InDesign CS5.5 – Upgrade or downgrade?

Posted on February 12, 2012 by Brian Lawler

I upgraded to Creative Suite 5.5 in the fall, and was disappointed in Adobe for charging for a full upgrade when they hadn’t really upgraded any of the applications except InDesign. I needed to make the upgrade in order to keep pace with the software at the university, which had upgraded in fall also.

This last week I used the InDesign to create an ePub, something Adobe crows about being so easy and complete, and other superlatives that make it sound like a picnic.

They added a new palette to InDesign, called the Articles palette, which defines the order of export for articles in InDesign documents. While it controls the order, it does nothing else. What I would like to see it do is to be the source of control for a functional Table of Contents, in addition to being the source of export order for the “articles” in the book.

The new Articles palette in InDesign controls the order in which chapters “articles” are exported to ePubs. This is a good start, but it needs to have greater functionality.

Adobe also added the ability to map Paragraph Styles to tags in ePubs, allowing those tags to be interpreted later on a Kindle to set the style of the display. This is useful, and I appreciate it.

There are two ways to make an ePub from InDesign, the first is to build a single document in InDesign, applying Paragraph Styles to the text, and then exporting the finished publication to ePub. As you export the document, you indicate which of your Paragraph Styles should cause chapter breaks in the resulting ePub.

Before you export, you have to add the Author’s name to the document’s IPTC data (File>File Info), otherwise InDesign will create an ePub with Unknown as the author. This, despite the fact that they allow you enter the Publisher’s name and the ISBN in the Export window. I wish they would allow the Author’s name to be entered at the same location.

And, to create an interactive Table of Contents, you must use InDesign’s Table of Contents function (Layout>Table of Contents). Without this, the ePub will have chapters, but will not have a navigable Table of Contents.

The second path to an ePub is to create a book as a series of single-chapter InDesign documents, each named for the chapter they represent. Then you import these separate chapters into an InDesign Book (File>New>Book), synchronize them so that InDesign indexes the page numbers correctly, and then Export to ePub.

This is the Book palette in InDesign. It’s a curious entity, not quite a part of InDesign, not altogether separate. You can drag chapters into the correct order, and their titles define the entries in a functional Table of Contents in your eBook. I like this technique best.

A word of caution here: the regular File>Export menu item does not work when you have an InDesign Book open. Instead, you have to use the microscopically small (some might say “hidden”) reveal in the upper-right of the Book palette to use the other Export to ePub menu, which brings up the very same palette of controls for making ePubs (Why couldn’t they make both of them work?).

The Book palette has its own reveal (indicated by that Big Red Arrow up there) that opens an entire menu of choices, one of which is the Export Book to EPUB. This is the only way to get this to work; the Export menu in InDesign is disabled when a Book is open.

When you make an ePub by this second method, InDesign creates a functional Table of Contents that is a table of the chapter titles of the contributing documents. Of the two techniques, I prefer this one because I can easily control the exact names of the Chapters, and I can drag these chapters into the exact order in which I want them to appear in the finished book.

Curiously, there is no way to use the new Articles palette when you work with separate chapter documents in an InDesign Book.

And InDesign’s ePub export doesn’t work correctly every time. In the book I made this week, the program created two pages, called Title Page, and Title Page-1. As hard as I tried, I could not find the source of the second of these pages. There is only one document in my book entitled Title Page. The program didn’t create any other duplicate chapters. I edited the redundant chapter out using a program called Springy.

Which brings me to the second this-is-no-picnic characteristic of InDesign as a creator of ePubs. In every case in my experience, the finished ePub must be edited in third-party software to correct little faux pas like the double Title Page, mentioned above, and to make the book compliant with the ePub standards.

My experience with ePubs is limited to just three years of making them, so I don’t count myself an expert. But, I do count myself as an InDesign expert in every other respect, and I am disappointed that this otherwise excellent page layout application is not as easy to use as advertised for making ePubs. Too much of it is opaque, badly- or not-documented, and overly geeky.

I paid a small fortune to upgrade to a program that purports to be easier and better for making ePubs, but in fact it’s a convoluted process that I don’t enjoy using, and which doesn’t produce effective ePubs consistently. It’s too hard to manage, and it requires too much editing after-the-fact to make a commercially-complete ePub.

I will continue to use it, and will learn from the experience how to produce ePubs that are effective and commercially acceptable. But it shouldn’t be this difficult. I expect better from Adobe.

____

I’m writing a new book about printing processes and prepress. Click on the link below to give me your e-mail address, and I will let you know when the book is published (target date is March, 2012).

 

Posted in Curmudgeon, ePubs and eBooks, Imposition and Pagination, Software, Typography | Tagged | Leave a comment

Another GREPping story

Posted on February 9, 2012 by Brian Lawler


For those stalwart folks who follow this blog, you know that I am a GREP enthusiast. I use it as often as possible; I treat it as mental calisthenics; I look for opportunities to GREP my way out of every problem.

For those new to the topic, GREP is a search method that is found in some of the best word processors (Word does not have it); InDesign has it. Text Wrangler does. My favorite, Tex-Edit Plus has it, but unfortunately that program is not compatible with the latest operating system from Apple: Lion. I’m sticking with Snow Leopard until I can solve this problem (I’m teaching myself GREP in Text Wrangler).

GREP is an acronym for Graphical Regular Expressions. It has been around for decades, and was originally found in UNIX. UNIX purists spit at InDesign’s unconventional application of GREP, saying that it’s not pure GREP. I don’t care; it’s delightful.

GREP allows you and me to search for abstract items, as opposed to searching for a specific word or combination of letters. The idea is that you an search a large document, looking for the word “Chapter” followed by any number, followed by a carriage return, and change its Paragraph Style to make it a Chapter Head.

Or, you can take a list of names that is last-name-first, and make it first-name-first. I do this a lot with roll sheets at the University.

My students love GREP because they work a lot with book-length manuscripts, building them into finished books for print publishing and ePub export (more on that in a blog tomorrow). One of my students approached me yesterday to solve a problem with Pride and Prejudice. Her manuscript is over 700 pages in length, and she wanted to know if GREP could style just the chapter heads as I described above. Click-click, beep! It was done. I enjoyed those clicks and beeps immensely!

Just minutes later (this is my Advanced Typography class, so it’s in the heart of their studies this time of year) another student approached me to solve a problem I have encountered before. The text she is working on has emphasized strings in ALL CAPS. She wants them in Italics, lower-case.

InDesign has a menu item for changing case, but it can’t do it as part of a find-and-replace string (which is a shame).

I searched Adobe’s web site, and the Interwebs in general, and in a few minutes I found a nice Javascript written by Thomas Silkjær, a fellow in Denmark that can change CAPS into lower-case, or vice-versa. It also does Small Caps.

The best part of this Javascript is that it uses GREP as its search criteria.

I downloaded the Javascript, which arrived in Firefox as a text file. I saved it, changed its suffix to .jsx, then stuck it into the Scripts folder in InDesign (I didn’t even have to restart InDesign). In a few seconds it appeared in my Scripts panel in InDesign, and I got it working just a few minutes later.

The manuscript is long, and it has many ALL CAPS sections in it. The GREP function for finding all caps is:

…which translated into English is “Find any upper-case character one or more times followed by a space, and store it in a variable called $1.”

I entered this into the script, and clicked OK, and it instantly converted almost all the ALL-CAPS into lower-case letters. When I say almost all, I mean it missed those words that are hyphenated into a compound-expression, words followed by a comma, or a period.

The fix for that was easy. I modified the GREP search string to:

…which means: “Find any upper-case character one or more times, followed by either a space, a comma, a hyphen or a period, and store it in a variable named $1.”

This solved the problem for the manuscript.

Except it also changed all the article I “words” into lower-case i’s. Oops! I suddenly became i.

I fixed those quickly with a standard text search “look for space followed by lower-case i, followed by space, replacing with space-Cap-I-space.”

But this left my GREPping mind unsettled, and I sweated all night thinking about a more elegant solution.

Then I spent far too long today trying to figure out how to use GREP’s negative look-ahead tool to say, “Find one or more cap letters – other than the letter I – followed by a space, but followed by a comma, etc., and change it into lower-case.”

So far I haven’t succeeded in making this work. BUT I PROMISE I WILL (caps intentional).

When I do, I will post it here.

Happy grepping to you!

Thank you to Thomas Silkjær for his script. I made a donation on PayPal for his work, though I couldn’t read much of the Danish as I did it. Is 40,000 Kroners a lot?

Posted in Software, Typography | Leave a comment

Father-son bonding experience, part III

Posted on February 2, 2012 by Brian Lawler

I’ve been back from the Bosque del Apache and the Very Large Array for ten days now, and (other than the temperature) I miss it. The Bosque is a magical place, with photo opportunities galore. Bird watchers take flight in this place, and it is nothing short of amazing. You can point your lens in nearly any direction and get a reasonable photo. Frame an image carefully and you get an avian masterpiece.

I took a total of 1326 photos at the Bosque, many of which are lovely, usable, reproducible. I just don’t know what to do with them! I will post a few more of them here.

Sand Hill Cranes in flight at the Bosque. There were thousands of them during our visit. This image, and the one above, were taken with the Canon 600mm f4.0 lens on a fluid head tripod.

At the Very Large Array I took only 400 photos, some of which are panoramic component images designed to be stitched together into a panoramic photo. I use my home-made panoramic mount, and I shoot 12 frames with the camera mounted vertically to get these. My usual technique is to shoot at about 21mm so that the aspect ratio of the final photo is about 5.5:1. The panoramic image of the array (shown here) is much taller, a result of shooting at 17mm. I did this to include the entire antenna that was directly in front of me. These antennas are massive: 94 feet tall, 82 feet in diameter, and about 235 tons each.

Antennas at the Very Large Array in New Mexico. This panoramic photo was taken on the walking tour path at the facility, which was spotted by frost on the day of our visit. It is a full 360 degree image. It was taken with my Canon 1ds Mark III camera with a 17-40mm lens set to 17mm.

With this focal length I get an aspect ratio of 3.07:1 which would normally create a panorama that only a fish can appreciate. But I like this one, and it has my shadow (and my son’s shadow) in it, which puts our shadow of approval on the image.

This panoramic image, which covers only about 200 degrees, was taken with my 100-400 zoom lens at 100mm. I stitched it with Photoshop’s Photomerge tool. The aspect ratio of this panoramic image is 8.23:1, which is too wide for my taste; it makes displaying the photo difficult – it’s too long and not tall enough. Click on the photo to see a higher-resolution version of the image.

While visiting the VLA, I also took a telephoto panorama (shown above), this one using my mount, but hand-stepping the image visually. I put it together in Photoshop using the Photomerge function while on the plane from Albuquerque to Los Angeles. It stitched nicely, and I spent only about an hour doing microscopic retouching, tonal adjustment and small corrections to get it perfected.

Photomerge is a nice tool in Photoshop, but I have found that it fails when stitching panoramic photos taken with wide-angle lenses. Almost all of mine are wide-angle, so instead of using (and being disappointed by) Photoshop, I use PTGUI Pro software, which I believe is the best in the business.

PTGUI can stitch almost anything, adjusting exposure, blending and cajoling sometimes inaccurate panoramic components into beautiful finished images. Over the years, PTGUI has been rewritten, updated and improved to the point where it’s nearly foolproof. It’s smart enough to recognize multiple processors, using as many as are available, and it allows human intervention when needed to connect the panoramic dots when adjacent photos don’t work correctly.

Ten days on, I am still organizing, scoring, editing and retouching my photos from the Bosque, and from the VLA. I’m thinking about having a photo exhibition. Maybe in Paris!

A note on Patrick’s videos: they are still in progress. He’s been busy doing commercial cinematography, and hasn’t finished the bird videos yet. I will post a link here when he is finished. This is Patrick at the VLA with his Red Epic camera on the big Canon lens in the frosty morning.

Posted in Digital video, Panoramic Photography, Photography | Leave a comment

The Very Large (and very cold) Array

Posted on January 22, 2012 by Brian Lawler

The crack of dawn cracked especially hard this morning in Socorro, New Mexico. It was our day to go to the Very Large Array, a group of 27 radio telescopes spread across a mesa to the west of Socorro. I was up before 5:00, packing lenses and cameras into our rental car, and getting ready to roll.

My son Patrick and I have been on a four-day photo adventure, starting with three days at the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, and ending today with our visit to the Array.

Located at about 7,000 feet altitude, the array is sited to be about as far from anything electrical or electronic as is possible on the North American continent. While visiting, the folks at the Array ask you to turn your cell phones off, not to use microwave ovens, and please do not use any radio transmitters. Any of these will be picked up by the array’s sensitive antennas, and will have to be filtered out by the scientists who analyze the data from the antennas.

This is a view down one arm of the Y-shaped array of 27 radiotelescopes at the VLA site in New Mexico. Each antenna weighs 234 tons, and each is 95 feet in diameter. The antennas are pointed by controllers in the adjacent operations building, using instructions from scientists from around the world.

There is no cell service in the valley, and we turned off our phones in response. There was no problem with the microwave oven.

The 27 antennas are located on a Y-shaped set of tracks that extends for miles across the Plains of San Agustin, west of Magdalena, and east of Datil, and about 1,000 feet higher than Socorro, the nearest “big” town to the east. It takes about an hour to reach the Array from Socorro.

This is the same row of radiotelescopes, seen from the east. Data from the telescopes is transmitted by fiber-optics to a center in Socorro, New Mexico, then on to the participating research institutions who contribute to the Array’s operation.

The site is run by Associated Universities, Inc., and funded in part by the National Science Foundation. Astrophysicists, astronomers, space scientists, and their employers pay to get access to time on the antennas. What the antennas collect is invisible radio waves. The scientists can ask for the antennas to be pointed in any direction, and for a variety of wavelengths of energy to be collected.

The array is very agile. It moves silently, and it moves quickly. As we approached the site this morning at sunrise, the antennas were pointing toward us. By the time we parked the car at the Visitors’ Center, the antennas had been repositioned in nearly the opposite direction.

From this vantage point, all three axes of the Array can be seen. The antennas in the left distance are on the (approximately) north-facing line, while the others are 120 degrees off-axis to that line. The position of the antennas can be changed with a railroad engine sized lifter, called the High Plains Lifter.

Though we never actually saw any of them move, we know they moved at least twice more in the two hours we were on the site.

A strong wind was blowing this morning at the VLA. That added considerable pain to the 23-degree ambient temperature. Patrick and I went on the walking tour of the Array, and we were nearly exhausted by the weather by the time we rounded the operations building.

There was ice on the ground, frost on the highway, and ice on my balaclava where I was breathing through the fabric. It was mighty, mighty cold.

The photos we collected, and the video that Patrick took, are lovely. Visiting the VLA was on my lifetime list of accomplishments, and I am very happy I made the trek to see it.

It’s back to work tomorrow, two states and many hours away. I will post more photos, and some links to Patrick’s videos in the next few days.

 

Posted in Digital video, Photography | Leave a comment

Father-son bonding experience, Part II

Posted on January 21, 2012 by Brian Lawler

Sunrise comes early at The Bosque. Though the official sunrise was 7:11 a.m. today, the birds were very active at about 6:35 a.m. The big Sand Hill Cranes had already started taking off in flights of three or four when we rolled up to the pond just north of the visitor center at Bosque del Apache, New Mexico, this morning.

Photographers line the levee adjacent to the water at the north entrance to Bosque del Apache in New Mexico. It’s worth the wait, because the birds put on such a show every day.

The photographers were also getting restless. There was a line of birdographers along the levee that lines the pond. I would guess the ratio of birds-to-photographers was about 100:1. The photographers were standing with their tripods along the water’s edge, long lenses at the ready.

This may be more than a “gaggle” of geese! Tens of thousands of Snow Geese congregate in one of the Farm fields at the Bosque. A few cranes mingle with them also.

And, it was cold. The thermometer in our rental car indicated 19 degrees when we arrived. That was two degrees colder than yesterday when I had a take a break to sit in the car due to hypothermia. I’m not used to this kind of cold, coming from San Luis Obispo where it gets down into the high 30s this time of year at the coldest.

With my layers of clothing, gloves over gloves, and wrapped in my stylish Hogwarts scarf, I was breathing frosty breaths this morning. But I felt great, and the birds were providing an amazing show.

A Sand Hill Crane taking off from the North Pond this morning at the Bosque.

My son was shooting 5K video with his Red Epic and our 600mm Canon telephoto lens. And, today I did a stint as sound man. I have an Audio Technica shotgun microphone and a small digital recorder with me, so I gathered about 20 minutes of wild bird sounds for Patrick to use under his beautiful footage.

My son Patrick shoots video of the rising sun at the Bosque. For a while he was the only photographer facing east. Eventually the others caught on.

At sunrise the light changed dramatically and we all started clicking wildly, gathering our photos of the birds as they squawked and honked and flew into the morning sky. Shutter sounds are mixed with the bird sounds on my recordings.

In the distance a virtual cloud of birds flew north from one of the fields at the Bosque. Using Photoshop’s Count feature and a grid, I was able to estimate that there are 2,500 birds in this photo. It seemed like many more when they passed us this morning.

This is our last day at the Bosque. Tomorrow morning we plan to drive west to the Very Large Array of radio-telescopes operated by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, funded by the National Science Foundation.

These antennas are located out in the middle of nowhere between Socorro, New Mexico and the Arizona border. There are 28 of the huge dishes arranged along a three-sided set of railroad tracks. The VLA antennas are used by scientists to look out into the heavens and analyze radio emissions from the edges of the universe.

They can collect electromagnetic signals as slow as 1 Hz, and way past the human visible spectrum. They routinely find black holes, galactic anomalies, and radiation that cannot be collected with optical telescopes. From this data, the analysts put together sometimes-visible images of deep space. It’s very exciting stuff, and I am looking forward to seeing the VLA first-hand.

I’ll post photos on Monday, as Sunday I will be traveling back to California. I have an 8:00 a.m. class on Monday morning – on digital photography – so I have to be ready to go as soon as I get back.

 

 

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Father-son bonding experience, Part I

Posted on January 20, 2012 by Brian Lawler

I’m in New Mexico, home of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the White Sands Missile Range, and the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge.

Among other things.

I’m here with my son Patrick to take photos of migratory birds. There are thousands of them, actually tens of thousands of them. There are Sand Hill Cranes, Snow Geese, ducks, and a few miscellaneous others.

Bald Eagles, for example. We saw three this morning.

A Sand Hill Crane on approach to Bosque del Apache International. This bird stands about three feet tall on land.

The Bosque, (pronounced boz-kay) as the locals call it, is the winter home to hundreds of thousands of birds as they fly from Canada to Central and South America. From season to season, week to week, the number and species of birds change.

And I promise that you have never seen anything like 50,000 snow geese flying toward you as if in a cloud. It is exhilarating, exciting, and almost frightening to see. And, the sound is like nothing I have ever heard.

Another Sand Hill Crane, this one making a bee-line for the field next to the viewing platform. Each morning and afternoon, photographers gather on these platforms to watch and record the flights of these beautiful migratory birds.

Two weeks ago there were 79,000 Sand Hill Cranes at the Bosque. Today there were estimated to be only 1,000. The other 78,000 have flown north to gamble in Las Vegas, New Mexico (they didn’t get the memo about that being the other Las Vegas).

A crane flies south with the background of mountains behind it. I was shooting with a 600mm Canon telephoto lens on my Canon pro camera. The results are excellent!

This is a photographic expedition for us. We have cameras to beat the band, and tripods, and a rented lens as long as my arm (I have short arms). We head out to the Bosque each morning before sunrise, stopping first at the Socorro Denny’s to get a quick breakfast. In the late afternoon we return to see the birds at sunset.

This morning we got to the bird-watching overlook just in time to see about 500 Sand Hill Cranes take off at the same time. The sound was comparable to a Boeing 737 doing a reverse-thrust push-back from the gate. I was stunned by the amount of air that 500 cranes can move at one moment.

That rush of air was quickly replaced by the cacophony of cranes barking out orders to each other about altitude and flight path. This is definitely flight-by-committee. No single crane is in charge, but there is a collective will about them that carries them into the morning sky. Where they go is anyone’s guess, but they return at sunset, squawking their way back to the ponds and fields of the Bosque.

Our photography has been very successful. We are armed with two nice cameras – one for stills, the other for video – and a variety of lenses from ultrawide to ultra-telephoto. We have two tripods, one with a smooth fluid-head, and we switch off between them from time to time so that both of us can get tracking shots of the birds in flight, or a nice wide shot of the gorgeous Bosque sunset.

Patrick’s nice Red Epic video camera is capable of some extraordinary feats, one of which is extreme slow-motion at very high resolution. His best shots from the sunrise bird-launching event are breathtaking. He was shooting at 300 frames-per-second at 5K resolution. The resulting video images are stunning, looking like a ballet performance by Sand Hill Cranes. In flight, the cranes’ motion is descriptive enough for a study in the musculature of large birds. It’s poetic motion, and like nothing I have seen before.

I am posting a few of my still photos here, and will follow in a few days with links to my son’s videos from this wonderful place.

Tomorrow we go back for more, to photograph a few tens of thousands of snow geese, or a crore of cranes. On Sunday we are moving west to see the Very Large Array of radio telescopes (you’ve seen these in various movies). These things are must-see subjects for me, two more things on my life’s checklist.

Check back here to see more as we move around New Mexico taking more photos in the coming days.

 

Posted in Digital video, Photography | Leave a comment

The prepress petri dish

Posted on January 16, 2012 by Brian Lawler

This post was originally made on June 11, 2010 on my blog at What They Think. I have updated the information in it here.

When I am not teaching, I am usually sitting in my home office, the master of all I see (I can’t see very far). Out the window to my right is a lovely view of the Santa Lucia Mountains, a ridge of 1,500-foot peaks that define the edge of the city, and to the north I see those same mountains going off into the distance on their way to the Pacific Ocean, 12 miles away. I can’t see the sea, though.

Right behind me is a woman who shares my office, a graphic designer who produces a tremendous amount of printed matter. She designs books, flyers and certificates, posters, billboards, and a host of advertisements for newspapers and magazines, and she designs an annual publication of 72 pages for the Chamber of Commerce. She is also my wife.

Quite often she will say something like, “How do you get Illustrator to distort something into an odd shape?” Or, she’ll say, “How do I get the image to appear more realistic when I apply this layer in Photoshop?”

At these moments I step into a phone booth and change into my Superhero costume, then fly to her rescue. What fun!

I know that sometimes I disappoint her with my answer: “I don’t know.” Other times I have an easy answer. And, then there are the confounding times when I really don’t know and I can’t figure it out.

I am an experimenter by nature, and I love a challenge! I dissemble files and reconnect the parts, then I look into the code behind them and look for the core of the problem. Then I teach myself the solution to the problem, and pretend to have known it all along: a true superhero! (oh, wait, that’s the definition of a consultant.*)

OK, so here we are, seven paragraphs into this blog, and I haven’t reached the topic yet… where was I?

Last week my wife had a problem that had come up a year earlier, one that involved rich black in Adobe InDesign being diluted when making a PDF for print. It was the cover of the annual Visitors Guide, her largest publication of the year. On the inside and outside covers are placed files – advertisements – while the cover is editorial copy and a photo that is designed by my wife.

The back cover was submitted as a TIFF file (they didn’t get the memo) at 300 ppi, with text rasterized at that resolution, and (theoretically) ready to print. It was sent with a SWOP Profile embedded. Did I mention that it was several weeks late?

So, on the eve of the production deadline, my wife placed the TIFF on the back cover, held her breath and made a PDF of the four pages of the cover. Then, using Acrobat Professional’s Production Tools, and the Object Inspector, she determined that the color had been modified as the PDF was made.

In 2009 when this problem came up, we had text that was 100 percent black coming out as rich black on press. It was a minor disaster. My friend Dov Isaacs at Adobe helped me to understand the problem, and to define a set of procedures for avoiding the rich black problem for the other signatures of the publication. The problem last year was that the PDF files were being converted into EPS files for the RIP at the printing company, and making the EPS files was causing them to be converted to SWOP from the color space where they started (a custom profile for the press we were using). So, in a nutshell, the color management was being done twice – once as my wife made the PDF, and a second time at the printing company.

By removing the embedded ICC profiles from the PDF while making it, we locked-down the color in the files, and prevented the subsequent color conversion to be done. This I called The DeviceCMYK Adventure.

This year we didn’t get so far. The PDF with the double-managed color was still in this room when we began the process of solving the problem. Super Blognosticator to the rescue!

Last year when working on this problem, I made a chart of the possibilities of color management from InDesign. Those same results occur today. I consulted my chart, and sat for a few minutes pondering the options. Then I remembered that one method for solving this problem is to cheat at bit.

And, there are two methods to cheat. One is to tell InDesign to ignore the embedded ICC profile (or all the ICC profiles) in the document (the TIFF file with the SWOP profile, for example). The other is to open the TIFF file in Photoshop, then save it again, stripping the ICC profile en route (this is not the best way to do it).

The reason that this is true, is that the phrase “Convert to Destination (Preserve Numbers)” doesn’t really mean all the numbers. Adobe InDesign will in fact change all of the numbers of any CMYK file in a document except those in images with the same ICC profile as the document, as well as any CMYK image that has no ICC profile at all.

So, even though this seems illogical, it is sometimes smart to create CMYK PDF files without any embedded profiles in order to preserve their CMYK values.

I encourage prepress pros and digital photographers to embed profiles in every image – with no exceptions. Yet, it was the presence of the embedded profile that caused the colors to be re-processed in this case.

And the solution we chose was to reassign the ICC profile for the ad on the back cover, this time invoking the press profile that would be used for the rest of the document. One must be careful here not to use any default ICC profiles, because they will seldom be the correct profile, and double color management will occur.

This reassignment was done in InDesign’s Object menu, under Image Color Settings. In that palette (if it’s available) one can change the profile assigned to any image.

To get the color in the ad to stay the same – and not be reprocessed – I assigned to it the MAN Roland profile provided by the printer for this project. That would ensure that the image profile and the output profile would be the same, and would cause InDesign to really Preserve Numbers, and not change the values in the file as the PDF was made.

Another technique is to use Edit>Color Settings in InDesign set to Preserve Numbers (Ignore Linked Profiles) in placed CMYK images (shown below). This does the same thing with less labor.

On my second attempt, I made a PDF that was processed for CMYK for the MAN Roland press, and the color in the back cover advertisement was left untouched.

For those who want something to read on a Sunday evening, here is my chart of what happens to color in Adobe software products (InDesign and Illustrator specifically). I have shown this to both Dov Isaacs and Peter Constable at Adobe; both have reviewed its content.

I will write more on this topic, as there is another way to manage color in InDesign using the Color Settings pane. I have yet to make a chart of its behavior, but I think it may be a saner way to ensure that color in CMYK placed documents is not changed on output.

I would like to think that having an embedded profile in every image is still the smart thing to do, but my confidence in this advice is shaken for the moment.

And, for images in RGB: embed those profiles! One way or the other, you will need it later!

____

I’m writing a new book about printing processes and prepress. Click on the link below to give me your e-mail address, and I will let you know when the book is published (target date is March, 2012).

Posted in Color Management, Photography, Printing and Printing processes | Leave a comment

Old School typing errors corrected with GREP

Posted on January 5, 2012 by Brian Lawler

When I was 13, my dad forced me to take a business typing class during summer vacation. It was awful, except for the cute girls who were a bit older, and a lot more sophisticated than I was.

The teacher was a stern woman named Mrs. Potter. She wore hard-heeled shoes that made a clack-clack sound on the hardwood floors at the business school.

The typewriters were strictly mechanical, and they had no labels on the keys. It was touch-typing at its worst. Clack-clack-clack.

And, there was no numeral one.

To get a one, you used the lower-case L. So l963 (that was the year) was lower-case L-9-6-3. Did I mention that this was a torturous experience?

I am grateful that my dad did this. He had vision, and he knew that I would need to know how to type in my lifetime. In fact I used my typing skills from that moment onward. I was pretty quick on the keys, and I learned how to use a variety of typewriter-based machines in the years that followed. Those included the Friden Just-O-Writer, a clunky typesetting machine that used a typewriter keyboard. When I got to college I had to learn the Linotype keyboard, which really messed up my QWERTY typing skills. I substituted ETAOIN and SHRDLU for the more common typewriter order.

In December an old friend of mine died at the age of 93. She was a newspaper editor, a civic volunteer, a writer, organizer and all around wonderful woman.

Her son sent me a manuscript to use for her memorial booklet, and I placed the text into an InDesign document to make it look nice, and to combine the text with some nice family photos of his mother.

Midway through editing the booklet I noticed what I thought was a lower-case L in front of a number for the year. Were my eyes tricking me? No they were not. In fact, all of the numbers one were lower-case L’s. I was amused because the author of the text is my age, and his typing habits were, I am sure, developed at the same time as mine.

It was easy to edit these out, replacing them with correct numeral 1’s.

I did it with an InDesign GREP search.

I asked InDesign to search for a letter l (lower case) followed by a wildcard for any digit. Then I asked it to replace the lower-case L with the numeral 1 and follow that with the same digit. It took about .5 second to complete the entire search-and-replace on the text.

I could possibly have done it by searching using a standard search string, but the GREP search ensured that I caught all of these characters. Some of them were not preceded by a space; some were preceded with a hyphen. It would not have been completely thorough.

The string looks like this to search for the letter “l” followed by any digit.

(l)(\d)

…which means “search for the letter l, assigning it to variable $1, followed by any digit, assigning that digit to variable $2.”

The replace string looks like this:

1$2

…which means “replace this with a numeral 1, and the original digit found. I drop variable $1 (which is always a lower-case L). That is what I am fixing in this search string.

This is the InDesign GREP window, showing both search and replace strings. It’s an easy one, but it saves a lot of time and trouble.

Modern GREP searches can overcome the typing habits of old guys like me! Even Mrs. Potter would like GREP.

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I’m writing a new book about printing processes and prepress. Click on the link below to give me your e-mail address, and I will let you know when the book is published (target date is March, 2012).

Posted in Language and grammar, Software, Typography | Leave a comment

1,062 fonts for a dollar

Posted on December 31, 2011 by Brian Lawler


If you have a dollar to spare, and you like lots of really bad type fonts, here’s a deal for you:

FontPackPro, from Macware (a Summitsoft company) is a collection of 1,062 OpenType fonts for Mac that is normally sold for $150. Today, that collection is available for just one dollar.

The price-per-font (PPF) is 0.094 cents, which one could say is a bargain. Heck, a font for less than an penny is still a font, right? My friend Kevin O’Connor alerted me to this deal, and because it’s the last day of the year, I decided to take the plunge and buy the package. What could go wrong?

Macware bills this collection of fonts as “A premier collection of over 1000 classic, refined, designer and creative style OpenType fonts for commercial use, including a 5-computer license to use the fonts in a variety of for-profit, commercial or personal projects across your organization.”

These are a few of the fonts I bought today. Unfortunately spacing irregularities, poor kerning, bad serif shapes and overall inconsistency make the fonts useless. The font called Elevane is nearly illegible.

I downloaded the package after parting with my dollar, and I opened the folder of 1,062 fonts. It is filled with a huge collection of fonts that no one has ever seen before, which is perfectly OK. I opened a dozen or so, just to take a look. Most are spindly, odd designs that have no redeeming quality, many are script fonts. Some of these look pretty good, have reasonable connections, and are attractive enough to be considered commercially useful. Maybe. Others of the fonts are really horrid.

But, that’s the nature of type design. One man’s horrid is another man’s fabulous (though I don’t think so in this case).

Though not awful, the large number of anchor points, and the inaccuracy of their placement make this font, called Banbridge, far from perfect.

Examining the fonts more closely, I find that they are lacking in soul. It’s like they were designed by a computer (which they may have been). There is little variety – even with over 1,000 fonts in the package. Almost all of these are light to medium weight, and they are unimpressive. The scripts vary from dreadful to reasonable, and almost all the fonts lack a complete set of characters. The basic European accents are present, but the symbols, mathematical characters and miscellaneous letters are all generic, not matching the fonts.

The same font – Banbridge – has blips and distortions in its outlines, which make me wonder if these fonts were drawn by a computer font generator – if such a thing exists. They do not have the fit and finish of the work of a human type designer.

I don’t want to seem like a cheapskate and a curmudgeon, one who complains about paying one dollar for over 1,000 fonts. But, even at that price, I can’t find three fonts in the entire collection that I would use.

And that’s a shame.

 

Posted in Curmudgeon, Typography | Leave a comment

It’s a red-letter day at Smith Controls

Posted on December 30, 2011 by Brian Lawler

This blog originally appeared in 2010. It has been updated with fresh information.

I’ve been studying and practicing GREP functions for about three years now, and I have to say I’m getting pretty good at it! I keep my various cheat-sheets handy when practicing GREP, but I find it to be one of the most delightfully geeky things that you can do in Adobe InDesign.

I love little GREP challenges, like turning a list of names from first-name-first to last-name-first, which is delightfully simple using GREP (I demonstrated this in an earlier blog).

My challenge this week was a large block of text in an InDesign document where the company wanted their name converted to small caps every time it appeared in text. You can do this with Character Styles as you type, or by selecting the text after it is in the InDesign document, but that’s slow and tedious, and you might miss one.

Step One is to create a Character Style whose only function is to set Case to Small Caps.

So, I set-up a Character Style whose only function is to make the Case of the type Small Caps (in this demonstration I added red color also). To apply this Character Style to a paragraph or larger selection of type, I created a Paragraph Style with all the other characteristics of the text, and then added a GREP Style function to the Paragraph Style.

This allows me to apply this Paragraph Style to an entire document, and the GREP Style will be applied to everything.

Step Two is to create a Paragraph Style with all of your typographic settings, and add a GREP command to that style, calling for the specific text to have the Small Caps Character Style applied. This will automatically apply small caps to the specific text.

This function has been in InDesign since CS3, but is little-known, and seldom-applied. I think a lot of people could use this, if they but knew it was there.

About a decade ago, while working as a contractor for Eastman Kodak Company, I produced a book for them which (they insisted) had to have the word KODAK in all-caps every time it appeared in print (at first they wanted me to put the little ® after it every time, but I talked them out of that). The book I had written had been through several torturous rounds of vetting by the legal beagles and the public relations team, and I had a tight deadline. I used search-and-replace, carefully, to catch every possible instance of Kodak and turn it into KODAK.

With the GREP Style function in InDesign, I could have done it in seconds, applying the change to the entire book with one quick edit of my Paragraph Style.

Here is the finished text, with small caps applied. I did nothing except add the GREP command to the paragraph style, and InDesign did the rest. This was set in InDesign 5.5, which behaves the same as its predecessor with GREP.

Warning! Changing a word from U&lc to Small Caps might change the line-fall or the pagination of the entire document, so be sure to look at every page of your document to be sure that this little trick does not cause a virtual text explosion.

For more on GREP styling, I recommend reading a number of sources. The best is an e-book from O’Reilly publishers called GREP In InDesign CS5 by Peter Kahrel. Mr. Kahrel has written an easy-to-implement guide to GREPping, and it has been at my right hand for months. I love it. The other places to look for information about GREP searching and styling are InDesign Secrets, and the InDesigner.com site. Both have excellent resources on GREP.

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I’m writing a new book about printing processes and prepress. Click on the link below to give me your e-mail address, and I will let you know when the book is published (target date is March, 2012).

Posted in Imposition and Pagination, Software, Typography | Leave a comment