Page Layout/Publishing News & Information from 2001

Review: ALAP Imposer
JULY 25—Not every publishing job requires the imposition step. Even when imposition is required, it has almost always been done by a technician in the back of the service bureau or print house using expensive, often custom imposition software as the last step before ripping and generating film or a proof. Quark can't even do imposition without forcing the designer to jump through hoops—unless you've added ALAP's (A Lowly Apprentice Production) Imposer 2.1.3.

Adobe InDesign: Well Rounded Rectangles
JULY 17—Experienced users of other desktop publishing applications may be surprised to note InDesign's lack of a tool for drawing rounded rectangles. Don't worry—it's not an oversight! In this clip from Total InDesign, Deke McClelland demonstrates InDesign's powerful Corner Effects command. With Corner Effects, you can choose between five different corner styles for your rectangle.

How To Screen Back Images in QuarkXPress
JUNE 28—The first step to screening back an area of an image, is to create a mask of the area we wish to screen back. In this example, we will draw a simple rectangular text box around our text as illustrated.

Spot Color Considerations
JUNE 12—There are several things designers need to be aware of when it comes to creating spot color jobs. First, the name of the color is critical. For some reason that only programmers know for sure, different programs use different naming conventions for the same color. Quark Express may call PMS 124 coated "PMS 124CV," while Photoshop will call it "PMS 124CVC" and Illustrator will call it "PMS124C."

Printing Duplexed Booklets from Adobe InDesign
JUNE 5—InDesign documents are in a format called reader spreads. Meaning, the front cover is the first page with the back cover being the last page. At times a format called Printers Spreads, where the first page is output with the last page, is required for final output. This is also useful when trying to build a composite with your laser printer.

InDesign: The Ligature Trick
MAY 22—In this clip from Total InDesign, Deke McClelland demonstrates InDesign's prowess at using ligatures. When the character "f" is followed by an "i" or an "l," the results can be less than pleasing to the eye. Ligatures solve this problem by replacing these combinations with a single attractive character.

QuarkXPress: Varnish Plates
MAY 16—This week we have a bonus tutorial supplied to us by the good folks at A Lowly Apprentice Productions (ALAP). ALAP is a software developer that makes plugins for both QuarkXPress and Adobe InDesign. We hope to feature more of their know-how in the coming months. This week we're presenting a tutorial for QuarkXPress, since most of our previous tutorials have been fairly heavily geared toward InDesign. Our tutorial involves ALAP's product ImagePort and Adobe Photoshop. ImagePort is an XTension for QuarkXPress that provides additional functionality for native Photoshop files within Quark, including the ability to preserve Photoshop layers. Look for future installments covering important tips for print production using both applications.

InDesign: Multi-Line Composing
MAY 8—Foresight isn't necessarily a quality you'd expect to find in a desktop publishing application, but Adobe InDesign is full of surprises! In this clip from Total InDesign, Deke McClelland introduces the Adobe Multi-Line Composer, which has an unprecedented ability to "look ahead" when composing text. Rather than just looking at the next line when setting justification, letter spacing and hyphenation, the Multi-Line Composer can look up to thirty lines ahead, creating much more consistent text layout. Watch this clip, and see Deke give a clear demonstration of this easy-to-enable feature.

MARCH 30
PlanSystem 3 To Debut at Seybold
Media Automation Consulting says it will debut version 3 of its PlanSystem at Seybold Boston this year. PlanSystem is a publishing management system designed for magazines and other periodicals. PlanSystem supports the editorial process from planning through output.

MARCH 21
WoodWing, Unisys Team for InDesign Content Manager
Unisys and WoodWing Software have teamed up in a development effort for Unisys' News Content Manager for Adobe InDesign. The first phase in the agreement calls for the two companies to develop a solution to transfer layout information and typography from InDesign to News Content Manager in order to allow Unisys clients to work with InDesign as well as the Unisys pagination engine.

MARCH 12
Bitstream Ships Unlocked Font CD
For the second time this year, Bitstream has released an entire CD of fonts unlocked. This latest collection, Type Odyssey, includes more than 1,000 PostScript and TrueType fonts for both Mac and Windows. The included fonts come from independent foundries in the United States and United Kingdom.

MARCH 12
Quark Releases CopyDesk SE
Quark today announced the release of QuarkCopyDesk Special Edition, a text-editing and processing application designed for writers and editors. The new software offers the text features of QuarkXPress without the overhead of the graphics features, according to Quark.

MARCH 12
Adobe To Ship Acrobat 5
Adobe today announced Acrobat Reader 5.0, a forthcoming upgrade to its PDF creation software.

MARCH 6
Extensis Supports QuarkXPress with Preflight Online
Extensis has added support for QuarkXPress in its preflighting service called Preflight Online. This service allows users to diagnose problems with documents via the Internet without additional software.

FEBRUARY 26
GretagMacbeth Inks Deal with Fuji Hunt
GretagMacbeth and Fuji Hunt have signed an agreement to distribute Gretag's color profiling and color management software with Fuji Hunt's photographic products. The partnership will integrate GretagMacbeth's ProfileMaker 3.1 and iCColor into Fuji Hunt's digital offerings, as well as offerings for photoprocessing customers.

FEBRUARY 22
News: EFI Partners with Pageflex for Variable Data Printing
Electronics for Imaging (EFI), the company behind Fiery PostScript RIPs, has partnered with Pageflex to develop software for variable data printing. Under the agreement, the companies plan to incorporate Pageflex VDP technologies into EFI products.

FEBRUARY 19
News: ALAP Ships InDesign Plugins
A Lowly Apprentice Production (ALAP) has started shipping three new page layout and publishing tools, as well as an update to InBooklet. InBooklet is an Adobe InDesign plugin for page imposition. The new version adds expanded printing capabilities to allow 2-up printer spreads and 3-up and 4-up consecutive pages from Adobe InDesign. InBooklet allows users to impose pages from a single InDesign document with full control over margins, gaps, bleed, creep and crossover traps. InBooklet 1.01 is a free update from 1.0.

News: Quark Upgrades Asset Management System
FEB. 13—Quark today announced an upgrade to QuarkDMS, it's asset management and publishing system. The new version, 1.5, includes a revamped interface on both Mac and Windows, designed to improve workflow with new features like the ability to set attributes of multiple files or folders with a single action. It also gains support for contextual menus for common tasks and the ability to drag and drop assets or folders to the desktop.

News: ALAP Releases Xpert Align
FEB. 9—A Lowly Apprentice Production (ALAP) has release Xpert Align, an XTension for QuarkXPress that allows users to align items in a Quark document. It can align items left, right, top and bottom, as well as horizontal center and vertical center. It can also be used to distribute items vertical top, center and bottom and horizontal left, center and right.

ALAP ShadowCaster for Adobe InDesign: Shadow effects for Adobe InDesign
FEB. 7—The drop shadow is a fact of design, and ALAP's ShadowCaster for Adobe InDesign is here to address this reality. Like its elder sibling, ALAP ShadowCaster XT for QuarkXPress, ShadowCaster for InDesign is a plugin that allows the user to select an object in a layout and generate a shadow based on that object. The shadow is generated automatically as a TIFF file.