www.nickhodge.com

From a John Nack’s post, through to a Business2.0 story.

From what I can see (but obvi­ously not exper­i­ence until it ships!) prepress people mak­ing masks (deep etches in AU magazine speak) are going to drool at this feature.

The Pho­toshop engin­eer­ing team is going to have oper­at­ors fall at their feet as gods: just like the heal­ing brush.

Ship it!

Ran­dom ques­tion popped into my head whilst hav­ing a shower: does Adobe Mars, the new pro­ject to rep­res­ent PDF as a pack­aged XML format, sup­port PDF’s strong print/prepress heritage.

Things like CMYK, col­or­spaces, high-dpi images, Post­script fonts, trap­ping set­tings (overprint/knockout) and the Crop/Bleed boxes. All those high-tech print­ing things.

The short answer is yes.

(test­ing pro­cess: InDes­ign doc­u­ment, export as PDF 1.3, open in Acrobat 8 Pro­fes­sional, Save as “PDF in XML Format” using Mars plu­gins, re-open, check with Acrobat 8 Advanced>Print Pro­duc­tion tools. Open SVG as text)

Roro­hiko have released a plu­gin for InDes­ign to con­vert col­our images to grey­scale at print time: Roro­hiko Color2Gray. Looks like it imple­ments this InDes­ign tech­nique, but in a much easier way.

It is dif­fi­cult to believe that the Cre­at­ive Suite and InDes­ign CS was announced a year ago. I’ve spent the long week­end updat­ing: Adobe InDes­ign: Prepress Tech­niques. This is a new sec­tion in the web site where InDes­ign Prepress tips and tech­niques will be pos­ted. Old, his­toric InDes­ign 2.0 doc­u­ment are still active.

A new art­icle: InDes­ign Prepress: What Are these White Boxes?

Missed this earlier, Adobe InDes­ign CS Print­ing Guide for Ser­vice Pro­viders If you are out­put­ting InDes­ign CS jobs, you will want to keep this handy. Its in the same fam­ily as the Adobe Illus­trator CS Print­ing Guide for Ser­vice Providers

Design­ing col­our for the web? Color Scheme Test­ing.

One month (exactly) to holidays.

InDes­ign CS: Prepress Overview

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

Adobe InDes­ign 2.x — Text Wrap and Alpha Channels

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!