Premedia Trends, Sponsored By Epson
Workflow, process, and imaging trends
Printing all week
As I mentioned last week, it has been a week for printing. But it turned out that this is week two (of one) for printing. I always plan an extra week into the schedule for disasters. And, I have had a few this week, which is why we’re in week two of one. This is the last week of classes for the quarter, and my two intensive print-related courses are coming to an end this Friday. We’ ...... Read More
Comments (0)Web Fonts emerge to help make web sites less ugly
Yesterday I signed-up for the Web Font license of a single type font from the Ascender Corp., a digital type foundry in the Chicago suburb of Elk Grove Village (where I once actually saw an elk!). The license is free for 30 days, after which time I must pay $10.00 per year to license the web font that I chose. I licensed Plantin Light, a handsome font that I chose because it is the most unlike an ...... Read More
Comments (0)Deleted
This blog entry has been replaced by a later one that corrects for some errors. I am unable to delete this one, so please read the next blog. Brian ...... Read More
Comments (0)I promise I won’t do this again
I bought and read an electronic book on GREP with InDesign CS3/CS4. That book, by British author Peter Kahrel, is about 50 pages of the most delightfully geeky information about my current short-term hobby: GREP. In that book, Kahrel recommends using the small caps search I showed yesterday evening in my blog \u\u+. And, as you may have seen in my blog, it wasn’t a perfect fix for the smal ...... Read More
Comments (0)The Adventures of GREPpleberry Finn
Another chapter in the story of searching-and-replacing with “regular expressions” otherwise known as GREP in InDesign. There are several other applications that support GREP. One of these is TexEdit, the very scriptable text editor for Mac that allows for some amazingly complex find-and-change strings. In the GREP story that I published earlier today, I described the method for fin ...... Read More
Comments (0)The Chronicles of GREPpia
Last year I wrote about my new-found love affair with GREP in InDesign. I promised to write about it from time to time. Here’s more! One of my students had downloaded the text of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from Project Gutenberg. This, as a part of a book design class taught by one of my colleagues, Lorraine Donegan. The students build their books (from out-of-copyright manuscripts ...... Read More
Comments (0)It’s publishing week in my life
My teaching/publishing life is cyclical. I have these ten-week runs where things start off rather quietly and then accelerate to a frenetic level, than calm back down again, and then start up all over again two weeks after that. I schedule my student projects to be complete on the last day of lab, or in some cases I plan an extra week into the schedule to cover unexpected disasters. This quarter ...... Read More
Comments (0)Software as a Service
I just got my Photoshop 25th anniversary T shirt in the mail. It was sent by a friend who attended the gala in San Francisco last week celebrating the Photoshop team. It’s a great shirt, and I am proud to have it. I think my first version of Photoshop was 2.5 or 2.6 – not that I can remember clearly. It was the fall of 1988, maybe a bit earlier. We didn’t have a color displa ...... Read More
Comments (0)iPhone bar code apps allow UPC/EAN testing
I have been flirting with 2D bar codes for over a year now, and have been impressed with the possibilities that interactive print could/might bring to the world of interactive communications and marketing. I have also had an interest in traditional bar codes for some time. Back in 1985 I wrote a program in PostScript that makes in-specification UPC and EAN codes on an imagesetter or platesetting ...... Read More
Comments (2)More on the script and the process
Earlier today I wrote about the Five-Fold Cards my students produced last week. The key to that process is an AppleScript that I wrote to make the cards semi-automatically. This is the flow chart of my Five-Fold Card AppleScript. The nifty thing about scripting is that the programs I write can query one application, then take the response to that query and send that to another application, causi ...... Read More
Comments (0)Five-fold card illustrates a profit opportunity for digital printers
I amuse myself with production efficiency ideas. One of the most demonstrable of these is the memento books that consumers can order from iPhoto (Apple) and others like mypublisher.com. A few years ago I bought a few of these one-off books as gifts, and was mightily impressed with both the quality and the value. I realized that the rewards that Apple and others are reaping come from the value of ...... Read More
Comments (1)Printing comes full-circle
I often hear and read about the decline of the printing industry, and though I acknowledge that some fields of printing are in decline, I am wowed by the quantity of printed matter, and the growth in some markets. Newspaper subscriptions are down. Magazine circulation for the major publications is down. A lot of commercial printing is now not printed at all, but is distributed online as PDF docum ...... Read More
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