www.nickhodge.com

Col­league in crime, and fel­low Aus­sie (well, at least he’s nat­ur­al­ised now), Dave Glover has a post that crosses some old ter­rit­or­ies of mine.

Using Power­shell, .Net, OpenXML and some code that I barely under­stand because it’s not Python; he’s been able to gen­er­ate 60 to 70 doc­u­ments per second.

Link­ing it here as it inter­sects the Adobe / Microsoft world.

The recently released New York Times Reader (http://www.nytimes.com/mem/reader_regi.html) is what the Adobe PDF Reader should be today. Small, data-driven, dynamic, inter­act­ive and skinable.

Scott Hansel­man states this is a pre­cursor to WPF based RSS read­ers. I am going to go one fur­ther and state this is the future of dynamic pub­lish­ing for large, paper-based pub­lish­ers. A ter­rit­ory tra­di­tion­ally marked by Adobe as their home soil.

Adobe, the old leader in this space with PDF, has missed the ferry to New York and may be stuck on the island for a while. Even Mac­ro­media (now mar­ried to Adobe) has missed this boat.

Small:

Times Reader will requires .Net Frame­work 3.0. Today this is a hassle. In the future, with Vista and wider deploy­ments the base Frame­work, the com­par­at­ive size of the down­loads will become very noticeable.

The installer is less than 1Mb, installing an applic­a­tion that is 2.5Mb.

The Adobe Reader is lar­ger (21.5Mb).

Data-driven:

Rather than the con­tent being bound up with the present­a­tion, some­thing that IT pro­fes­sion­als con­stantly con­sider bad archi­tec­ture, with the Times Reader these are kept separate.

The dis­play res­izes cor­rectly, but within the bounds of the New York Times look-and-feel. Design­ing for this style of lay­out is not simple today: it requires the smarts of a developer to gen­er­ate. I believe there is a mar­ket to wire backend ser­vices to cus­tom publisher-centricinterfaces in a mech­an­ism non-experienced pro­gram­ming design­ers can grok.

Main­tain­ing the own­er­ship of the con­tent, even in a creative-commons man­tra world, is crit­ical. There is a sig­ni­fic­ant invest­ment in infra­struc­ture to run a pub­lisher, and this must be paid for. Adding value is the only way a large pub­lisher can charge for their premium con­tent. Whilst the Adobe Reader has mech­an­isms for, cough, DRM, inbuilt — it is another bar­ren waste­land in daily pub­lish­ing worlds.

Dynamic:

The cent­ral dogma/mantra of the Adobe Reader is to retain the ori­ginal designer’s intent (includ­ing fonts) Acrobat does have lim­ited reflow and res­iz­ing abil­ity; mainly tacked onto the Reader to per­mit access­ib­il­ity. There is an under util­ised fea­ture of Acrobat called the Art­icle Tool. Ever used it? It has been in there since the very early versions.

The Times Reader per­mits res­iz­ing of the applic­a­tion and cor­rectly reflows the text; in a com­pos­i­tion mech­an­ism that Adobe has liv­ing in InDes­ign, InCopy — even Page­Maker. Why can’t these be bolted into an Adobe Reader? InDes­ign could be turned into the fron­tend design tool; Cold­fu­sion is at the backend. Maybe this is too old ground for Adobe?

Inter­act­ive:

Search­ing in the Times Reader is a pleas­ure, and sur­prises you. With dynamic search­ing; that is the rel­ev­ant art­icles appear under the search box as you type is way excel­lent. The Topic Explorer is worth the price of entry, alone. It reminds me of Apple’s MCF/Hotsauce/Project X.

Skin­able:

New York Times owns the inter­face, lock-stock-and-barrel. The exper­i­ence is theirs. Being a news­pa­per of record, this is crit­ical. To change the inter­face to match their cor­por­ate stand­ard is some­thing that the Adobe Reader should permit.

As Scott Hanselman states, the Times Reader is the cur­rent poster child for Microsoft’s WPF tech­no­lo­gies. The only arrow I can aim at its heart is the Win­dows XP/Vista only nature of the Reader. Come on Microsoft, release a MacOS ver­sion! Hav­ing .Net on the Mac plat­form is prob­ably the friend­li­est Unix you guys are going to get since Xenix.

It also hap­pens to trump the old king of type and present­a­tion: Adobe. Will Apollo save Adobe’s repu­ta­tion? Let’s hope its Apollo 11, not Apollo 13.

When tak­ing your piece of digital design to the prin­ted world, there is this nasty, some would say: evil, thing called CMYK. Dynamic Graph­ics magazine has a five-point art­icle on how to sur­vive in a CMYK world. http://www.dynamicgraphics.com/dgm/Article/28597

Excel­lent read, and even bet­ter: tag/bookmark it for later.

Some notes of my own, based on 8 years of ques­tions from cus­tom­ers. I’ll add to this, so you can tag it and come back.

1. In a major­ity of cases, a Print designer works in RGB or CMYK. RGB stands for Red-Green-Blue; this is ‘sub­tract­ive’ col­ors using light to gen­er­ate the col­ors you see on screen. CMYK is Cyan Magenta Yel­low and Black(K). This is a ‘addit­ive’ mech­an­ism where these inks are mixed together to gen­er­ate the col­ors we see. Light is ‘reflec­ted’ through the ink, off the paper to your eye. As these color mech­an­isms are very dif­fer­ent, the color res­ults are different.
2. The screen; LCD or CRT, will not show all the col­ours that can be prin­ted: espe­cially in the shad­ows, blues, purples and oranges. CMYK has a color space that is dif­fer­ent to mon­it­ors we view our designs. You can pur­chase devices to ensure that where col­ors can be dis­played onscreen: they match.
3. Set the background/desktop of your OS to neut­ral gray, and run the color cal­ib­ra­tion soft­ware to set your mon­itor cor­rectly. The envir­on­ment in which you eval­u­ate color; the light­ing, back­ground light­ing and the col­ors on your screen get in the way of color eval­u­ation. If you can afford it, pur­chase a screen color cal­ib­ra­tion device. If you can print a neut­ral gray with no color cast (too much CMY), you are 80% to a cal­ib­rated device.
4. Another “name” for CMYK is Pro­cess Col­ors, or just Pro­cess. Another way to think of this is “Pro­cess” equals “The nor­mal Pro­cess”. All JPEGs may not be RGB; you can have CMYK JPEGs.
5. There is a myriad of soft­ware com­pon­ents that can con­vert RGB to CMYK. These are called Color Man­age­ment “Engines”. It is a math­em­at­ical pro­cess. Adobe Pho­toshop con­verts between these col­or­spaces. So does Apple’s Col­or­sync, so does the soft­ware that sits inside a RIP or a printer driver. As each of these pieces of soft­ware are not writ­ten by the same people, your res­ults may and prob­ably will dif­fer depend­ing on the envir­on­ment. Use the soft­ware you can trust.
6. Color Pro­files, which describe the col­or­space a par­tic­u­lar image is “in” can be small, or large (up to 1Mb). Soft­ware as described above may use this Pro­file to con­vert from one col­or­space to another; some soft­ware may ignore some parts of the pro­file and the color res­ults will dif­fer. Some printer drivers just use their inbuilt soft­ware and ignore the color pro­files alto­gether. Color Man­age­ment, to work con­sist­ently, needs to use the same “color engine” con­sist­ently at all points to be 100% perfect.
7. Color Pro­files describe col­ors in RGB, CMYK or a col­or­space called “CIE L*a*b” (shortened to LAB). LAB describes color in a device inde­pend­ent (that is, not screen, not printer) using Light­ness (L), Red-Green (a) and Yellow-Blue (b). If you use a Color Man­age­ment Engine to con­vert from RGB to CMYK, the engine will pass through LAB first. Some spe­cific col­ors, or color ranges, may have spe­cial “trans­forms” as described by the color profile.
8. The CMYK col­or­space can print a wide vari­ety of col­ors. Look at a cof­fee table book; it’s is a high screen (150lpi to 175lpi) print — prin­ted in CMYK. Yes, there are other color spaces that add 2 or more plates that “mix together” extra col­ors to res­ult in a higher num­ber of prin­ted col­ors (also known as higher range col­or­space). Print­ing CMYK + spot plates is not the same. The extra 2 plates are print­ing two spe­cific col­ors. You are ask­ing the Printer to add an extra two col­ors in the print run, add extra inks. This costs money. In a large num­ber of cases, you are print­ing nor­mal CMYK. Ensure your Spots are con­ver­ted to Pro­cess (CMYK)
9. Con­vert to CMYK as late as pos­sible in your design, if you can. Keep­ing ori­gin­als in a format closest to the ori­ginal (RGB for Stock Pho­to­graphy, in the most lossless com­pres­sion, or Cam­era Raw formats such as DNG) will mean that you can con­vert to the tar­get CMYK and keep as much color in the pixels as pos­sible. RGB, based on the same com­pres­sion set­tings, will be 25% smal­ler, too.
10. There is noth­ing like a prin­ted proof from a color-matched, cal­ib­rated device. Inkjet or oth­er­wise; to ensure a match. But also note that a proofer is not the press/digital press — so your design col­ors may not exactly match. If the proofer is not yours, ask when it was last cal­ib­rated. Ask if the paper and inks being used are consistent.
11. Swatches from Pantone and oth­ers ensure that key col­ors: such as Cor­por­ate logos, match at print time. The col­ors on screen may not exactly match (see #1 above). Once you use these swatches, you are manu­ally color man­aging. Pantone swatches have an asso­ci­ated CMYK value attached to the named swatch. Rarely will you use a Pantone color for a “spot” or extra plate.
12. Once you “hard code” a CMYK value, or use a com­mer­cial swatch set like Pantone — you are in con­trol of the color. Color Man­age­ment may change the col­ors later on, but gen­er­ally you are telling the Press oper­ator: I want this mix across my four plates.
13. If you work in RGB you are leav­ing other sys­tems (Col­or­Sync on MacOS X, maybe print­ing from InDes­ign) to decide how to con­vert to CMYK. If you are print­ing from Word to a con­sumer inkjet printer, the drivers are using RGB and the printer driver con­verts to CMYK (or more inks) for you. The more inform­a­tion you attach to your RGB image (source Color Pro­file for instance), the greater chance your out­put driver will suc­cess­fully print the colors.
14. Press oper­at­ors are the most highly exper­i­enced color people you will ever meet. If you are at the design end of the world, and you meet one; buy them a beer or cof­fee and have a chat. Each one will have a story about an “unprint­able job”. Given no proof, they will match the print to what our eyes will notice most: flesh tones, green grass/trees and a blue sky. The cent­ral modus operandi is to ensure that the color is believ­able in the prin­ted res­ult. Our mind is trained to recog­nise these col­ors based on our men­tal per­cep­tion of the image as a whole. If there is a prin­ted proof, they will obvi­ously match to the proof. Trust the Press operator.
15. RIPs, the devices that take your PDF or file and gen­er­ate proofs or plates, ras­ter­ize (con­vert to very, very high DPIs) images (bit­maps) and vec­tors (text, lines, boxes) through dif­fer­ent paths. Whilst there are set­tings in the RIPs to turn this off, you can­not be sure that this is the set­ting used. Be very, very care­ful if you are attempt­ing to match the color of a vec­tor object to the color in a bit­map object. RIPs may use their own Color Man­age­ment Engine; gen­er­ally this engine will be unknown to you.

Ref­er­ences and fur­ther Reading

• Color Art­icles from Color Rem­ed­ies. Greater than 6 years old, but still relevant.
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You will need Adobe Reader 6.0 (or a full ver­sion of Acrobat 6.0) for this bit of Fri­day fun: Ran­dom Neil Finn Lyric

This is some­thing I tricked up for Open­Pub­lish 2003 using the new SOAP calls from Javas­cript in Acrobat 6.0. It uses the Ran­dom Neil Finn Lyric Server web service.

Print­ing Acrobat 5.0/PDF1.4 Gen­er­ated by Adobe InDes­ign 2.0. Sorry about the dur­a­tion between notes here. Busy doing other, non tech­nical stuff.

Tur­key wins Euro­vi­sion 2003: On the Brit­ish zero point score: “But oth­ers were less char­it­able, cit­ing Jemini’s off-key per­form­ance, tacky cos­tumes and inane lyr­ics.” So why did any­one score points at all? In fact, why are Ice­land and Israel in the com­pet­i­tion. They are not in Europe! In fact, isn’t Tur­key barely a European coun­try? Go Esto­nia

Dov Isaacs as inter­viewed by Plan­et­PDF. A per­son who is to be respected!

This has been in my head for a while: InDes­ign 2.0: Pho­toshop, Duo­tones into InDesign

In my time I have seen vari­ous ‘com­plaints’ that Adobe does not pub­lish the spe­cific­a­tions for the PDF (Port­able Doc­u­ment Format) in a timely fash­ion — thereby gain­ing mar­ket advant­age. Well, the Draft PDF Ref­er­ence, Ver­sion 1.5 is avail­able before Acrobat 6.0 ships! Whilst this is a Draft ver­sion, and sub­ject to change, it does go to show that we are a friend­lier com­pany than some people claim.

Now, at 1107 pages in length — its not going to be a read for all of us!

Wel­come to Acrobat 6.0. Over the past couple of weeks I have been work­ing on this doc­u­ment: Acrobat 6.0 Pro­fes­sional: Graph­ics, Print, Prepress Overview

On the Adobe web site, Acrobat Solu­tions for cre­at­ive pro­fes­sion­als is the area that con­tains print/prepress spe­cific features.

Adobe Acrobat Reader and Forms Data without Cus­tom CGI. This has been in pro­gress for a while — so its good to get this tech­nique published.

Hello, Adelaide and Perth!
GASAA PDF for Print, Oct Nov 2002 Jan 2003

Adobe Pho­toshop 7.0.x AltiVec­Core Update plug-in