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*** DesignGeek ***
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Tips and techniques for the digital designer
In this issue:
-- Illustrator Eyedropper and Collect for Output
-- Embedding Fonts in Web Pages
-- Swatch Import Tricks with InDesign
-- Unheralded new Panther feature
Issue 10, 11/17/03
Written by Anne-Marie "HerGeekness" Concepcion
© 2003 Seneca Design & Training, Inc.
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Coupla Illustrator Tiplets
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Eyedropper Plugged Up?
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What happened to the Illy Eyedropper tool's ability to pick up colors from a placed Photoshop file? You click and click on all sorts of cool colors in the placed image, but all that happens is your Fill and Stroke swatches get filled with "None" (the red slash mark).
Answer: By default in Illy 10/CS, the Eyedropper tool is set to pick up Transparency. That's the None color you're getting. Tell the tool to ignore Transparency and it'll pick up the color in the image instead, like how it works with its own objects.
So how do you tell it to ignore Transparency? Method 1: Hold down the Shift key while you click with the Eyedropper tool to temporarily ignore it. Method 2: Double-click the Eyedropper tool to open its settings, then uncheck Appearance/Transparency in the first column (Eyedropper Picks Up).
By the way, if you haven't double-clicked on the Eyedropper tool in Illustrator lately, skootch back from the keyboard first so your jaw doesn't land on it.
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Finally! A Collect for Output Plug-in for Illy
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I've written various tips about manually identifying and listing the components (such as fonts and linked/embedded images) of an Illustrator file in previous DesignGeek issues. Designers need to know how to do this when they hand off an Illustrator document so that they can include everything the file requires to open and print correctly on someone else's machine. It's also a good idea when archiving the project.
What Illustrator really needs, of course, is a Collect For Output-type function (or "Package" if you only speak InDesign) found in page layout programs so that we don't have to do the painstaking work ourselves.
Well, there is such a beast, as graphic consultant David Creamer recently alerted people to on the QuarkXPress listserv.
Art Files (a "Collection utility for Adobe Illustrator (.ai) files") is available here:
<http://www.code-line.com/software/artfiles.html>
A few notes: First, it's only for Mac OS X 10.2+. Second, it currently supports Illustrator 8, 9 and 10, no word on CS. Third, it's not fully released yet, it's in beta: version 0.9.2. But you can still download a free trial (good for 15 uses) and purchase it for $24.95. When it gets out of beta it'll cost $10.00 more.
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Embedding Fonts in Web Pages
Vexed with Verdana? Tired with Trebuchet? To hell with Helvetica? (One more: Arial gives you angst?) The meager standard font choices for web designers can get tiring. Of course, you can call for any font you'd like in your web pages, but if the user doesn't happen to have that same exact font active on their machine, your web page will appear in the default font per their browser settings -- typically, Times.
Web designers working on Windows machines (all web designers should have access to a Windows machine, if only for browser testing, actually) have the ability to embed non-standard fonts in web pages with Microsoft's Web Embedding Fonts Tool (WEFT), a free download:
<http://www.microsoft.com/typography/web/embedding/weft3>
This utility lets you create an Embedded Open Type (EOT) version of each font you call for in your web site's Cascading Style Sheets (assuming the font's designer allowed embedding). By uploading those EOT files to your server -- each is typically 1 or 2K, quite small -- and adding a few lines of extra CSS to your site, you can create web pages formatted in the font you want, even if the site visitor doesn't have that font loaded.
And I'm not talking just about using Garamond or Futura, though of course it's refreshingly liberating to be able to do that. But what about being able to extend a client's Corporate ID standards to their web site? Or set up a site in foreign language? Thousands of people use the WEFT/EOT solution to set up web pages in languages that use a non-Roman font, such as Hindi and Khmer. Check out the WEFT-using community at their busy on-line forum:
<http://groups.msn.com/MicrosoftWEFTuserscommunity/messageboard.msnw>
The hitch: Without any extra software, only site visitors using Windows Internet Explorer 4.x or above will see your pages in that font; everyone else gets the pages in their browser's default font. (Hey, I said this was a Microsoft utility, didn't I?) Still, since the overwhelming majority of Internet users are using Windows IE 4.X and above to view your site (check out your server logs), it's something to consider.
But you can get around the hitch: To make your EOT-based site appear as designed to users on Macs or who use Netscape or another browser, check out GlyphGate from em2 Solutions, a company based in Stockholm, Sweden:
<http://www.glyphgate.com/info/index.html>
It's a web server extension (works with Microsoft, Linux, and Mac web servers) that can detect non-IE/Windows visitors and enable them to see the pages with the embedded fonts. Using IE 5.2 in OS X, I was able to see demo pages that used non-standard display and body fonts to format live text. From the source code it appears the EOT fonts were derived from Ancient Script and ITC Franklin Gothic. Very cool!
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Importing Swatches in InDesign
One of InDesign CS's new features is the addition of "Load Swatches" to the Swatch palette's fly-out menu. With Load Swatches, you're able to add previously-defined color Swatches from other InDesign (CS and v2) files to your active InDesign CS document. This makes it easier to keep your colors consistent from one project to the next.
But what if you don't want *all* of the swatches from that other file, just one or two?
In that case, use the same secret back door that's available in InDesign 2: Other Library. You find the door by going to the Swatches palette's fly-out menu and choosing New Color Swatch. In the next dialog, press on the Color Mode: drop down menu, scroll past all the Pantones and Focoltones, and choose the last one, "Other Library...".
You'll get the standard Open/Save navigation dialog where you're supposed to point to a different Swatch library (Pantone, Toyo, TruMatch, etc.), perhaps from Photoshop or Illustrator's application folder.
But if you want, you can double-click on another InDesign document instead. When you do that, InDesign creates a quasi-Swatch Library with the same name as the file you chose, containing all the Swatch colors in that document. Now you can pick and choose which of those color Swatches you want to add to your current document, the same as you do for the proprietary swatch libraries.
I wish we could do the same for Paragraph and Character Styles! InDesign CS still has just the Load Styles options available, which loads all the Paragraph and/or Character styles into your current document at once, instead of letting you pick and choose. (Score one for Quark's Append... feature, which lets you do just that.)
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Panther Seminar uncovers an unheralded feature
Apple's latest version of OS X -- 10.3, aka Panther -- was released on October 24, 2003. Going against all instincts that were screaming "wait till it's been out a while!" I upgraded one of my design workstation Macs that had been happily purring under Jaguar for months. I had no choice, I had to update all the info and screen shots for the OS X seminar I do for Dynamic Graphics Training.
The upgrade was problem-free, and my first Panther-enabled seminar went off without a hitch in San Francisco last Friday. Not only did the content focus on doing design and production on a Mac running Panther, I actually used Panther to *give* the seminar, a more tricky operation... I was a little nervous about how my first generation G4 PowerBook (400 Mhz, 512MB RAM, weeny graphics card) would fare with Panther running things for a solid day, mirroring my screen and a screen projector, with eight or ten big fat design apps open at the same time, jumping from Classic to OS X, running Terminal, Font Book, the whole bit.
I thought about bringing its big brother instead (a new 1.25Mhz 15" Aluminum PowerBook with 1GB of RAM), but I think it's important to show how OS X can run on hardware that is *not* the latest and greatest -- the kind that you find in most design departments still using the Macs they bought back when everyone had money.
The veteran PowerBook came through like a trouper! The only program that hung with the spinning pizza wheel of death was Illustrator 10, which in my office at least has always been a little flaky. (Of course I told the attendees that I *meant* to do that, so I could demo Force Quitting. Heh heh.)
Anyway, while putting Panther through its paces in the days preceding the seminar, I discovered a great new feature that I hadn't read about before in all the Panther sites and books and magazine articles I've been amassing. I'm sure it's been mentioned, but let me point it out anyway.
The Open/Save dialogs now include a hierarchal "tree" view of a document's location on your hard drive (in the Where: drop-down menu) just like in OS 9. Man, did I miss this in Jaguar! I kept getting that "oh yeah, it's not there" feeling, when I'd press on the document name's drop down menu and see Home, Documents, Favorites, etc. instead of the folder hierarchy for the current location.
As in Jaguar, you still have the ability to figure that path out yourself by navigating visually in Column view (in Panther, you can choose List view instead if you like, thank you Steve), but it just feels more Mac-like to see it in the drop-down menu as well.
If you'd like to upgrade to Panther, Apple's $129.00 is not the only game in town. You can get it for $99.95 via MacConnection (list price of $119.95 and then you redeem a $20 rebate from them).
<http://shop.macconnection.com/Webcontent/Brands/Apple/Apple+Software.htm>
Then, check out Adam Engst (TidBITs e-zine publisher, Mac luminary) new venture, Take Control E-Books. These are 30-80 page "electronic book" PDFs that focus on one particular Mac topic. Each is only $5.00, making it a virtually risk-free purchase, and you can download them as soon as you purchase them.
The first two Take Control Books are "Take Control of Upgrading to Panther" (by Joe Kissell) and "Take Control of Customizing Panther" (by Matt Neuburg). Both books are excellent resources, and well worth the fiver. Free updates are included with the purchase.
<http://www.tidbits.com/takecontrol/default.html>
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OS X TRANSITION:
A SURVIVAL GUIDE FOR DESIGN STAFF AND MANAGEMENT
(Now updated for OS 10.3 -- Panther)
Note: The next seminar isn't scheduled until February 2004 (in Long Beach, California). If you can't wait that long, give me a call to arrange an on-site OS X training session customized for your work group. Even a half-day goes a long way, as many of the clients who've gone this route can attest. :-)
DGT Seminar details and registration here:
http://www.dgusa.com/dgt/dgt.aspx?viewCourse=13
All of Anne-Marie's software/seminar training info, student pix and testimonials, fees, etc. are here:
http://www.senecadesign.com/training/
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DesignGeek is a free bimonthly publication written by Anne-Marie "HerGeekness" Concepcion, a cross-media designer and authorized Adobe and Quark training provider. She owns Seneca Design & Training, Inc. in Chicago, Illinois (http://www.senecadesign.com/).
To subscribe to DesignGeek or read archived issues, go to its home on Seneca's site: http://www.senecadesign.com/designgeek/subscribe.html.
To unsubscribe, follow the link at the bottom of this page.
Contact Seneca by phone at 312-946-1100 or email at info@senecadesign.com
Copyright 2003 by Seneca Design & Training, Inc.
Please forward without cutting. Please contact Seneca for reprint permissions. We don't guarantee accuracy of articles. Company or product names mentioned in DesignGeek may be registered trademarks, we use the names in an editorial fashion with no intention of infringement.
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