI Erase tool. It had to remove the steel post, then patch the stucco wall, the planter box and, most importantly, the tiles at the soffit. The tool took only about a minute to do this, and it did it flawlessly. It even replaced the right-hand planter on the white wall.Here I have selected the street sign. The AI Erase tool removed it easily, I left the brackets unselected; I would get those with the clone tool.Removing the third traffic light was easy.The shadow left behind of the pole was removed.Tire tracks on the pavement were removed in a group.Last, the truck on the right was removed. I had to do this twice, as it didn’t work correctly the first time.
Elapsed time? It took longer – much longer – to write and illustrate this post than to make the corrections on the photo. 11 minutes and 20 seconds.
What have I learned? Like Photoshop’s Content-Aware Fill tool, with which we are all familiar, it’s smart not to bite off too much in each action. It would be impossible to remove all of the elements of the traffic signals in one pass. It works better in small morsels.
Overall, the photo is much better after. The clutter of the traffic signals, the tire marks, the sign and various artifacts made the original too busy for me, and for the client.
At the core of The Blognosticator are posts about the graphic arts, printing processes, solutions to printing processes, and related items. The blog was originally an arm of Graphic Arts Monthly magazine, who hired me in 2000 to write blogs, typically four a month, about the graphic arts.
When that publication went out of business, they apologized to me, turned over the copyright to all of my work, and then promptly – very promptly – shut down their web site, and ceased publishing their printed magazine.
So, I joined What They Think, another graphic arts blog, who had me on salary for a month or two. That just didn’t work out, so I was set free again, and I established the non-profit version of The Blognosticator (what you are reading) on my own. It wasn’t supposed to be non-profit; at Graphic Arts Monthly I was sponsored by Epson. At What They Think, I was paid. Since then I have not made a farthing on this.
But I keep doing it!
Someday, someone will take all this and delete it all from my server, and say, “He was a nice guy. I wonder why he wrote all this?”
Until that time, I continue to write posts, and I am taking a break from my Building Permit posts to write about Artificial Intelligence, and how it has saved a long-running project for me, one that is solidly in the graphic arts field.
Shakespeare Press Museum at Cal Poly
When I was teaching at Cal Poly, I was the faculty advisor to the Shakespeare Press Museum, a delightful museum on the campus of Cal Poly where we have a collection of letterpress printing machines, hundreds of drawers of metal and wood type. Almost everything in the museum works!
An early Linotype machine. Invented in 1886 by a German immigrant named Ottmar Mergenthaler, the machine is an automated type-casting machine. The operator sits at the keyboard, entering keystrokes. Each one is answered by a small brass matrix falling from the magazine at the top-right. An entire line of type (a line-o-type!) is composed, then sent to the casting side of the machine (left) where molten lead is injected into the matrices to make the line of type. Later, those lines of type are used in a printing press.
Those include the Model 31 Linotype machine, which was given to the museum on long-term loan from another museum in San Jose, California. That machine required restoration, rewiring, some new parts, and lots of care from my friend Bill Berkuta (I call him the Linotype Whisperer). Bill is a genius with printing machines, and he knows his Linotypes! Between the two of us we got it running, and it has been, more or less, running since.
He and I spend an occasional weekend tinkering on the machine, adjusting, cleaning, lubricating, and encouraging it to continue working.
The Linotype Machine
A Linotype machine is a machine that casts lead type in strips called slugs. That is done from a keyboard. When the operator strikes a key, the 3,000-pound machine drops a little brass matrix into the assembler. Each letter falls into place in order. Between words you put tapered steel strips called spacebands. When a line of matrices is complete, the operator elevates the matrices into the machine’s casting section where molten lead (535° F) is injected into the back of the matrices and a line-o-type is created. A few seconds later, it is cooled enough to be solid, and it is ejected from the machine into a galley where it can be taken to a press and used to make printing.
The machine is one of the most fascinating devices ever invented. I am lucky enough to be a Linotype operator. I am even luckier to know a great Linotype mechanic (Bill, the Whisperer).
This is me at the Linotype keyboard. At my left hand is the spacebar key, where I can tap to insert a space between words as I compose type. The Linotype is an incredibly complicated machine, difficult to maintain, and worth all the effort. We keep the machine at Cal Poly running to show the world how type was cast in the early 20th century.
Once we had the machine at Cal Poly working, I started looking for more than the one magazine of type that came with it. I found one here and another there, and soon we had five fonts!
Along the way I acquired, from the other Linotype wizard, Dave Seat (who operates out of Tennessee), about 20 magazines of matrices for the machine. Dave called one day from Marysville, California (he’s an itinerant wizard). He had a “few” magazines he wanted to give me. It was a take-it-now-or-they-go-to-the-scrap-yard deal. I had less than 24 hours to go up there (it’s about 7 hours from here), pick them up, and bring them back. I accepted. I rented a U-Haul trailer, put it on the back of my van, and headed north. There, we loaded them, he drove back toward Tennessee, and I returned home to put the magazines in the museum at Cal Poly. It was a prize!
This is a matrix. Each one has one or two molds along the edge (left side) into which molten lead is injected during the casting process. The lower of the two molds is usually the regular letter, while the upper is the Italic or Bold version. These matrices, made by both Linotype Company and Intertype Company, are interchangeable. This example is an Intertype matrix, 10 pt. T102. Matrices are about one inch tall (about 25 mm).
Selecting a typeface
A moment of definition for those who think that changing a type font is done by choosing a menu and clicking on a name: changing the font on a Linotype machine is done by raising the magazine, in which there are about 1,000 small brass matrices, then removing that magazine from the machine (lock it first to prevent a catastrophe!), and then carrying it to a rack where you store it. These magazines each weigh about 50 lbs., depending on the size of the type font and the quantity of matrices inside.
After you put the magazine on the rack, you get another 50-pound magazine and carry that to the machine. There, you put it on the machine, then slide it upward and inward until it makes a solid “snap!” sound. Then you unlock that magazine, and crank it into operating position. This takes a few minutes.
Cal Poly’s museum has a total of about 25 magazines now, having expanded the collection to include some great fonts: Helvetica, Bodoni, Garamond, Times, Optima, and a handful of others. Most of them are in excellent condition (matrices tend to stay in good condition for decades) and we can use them all.
There is no digital menu of fonts for the Linotype machine. That, when last made available, was a booklet with columns of fonts listed in order of size, then Delta number, then name. The Linotype company named their fonts with the original names, and then stamped this delta number on the side of each matrix. In front of the delta is the size, in printer’s points. The booklet is the guide to which font goes with which delta number. 12?698 is Helvetica Medium with Italic in 12 point [curious how difficult it was to get a delta character in that last line*].
The booklet is long out of print, and they are moderately hard to find. We have one copy.
Enter the Intertype Machine
In the early 20th century, when most of Linotype’s patents expired, a competitor showed up on the scene, the Intertype Company. This outfit made a competitive machine, and it was almost identical to a Linotype, but different enough to avoid legal action from the original firm. The one thing that was absolutely identical, were the matrices. These were and are to this day interchangeable, and many shops had a mix of Intertype fonts and Linotype fonts. The magazines are not interchangeable.
At Cal Poly we have a few Linotype magazines filled with Intertype matrices. They do not have the delta. They just have the letter T and a number. The guide for those is also long out of print, and we don’t have a copy. The Linotype Whisperer has one, published in about 1955. He snapped a photo of every page for me.
This is a photo of one page of the Intertype Catalog. The pages are 8.5 x 11 inches in size. Each lists the numbers of type matrices followed by their part number, size, a description of the font, and the status of the font. This was the raw material of my project to publish (re-publish) this long out-of-print booklet to make it available to the industry.
My plan was to create a central database of all Linotype and Intertype matrices, and put it online so that all of the Linotype and Intertype operators in the world could look up a matrix number for either system, and get information about the original font, its available sizes, and whether it is from Linotype or Intertype. The online part of that is more difficult than I expected, so in the short term I have chosen to publish them in traditional form – print and PDF, as booklets.
This involves Optical Character Recognition. Throughout modern times (starting in about 1975, zillions of dollars were spent by various companies to develop hardware and software that could look at (scan) and then identify, and convert printed type into computer-editable type. Almost none of these devices and systems ever worked. Those that did couldn’t identify all type; they tended to have a limited visual library, making it possible to scan some type, depending on the legibility of the typeface of the original.
Adobe Acrobat to the rescue!
Adobe finally made it pretty easy to convert scanned type into editable type using Adobe Acrobat. This software has the best technology for doing this that I have ever used. If you put a scan of a printed page into PDF format, then open it in Acrobat, the program can identify the text and export it in Microsoft Word or plain text format. It is nearly perfect in this conversion, with less than one error in 1,000 characters.
That rate of success is possible unless you are trying to convert the Intertype catalog into editable text. That simply does not work, and as hard as I tried, cannot be made to work. Here is some of the suffering I endured trying:
Reproducing the Linotype Matrix catalog
From the Linotype booklet I scanned and saved as PSD files. I carefully straightened each page, and did a small amount of Levels adjustment to get the contrast between the paper and the lettering to be better. Then I saved each page as a Photoshop PDF. Then, in Acrobat, I opened the files, selected the export text function and had pages of nearly perfect text. This gave me hope that the same would work on the Intertype listings.
Attempting to reproduce the Intertype Matrix Catalog
From the Intertype catalog, I did the same, opened the files in Acrobat, and exported as MS Word documents. They were a total disaster. The program (Acrobat) couldn’t determine that columns of text were related to each other left-to-right. It treated them as columns of text, and applied myriad fonts and sizes and style to each group of letters that it assumed were related. The results were useless.
I went back into Photoshop, reopened the files, and cleaned them up. I moved the columns closer together, I worked to ensure that each line was level; I increased the contrast. And I saved them again, only to experience the same event in Acrobat. I did several versions of this, tweaking lines and spacing, and I got nothing.
I gave thought to retyping the whole catalog (I would have spent less time doing that). But, in the interest of solving the problem, I kept at it. And, I got nowhere. Slowly.
The Macintosh operating system can recognize text in photos. It’s pretty easy. You open a scan of a page with text on it in Apple’s Preview application, and it assumes you want to create editable text from it. It’s uncannily good at this; it can recognize letters in hand-written notes; it can find fonts in the middle of tomato sauce labels; it identified a font on a paint can for me. Apple’s Safari browser can also identify text from photos.
Adobe Illustrator has an even more impressive picture-to-text function: it can take an image of type and not only identify the letters, but tell you what font is used to make them!
These are shining examples of image-to-text. They were both foiled by the Intertype catalog! I tried several ways to get them to identify the columns of text. I even opened one page in Photoshop, cut and moved the columns to make them into paragraphs of text, and that didn’t work either. Nothing worked.
Enter ChatGPT
So, last Saturday, having nothing to do except paint my fence (which I did early in the day), I decided to try ChatGPT. Since all of the other techniques had failed, I thought it would be fun and possibly helpful to see if Artificial Intelligence could do it for me.
I downloaded the application, and having never tried it before, I typed:
Please convert this image to editable text, scanning left-to-right. Convert large spaces into tabs; remove ellipses.
And, it responded:
Sure. Drop the file here.
In about two minutes, the resulting text appeared on my screen (surprisingly slowly). Every line was interpreted as one line; the long spaces were converted to tabs, and the ellipses were gone. Bravo! It was flawless.
This is the text from my page, being output to my screen by ChatGPT. It was uncannily accurate. In the 42 pages and 3,000 entries I scanned, there were about a dozen cases where it misread the text. I was able to fix those errors easily.
At a glance, it appeared to be exactly what I wanted. So I decided to try the other 42 files. I uploaded them to the same prompt, and I received a message that I has overstayed my welcome. I had overdone it, and ChatGPT told me to take a break of at least three hours and try again.
After three hours it still wouldn’t accept my images, so I bought a personal license for one month of ChatGPT at $20 (which can be canceled at any time).
Then I tried again. It seems that my $20 was well spent. It worked immediately, and it worked perfectly.
Each page took about 90 seconds, which surprised me. It seemed like a long time to do such a simple thing.
Everything worked delightfully well until I got to page 14, when ChatGPT did everything nearly perfectly. Instead of substituting tabs for multiple spaces, it put in the spaces, as it found them in the document. This was a bit frustrating, but after two or three pages like that, it regained its ability to get the spacing right, and started using tabs again. For those pages that didn’t work perfectly, I used Find/Change to convert rows of spaces into tabs. It took just a few minutes, and then I moved on.
I decided to polish my prompt a bit. I changed it from:
Please convert this image to editable text, scanning left-to-right. Convert large spaces into tabs; remove ellipses.
to:
Please convert this image to editable text, scanning left-to-right. Convert two or more spaces into tabs; remove all ellipses.
…and it slowed down to a crawl. What was earlier taking about 90 seconds was now taking much more time. I phoned my genius child, who told me that this happens when there is a lot of traffic on ChatGPT. His suggestion was to try again on Sunday morning.
A fresh start in the morning
On Sunday morning I put in the same prompt, and the images of text were converted in seconds. The “analyzing” part dropped to about 12 seconds, and ChatGPT was putting the finished text on my screen within a few more seconds. Each page took less than one minute to process completely. I am dazzled by how intelligent the software is. A few pages into the work, I received a comment from the ChatGPT engine in the output area:
The entries appear to use a mixture of normal listing and a specific pattern indicating either advanced features or combinations of styles, noted by “A”, “B”, etc., before the entry numbers. If you need further information or additional assistance, feel free to ask!
OK. I’m impressed. Not only did it convert the pages, but it analyzed the content of the pages, and commented on that content; it knew what it was analyzing!
I was able to complete the project this morning, and I have now compiled and published the first new edition of the Intertype Matrix Catalog since the 1970s. I gave the document a light proofreading, then saved it as an Adobe PDF document. It’s now off to The Linotype Whisperer for his review, after which I will publish it here.
The current booklet is in Font Number order, which is not very helpful. I also sorted the data in alphabetical order, and will publish that in the same edition. With the matrices in alphabetical order, one could look for the font name, then get the font number. In any event, the information will be back in the public domain, and to those in the type-casting world, it might be helpful.
Click here to go to the downloads page for these catalogs.
To type a Delta character in HTML, you can use either the Δ code or Δ in the HTML stream. In WordPress you must exit the visual editor and enter the code editor to do this. Though I have entered the correct HTML code, I can’t get the Delta to show up in this blog.
Addendum: July 9, 2024
Today, a couple of days after I did this work, I tested both of my prompts to see if one works better than the other. They both took about the same time to analyze, and they both delivered the same editable text. The second prompt:
Please convert this image to editable text, scanning left-to-right. Convert two or more spaces into tabs; remove all ellipses.
…resulted in an interesting comment made by the ChatGPT engine at the end:
This text should now be easier to process or format for any digital needs. If you have any further adjustments or need more help, feel free to ask!
It seemed to understand that the text was cleaner with this prompt than the first (and it seemed to notice that I had tried two different prompts). I am again impressed!
The rejections came, and quickly! Both the grading and building permit applications were incomplete. The county planners asked for more complete soils engineering plans. I contacted the soils engineering firm, and got the broader soils reports and submitted those to the county the next day. Then I awaited the next rejection or correction request.
This is the fasteners page of the steel building engineering plan. These structures are quite complex.
Chapter 4 – Money
The permit applications then passed the “intake” phase. I knew this because the county sent me an invoice for just under $11,000. I was told that this is normal for projects like mine. I gulped, but was relieved to have gotten over the first major hurdle. Asking for money indicated that the County had accepted my applications. Those fees go to pay for the planners to review the plans (and send them back for corrections and additions). These fees also pay for local schools, based on construction costs, and other operations of our local government.
It was the largest charge I had ever put on a credit card. I went online and put the fees into my cart, then put in my card number and pushed the PAY NOW button. And it worked!
After the fees were paid, the planners dug in to my plans, checking them against local and national codes. Since my building is so simple, there isn’t much to consider. I have grading plans, engineering drawings for the concrete pad, engineering details for the steel building, and the soils report. Then there is the electrical plan, which includes lighting, electrical outlets, several in-floor power boxes, and three ventilation fans. I didn’t expect much difficulty on those items. I was wrong, of course.
Chapter 5 – Corrections
In mid-May, I received a letter from the County indicating that my plans had been reviewed and that a Corrections document had been generated. In that letter were 26 corrections and comments. One example: “Remove the heat pump. This type of building cannot have heating or cooling.” Another: ”Electrical outlets below 5’4” from the floor must have tamper-resistant covers.”
There were a small number of questions about the concrete foundation engineering, all of which were answered by the firm I hired to do the engineering. The man at the County rejected the structural engineering drawings provided by the building manufacturer because they were based on the wrong California Building Code year. I paid an additional $1,850 to the manufacturer to get new structural drawings. The only thing that engineer changed, as far as I can tell, was the date. Ouch!
I was told to remove the smoke detectors I had included in my plans; I also removed a booster pump for the fire sprinkler system, and had the contractor replace that with a water main fed by an upstream pump. I added motion-sensing light controls on the exterior of the building, and added motion- and occupancy-sensing controls on the interior.
The most difficult item in the list was the Collateral Load calculation for the building’s roof. Apparently, most steel buildings have an excess load carrying capacity (Collateral Load) in the range of 3-5 pounds per square foot (psf). My building has only a 1 psf capacity.
The County was concerned that the fire sprinkler pipes, charged with water, combined with electrical conduits, light fixtures, and wiring would exceed the 1 psf value. I was in a bind. I asked the sprinkler contractor how much the sprinkler system would weigh, then added to that all the electrical loads, and made a spreadsheet showing that the total weight of these would be just over 0.3 psf –well below 1 psf, and (I hope) this makes the building’s Collateral Load capacity able to support those things with strength to spare.
Chapter 6 –Resubmittal
Making all these changes took several weeks, and lots of conversations with engineers, contractors and the County planner. I had to re-submit all of the elements of the building permit application at the same time to allow the County to review version 2 of all of this. I did that on June 16. Now I wait for their response.
Chapter 7 – And that’s only half the application!
There are two big parts to this application process: first, the building and its foundation, and second, the grading necessary for the building. Those are treated as two different projects by the County. They have different analysts looking at the two parts. Ironically, the building was reviewed prior to the grading. The grading must go first, obviously, but the planner has not yet begun to review the grading plans. That will happen in early July.
To read the next post, where my permit is approved, and then rescinded, please click here.
In the first installment of this story, I introduced my new shop building, and introduced you to the County Planning Department. They looked at my initial set of plans and threw them back at me. Too big, they said.
I was dejected. I considered selling my unbuilt steel building and giving up. I looked around for other places to build the structure. I thought about swimming out into the sea, taking the building with me. I was really depressed.
Since the building is essentially a kit, made up of standardized components, I realized that I could scale the structure to almost any length. I looked at the engineering drawings and learned that the building modules are 15 feet each. I wrote to the County and asked if I could make the building 45 feet long instead of 60, reducing the square footage from 2,400 to 1,800. I knew this was 138 square feet too large for the allowable size, but I asked.
And they said, emphatically: NO.
This is the scaled-down version of the building. I shortened it from 60 feet to 40 feet. Fortunately, the building parts can be adapted easily to the shorter dimension.
I then reduced it to 40 x 40 feet, removed the lean-to, and removed one of the interior rooms. I worked on the layout to fit my tools inside a smaller structure and came up with a plan that will accomplish that task at 1,600 square feet.
It is still going to be a large shop, and I am grateful to be able to move forward. The County said yes to my new proposal, so I started again. I paid the engineering firm to redraw the foundation at the new size, and asked the civil engineer to redraw the grading plan. Both were relatively easy to change.
Architectural drawings are usually created in Autocad. There are some traditions that I simply couldn’t abide, specifically the use of those dorky “architectural” fonts written in all caps. I find these pedestrian and difficult to read. Instead, I chose to use the Adobe Myriad Pro series, a handsome and legible sans-serif family of faces designed by Robert Slimbach.
These drawings are drawn to either 36 x 24 inches or 48 x 36 inches, always landscape format. I chose the 36 x 24 size because I have a 44-inch Epson ink-jet printer, and I have two 24-inch rolls of plain paper on-hand for the printer. Making the prints will be easy when I get to that stage (after the building permits are issued). Meanwhile, everything is submitted to the building department in PDF format.
Tradition dictates that there is a base legend on the drawings indicating in the lower-right what is covered on each page, revision dates, and contractor stamps along the vertical right-hand edge of the sheet. All of the drawings I have seen are in black ink only. I used color in a few spots on my electronic versions, and I trust that the County analysts will not object.
There are also arcane abbreviations on these drawings, many of which I did not know. There is always a scale at the bottom, and usually a compass rose indicating the direction of the project on the land. As I worked, I referred to already-approved drawings from the other buildings on the same property. I was copying the style of these drawings in my new work.
This is E1, the above-ground electrical drawing. It shows all of the overhead fixtures, the wall outlets, fans, sensors, exterior lighting, and switches. There is a second page, E2, showing the electrical work that will be cast into the concrete foundation. In the upper-right is the electrical legend, showing each type of electrical device.
I used Adobe Illustrator to make my drawings. This is because I don’t own Autocad, and I don’t know how to use it. Illustrator is the program I know the best, so preparing my work there made the most sense to me. In several cases, I borrowed elements from other PDF files or plans. Specifically, I copied the topographic markings prepared for another building on the same land, and pasted these into my Illustrator drawings. There are thousands of tiny vector elements marking the topographic contours on the property. This caused an immediate response in Illustrator: it slowed down to a crawl.
I am running the latest version of the Creative Cloud on a new Macintosh Studio M1 Ultra computer with 20 cores and numerous GPUs. It really shouldn’t get so slow when running Illustrator, but it did. I think I was overwhelming the system with my drawings, which were multiple pages in a single Illustrator document. In retrospect, I think I would have been wiser to make the pages into separate documents, and then merge them together in Acrobat at the end.
There were times when I selected a word in a column of text, and the machine would go off into outer space for more than 60 seconds before responding. It was aggravating. I found that changing to the Outline view would save a few seconds, but in general, Illustrator was dragging me into a very dark place as I worked on these drawings. After considerable observation I have come to the conclusion that it is my hard drives (three RAID-5 units) that might be causing the slow-down. Each time the computer goes to the drives, there is considerable speed-up and parsing going on while the drives split-up the data and write it to all four drives simultaneously. If perhaps I had a big solid-state memory device I could avoid this (an investigation for another day).
The dimensioning tool in the latest version of Illustrator is nice, but not quite ready for prime time. I used it successfully on some of my drawings, but I was unable to use it on my primary illustrations because it wouldn’t let me choose a dimensioning ratio of 0.2 inch = 1 foot. It offered 0.25, 0.1, and numerous others, but I wasn’t allowed to enter 0.2. Why?
It’s obvious that Adobe Illustrator is not meant to be used for this kind of work, with thousands of drawing elements on numerous pages (12 in my case). In the past I have drawn far more complex illustrations with thousands of nodes, but I have never witnessed slow-downs like this before.
When I was finished, I saved my completed architectural drawings as a single multi-page PDF document. That does not seem to be frustrated by the topographic information, nor by any of the other complex elements in the drawings. On completion, I submitted the PDF to the County for their scrutiny. I was told by my contractor that they reject 100 percent of drawings that are submitted for a building permit. They will always ask for revisions or additional detail in these drawings, even when they have been prepared by professional (and licensed) architects, engineers, and electricians.
