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April 8, 2011 at 5:38 pm in reply to: Is there a way for Bridge CS5 to display InDesign CS5 pages as spreads? #59218
Alan Gilbertson
ParticipantNo Bridge preview of ID spreads. If you want to see more than two pages of ID preview, be sure to change Preferences > File Handling to save thumbnails of all pages. By default, ID saves only the first two, to save on file size.
ParticipantSomething is making ID grab focus after the PDF export completes, but I've tried a number of possibilities, but nothing makes that happen on my systems.
Did resetting refs do the trick?
April 8, 2011 at 5:06 pm in reply to: Table of contents has strange formating when include book contents is checked. #59215ParticipantFrom the look of what you posted on the Adobe forum, I suspect you have overrides on the Heading paragraphs in your various documents that come out “weird” in the TOC. It's a misfeature of the TOC function that if any overrides are present in text that is in the styles list for the TOC, it will be reproduced in the TOC. (E.g., If you have a 48 pt. chapter title and you tighten the leading to 48 pt., you get 48 points of leading in the 12 pt. TOC entry for that chapter title. It's infuriating, but according to the Adobe engineer I corresponded with on the subject, it's “as designed.”)
Synchronizing styles across the book document doesn't affect any local overrides, so first remove any overrides in your headings (click inside the paragraph and Alt/Option-click the paragraph style name) in each document, then synchronize the documents with your style source once again, just to be sure, then try the TOC again.
I'll post this on the Adobe forum, too, for you.
ParticipantMark, I would take a guess that the people you're describing aren't the kind of folks who frequent this site. But, like David, I'd never, ever suggest to someone that upping the output resolution is a solution, or even that it is helpful. That's just validating ignorance and encouraging bad practice. One doesn't solve miseducation with further miseducation, but by pointing out the correct problem and the correct technical handling.
If a publisher wishes to rasterize a PDF, that's up to them. It's stupid (okay, it's completely retarded), but it's their choice. The answer is to educate the publisher (or just use a different one), not invent unusual solutions to a problem that shouldn't exist in the first place. Solutions like that have a nasty and inexorable habit of becoming problems in themselves, so from both a practical and a philosophical viewpoint they are a really bad idea.
ParticipantMark, I would take a guess that the people you're describing aren't the kind of folks who frequent this site. But, like David, I'd never, ever suggest to someone that upping the output resolution is a solution, or even that it is helpful. That's just validating ignorance and encouraging bad practice. One doesn't solve miseducation with further miseducation, but by pointing out the correct problem and the correct technical handling.
If a publisher wishes to rasterize a PDF, that's up to them. It's stupid (okay, it's completely retarded), but it's their choice. The answer is to educate the publisher (or just use a different one), not invent unusual solutions to a problem that shouldn't exist in the first place. Solutions like that have a nasty and inexorable habit of becoming problems in themselves, so from both a practical and a philosophical viewpoint they are a really bad idea.
Participant@orielwen: Don't upsample. Ever. You don't add any information to the image by upsampling, you just make it bigger. (There's a standing joke in the Photoshop community about the “CSI Filter”not having been invented yet. That's the one you see on TV, where some bloke with a computer takes a vague blob in one corner of the photo and turns it into a sharp image of the suspect.) Final output quality of a sharp lower resolution image is just as good (better, in most cases), than from a upsampled version of the same image, because “upsampling” is really just some algorithm filling in its best guess as to what those extra pixels might have been. It's not the real image data, the RIP has no way of knowing which pixels are original and which are bogus when it builds its half-tone screens, and you have no control over which ones it decides to keep and throw away in the process.
I do quite a bit of theater and concert promotion work, so I've become quite used to images that are way below what conventional wisdom says are minimum size/resolution, and to how good they can look in print if the contrast and tonal range are optimized.
ParticipantPerhaps if you posted a screen shot of the problem, or a link to one, one of us might be able to help. It's hard to tell what you're referring to without seeing it.
ParticipantMark, the article you refer to presents a solution (raising the ppi) for a nonexistent problem. Anyone who has Photoshop can output a PDF. The PDF retains all vector information as vectors, making the ppi of the file irrelevant as far as the vector (“hard edge”) data is concerned. Naturally, if you then rasterize the PDF you will destroy the vector information, but why would you do that? It's like complaining that ice cubes melt too fast when you keep them in the washing machine. The answer isn't a colder washing machine, it's “put them in the freezer.”
March 4, 2011 at 1:52 am in reply to: How can I get saddle stitch to work across several chapters in the book panel? #58871ParticipantThe booklet feature really has no connection with the book panel, so it won't get you where you're trying to go. It was intended for short booklets that someone would print on an office printer, which as a matter of practicality are usually single documents not more than 20-24 finished pages.
The book panel is for longer publications (hundreds of pages). These become very unwieldy, not to mention hard to farm out for editing and proofing, if they're all in one file. Any printing or export of a book must be done from the book panel flyout menu. The regular File > Print and File > Export menu items only apply to whatever individual document has focus at the time, not to the book. An InDesign document doesn't “know” (has no metadata that indicates) it is part of a book. That information is in the .indb book file.
What you can do, if you have Acrobat, is output your book from the book panel as a single PDF, then use Acrobat to print the booklet. Open the file in Acrobat, select File > Print, and then the fun starts.
“Booklet Printing” is, wierdly enough, one of the “Page Scaling” options. I guess they just didn't know where else to put it. Once you select that, an new button shows up labeled “Booklet subset” that lets you choose to print All the sheets — only useful if you have a printer that can print both sides in a single pass — or a subset (fronts only or backs only). You'll have to experiment with your printer to find the setting that works for you. Look under “Printing – Other ways to print PDFs” in Acrobat Help for more info.
If you need to end up with a PDF that is already set up in printer spreads, print from Acrobat as above, but to the PDF printer.
Participant@orielwen: Don't upsample. Ever. You don't add any information to the image by upsampling, you just make it bigger. (There's a standing joke in the Photoshop community about the “CSI Filter”not having been invented yet. That's the one you see on TV, where some bloke with a computer takes a vague blob in one corner of the photo and turns it into a sharp image of the suspect.) Final output quality of a sharp lower resolution image is just as good (better, in most cases), than from a upsampled version of the same image, because “upsampling” is really just some algorithm filling in its best guess as to what those extra pixels might have been. It's not the real image data, the RIP has no way of knowing which pixels are original and which are bogus when it builds its half-tone screens, and you have no control over which ones it decides to keep and throw away in the process.
I do quite a bit of theater and concert promotion work, so I've become quite used to images that are way below what conventional wisdom says are minimum size/resolution, and to how good they can look in print if the contrast and tonal range are optimized.
ParticipantMark, the article you refer to presents a solution (raising the ppi) for a nonexistent problem. Anyone who has Photoshop can output a PDF. The PDF retains all vector information as vectors, making the ppi of the file irrelevant as far as the vector (“hard edge”) data is concerned. Naturally, if you then rasterize the PDF you will destroy the vector information, but why would you do that? It's like complaining that ice cubes melt too fast when you keep them in the washing machine. The answer isn't a colder washing machine, it's “put them in the freezer.”
February 12, 2011 at 5:17 pm in reply to: 1st post — advice needed please: Book vs. long doc? #58715ParticipantI did a book as a long doc once. Never again. Assuming that you want all chapters to start on a recto, in the usual way, then using the book panel will save a boatload of production time if the document is still “live” when you're typesetting it (i.e., there will be edits, adds, deletions). Paragraph, Character and Object styles all sync across book documents, cross-references work fine, etc., and it's massively easier to switch out a single chapter, or rearrange the sequence of chapters, if you have a book vs. a single long document.
The only caveat is that synching master pages (in a Windows version of CS4 or CS5) is currently broken. No indication from Adobe of when that will be fixed. Attempting to sync across multiple files with Master Pages selected will crash ID if there are margin changes.
For ePub, cross-references that connect across documents don't currently work in CS5, but are fine for PDF output. I'm not sure about CS4.
Depending on your project, another possible gotcha is that odd bits like Footnote settings (Type > Document Footnote Options) and baseline grids (document grids, not text frame grids, which can be locked in an Object Style) have to be set chapter by chapter unless you work from a template file. These won't be an issue if you don't use or don't need to change them.
February 12, 2011 at 4:44 pm in reply to: Does ID store date/time of last redefinition of styles and can it compare? #58714ParticipantA very inexpensive safety net is GridIron Flow. It will automatically save versions as files are overwritten so that you can revert (pretty much instantly — we're not talking about restoring from a backup) to an earlier version any time. Visual versioning is a life saver, and a bonus is that you can make any saved version the current one just by a click, open it and re-sync. Flow has other advantages in a design workflow, but that one feature has saved my bacon (and a great deal of time) more than once.
ParticipantPermissions or rogue .LCK files might be causing the problem, but if you copy the file to a local folder, open it there in CS5, then Save As over the original on the server, you will bypass any problem that's being created by InDesign. A bit tedious, perhaps, but less so than opening a file repeatedly until it just happens to be writable.
February 12, 2011 at 4:30 pm in reply to: How can I make an object have atransparent background in PS5? #58711ParticipantHow you do this depends on how the Photoshop file is set up.
If you have your logo on its own layer(s) with a separate background layer, all you need to do is turn off or delete the background layer as the first step. See below for the last step.
If, on the other hand, you have only a flat file with the logo and the background on a single layer, follow these steps:
If there is no white in the logo, the simplest way to isolate it is to use Select > Color Range with your foreground color set to white. That will select the entire background. Reverse the selection (Ctrl-Shift-I or Cmd-Shift-I depending on your platform). If the logo also contains white elements as part of the logo, then switch to Quickmask (just press Q) and with a white, hard-edge brush paint out the red overlay on the parts that you need to keep, then continue.
Click “Refine Edge” (which will show up on the Control bar if you have any selection tool active — click on the Lasso tool or Marquee tool if necessary) and fine tune the selection so you have exactly the logo and no background. For a logo, I would set the feather to about .5 pixels. You should check “Decontaminate Colors” before accepting the changes in the dialog.
This will place the logo by itself on a new layer with a layer mask. You should Save As with a new filename (so as not to overwrite your original file).
LAST STEP: Having got this far using either of the above methods, you'll want to compact everything onto a single, non-background layer. Select all the layers that comprise the logo itself and press Ctrl-E (Cmd-E on Mac) to make a single layer with a transparent background. (Note: Don't use Layer > Flatten, because that will make a background layer with a white background!)
Save what you now have as a PNG or TIFF for use in Powerpoint. You could save as an EPS, but that's a dying format and isn't recommended for most purposes.
Hope that helps.
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