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*** DesignGeek ***
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Tips and techniques for the digital designer
In this issue:
-- Artist Forgot to Include a Bleed?
-- Add Columns of Numbers in ID/QXP
-- Last Chance for my 2-day ID CS3 Expert Class
-- Speaking of Bleeds ... The Game!
Issue 64, 7/27/07
Written by Anne-Marie "HerGeekness" Concepcion
... for her clients, colleagues, random contacts and interested subscribers
(c) 2007 Seneca Design & Training, Inc.
[NOTE to readers: My apologies for not being able to get an issue out in June, and this one arriving so late in the month! I had too many competing deadlines. I hope to get two issues out in August to make up for it -- I have a ton of great tips in the slush pile. --AM]
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Artist Forgot to Include a Bleed?
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One of the first concepts that print designers learn is "bleed." If you want the final printed work to have artwork that appears to print right up to the edge of the paper -- that "bleeds" off the edge -- you need to place it so that its edges overlap the edges of the layout page, typically an overlap of at least 9 points (.125 inches) on each bleeding edge.
When the job is printed on oversized paper and cropped to the final page size (the page size specified in the layout program), the trimming lops off the overlapping artwork, resulting in a nice bleed in the finished piece.
Occasionally, though, no one tells the artist supplying a page-size image about the bleed thing. Or the artist is too new to the magical world of printing presses to understand the requirements. They were told the publication is 6" by 9" so they give the client a 6" x 9" piece of artwork for the cover. The client/boss gives it to the designer who says, "Uhhh, this is too small. It's supposed to bleed on three sides: top, bottom, and right."
If the designer just positions the artwork on the page so it perfectly fits -- no overlap -- then there's a good chance the the final printed pieces will show slivers of the paper color at the edges of the page, because of how paper can shift slightly as it moves through the presses at lightning speed. [Edit: Actually, the problem would occur at the trimming stage, not as a result of misregistration. As one of the handful of printers who read the story and e-mailed me about this said, "The real reason for bleed is more mundane: It is because at the trimming stage, the physical action of the guillotine on the piles of printed paper cannot ever guarantee a perfect cut - even on the most expensive guillotines." Thank you! --AM]
Recently, two different clients of mine encountered this exact situation, and someone else wrote about it in one of the prepress forums online. Must be something in the air. Interestingly, in all these cases, the simplest solution -- tell the artist to make it bigger -- was impossible, because they were dealing with legacy files and the original artist had dropped off the face of the planet.
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The Fix
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If you're very lucky, the image will lend itself to scaling without pixellation or ruining its design. Just size it up in the layout program so you've got a bleed, and go on your way.
More often, though, the artwork contains other elements (such as a special type treatment or a fancy border) that would look too big if it was scaled up, or off-balance if only a couple sides needed to bleed. In that case, the solution is to roll up your sleeves and "make it bigger" yourself in an artwork program.
You don't want to scale it up the artwork program either, just increase its dimensions -- its own page size -- slightly. Then you'll add art elements to the added area. Your handiwork will likely never see the light of day because it's going to end up outside of the live page area, in the bleed allowance. But in case the paper shifts slightly on press and some of this overlapping artwork lands in the "live" area, users won't see blank paper.
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Adding Bleed to Vectors
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If it's a vector EPS, AI or PDF file, open it up in Adobe Illustrator and pray any fonts it uses were embedded or converted to outlines. (If it requires fonts you don't have, you'll have to rasterize it in Photoshop and correct it there. It's a last resort.) In Illustrator, go to File > Document Setup, and increase the size of the artboard to account for the bleed. In the example of a 6" x 9" page that needs to bleed on three sides, you'd change the artboard width from 6" to 6.125," and the height from 9" to 9.25."
After you click OK you'll see that your artboard grew from the center and the artwork itself stayed in position. That's exactly what you want for the Height, since there's now .125" of extra room above and below the artwork. But since you want the Width's additional .125 to only appear on to the right of the artwork, you'll need to move all the artwork .0625" to the left. (That's .125 divided by 2.) Just choose Select > Select All, then Object > Transform > Move and enter "-.0625" in the Horizontal field, and click OK.
Now you need to fill in the empty artboard area you have on the top, bottom and right sides of the artwork.
Use your Direct Selection tool to extend edges of elements into the bleed area, or fill the empty space with 0-stroke rectangles filled with the same color as adjacent art elements. You don't have to be perfect here. Remember, you're just trying to avoid slivers of paper showing up. Consider that at least 95% of what you create will be lopped off during the trimming process, assuming your commercial printer keeps their presses maintained.
Save your file with a different name so you know it's the one you added the bleed to, place it in the layout program, and voila, it's large enough to overlap the trim edge. Since you're not scaling it, the important elements inside the live area are untouched, they're exactly as the original artist intended.
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Adding Bleed to Rasters
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Use the same basic procedure when you need to add a bleed allowance to a raster image. Open up the artwork in Photoshop, then "make it bigger" in the Image > Canvas Size dialog box. If you turn on the Relative checkbox, you can enter the actual bleed amounts in the Width and Height fields instead of adding that measure to the existing dimensions. "Relative" means "add this amount to what's already here."
Unlike Illustrator, Photoshop lets you specify how the extra canvas area should be added to the image (instead of just adding it evenly on all sides). You do this by selecting one of the nine boxes in the little Anchor grid in the Canvas Size dialog box. If you want the additional measure added to the top, bottom and right sides of the existing image, click the middle box in the left-most column of the grid. The selected box stands for the existing image; so you're telling Photoshop to "grow" the canvas above, below and to the right of it.
(It's times like these that I wish I could include a screen shot! I'm working on that ...) [Edit: This article was reprinted with permission by CreativePro.com on Aug. 6, 2007, and they included screenshots! Check it out, they called the story "I Bleed for You" ... heh. --AM]
Click the OK button and you'll see the empty canvas area for your bleed allowance appear above, below and to the right of the existing artwork. I recommend that at this point, you don't just start painting in it willy-nilly. It's too easy to accidentally mess up the original art. Instead, add another layer in the Layers panel and do all your fill-in work on that layer. (Creating a slightly feathered layer mask here can also help keep your additions from impinging too much on the original artwork on the layer below.)
If the artwork's edges are a flat color, you can pick up that color with the Eyedropper and then paint that color into the canvas area on Layer 2, or just fill selection rectangles with it, for that matter. If the edge is some sort of pattern or texture, you can use the Clone Stamp tool to pick up pixels near the edge of the art in Layer 1 and paint them into the empty canvas area in Layer 2. You can even just copy and paste thin rectangular selections from the artwork to the empty canvas area, overlapping them slightly and blurring the edges so the transition from the real artwork to the fill-in you're making in the bleed isn't too harsh.
Again, remember most of what you're adding is going to get lopped off anyway, so don't get too obsessive about it. People will be focusing on the interesting middle parts of the art. You're just trying to eliminate any distracting slivers of paper show-through at the extreme edges.
Finally, save your file under a different name, flatten it into a TIFF if necessary, and place it into your layout program. And there you go, a bleed allowance on the artwork without having to scale it.
Remember all your painstaking attention to detail on this project when your next review rolls around!
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Add Columns of Numbers in ID/QXP
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The other day I was laying out a data-heavy table in InDesign. The bottom row was supposed to contain sum totals of the numbers in each column, but I didn't have those figures. All I had was the client's Microsoft Word file containing the original columnar data, and no sums there either.
Sighing, I hauled out my adding machine (translation: I pressed F12 on my Mac to open up the Calculator widget) and was about to start entering each column's numbers to get totals when I thought, "This is ridiculous! I'm on a computer more powerful than the ones used to send people to the moon! This is not a $2500 adding machine!" I pressed F12 again to close the widgets and thought about it for a bit.
It is very aggravating that a program that allows you to create tables doesn't include even the simplest functions to add up the numbers in one of its columns. Can I get a witness? Yeah, yeah, I know a layout program is not an accounting or spreadsheet program, and designers often use tables to create things without a single number in it.
But. Still. This is a computer! C'mon!
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Microsoft Word to the Rescue
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After a minute of thinking, I realized that of course, I already had a program that can add up numbers in a column: Microsoft Excel. Unfortunately, I'm one of the three business owners on the planet who doesn't understand Excel. I mainly use it to open OPS's (Other People's Spreadsheets) and wonder how they did that, and why didn't they just use Filemaker.
I *do* know Microsoft Word, though, so I opened up the original Word file the client had sent.
Now, if you're an experienced Word user, you're probably already thinking this: "Use Word's AutoSum feature." For those of you who seldom use Word (it's amazing to me how many designers never open it up), what the Word geeks are thinking of is the the exact feature I want in my layout programs; an "add this up!" button in Word's Tables and Borders toolbar (View > Toolbars > Tables and Borders).
The AutoSum button is simple to use. You put your cursor in an empty cell below a column of numbers, click the AutoSum button in the toolbar, and Word inserts the sum of the numbers above into the cell. Numbers in parentheses or prefixed with a negative sign (a hyphen) are correctly calculated as negative amounts. Alternatively, you can put your cursor in an empty column at the far right of a table, and click AutoSum to get the total of the numbers in the row.
But, my fellow Word freaks, AutoSum only works on tables, which my document didn't have. Instead of a table, the user had aligned the columns of numbers with multiple tabs and space runs. I'd need to spend time cleaning up all the extra spaces and tabs separating the columns so that I could convert it to a clean table. And that almost defeats the purpose of looking for a fast way to sum up columns of numbers in a layout program.
Then I thought, aha! I do have a table! I could flip back to InDesign, select the table, copy it, and paste it into a Word document, where it comes in as an editable Word table. I love that you can round-trip tables from Word to InDesign and back, though some formatting may be lost in transit. (Unfortunately, QuarkXPress tables aren't constructed the same. You'd need to convert a table to text in XPress first, copy the tabular data, paste it into Word, and then convert it back to a table via Word's Table > Convert > Text to Table feature.)
Anyway, once I had a clean table in Word, I could just insert an empty row at the bottom of it and do the AutoSum magic for each column, then copy/paste the last row back into InDesign (or XPress, if I was using it). But then I remembered: AutoSum requires every cell in the column it's going to add to be filled with a number. The columns in my table were riddled with text entries (for example, "n/a" or "see below"), merged into other cells, or were empty. Argh! I'd still need to do clean-up work just to get the sums.
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Secret Word Feature: Calculate
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Finally, I remembered that Word has a far more forgiving and flexible AutoSum feature called "Calculate." It doesn't require a table, and it's smart enough to ignore empty paragraphs and text in a selection. Not even Excel can do that.
"Calculate" used to get some respect in Microsoft Word. It was a full-fledged command in the Tools menu back in the day. But about ten years ago, I think with the release of version 52 B.C., Microsoft retired it into a dusty, neglected corner in the Tools > Customize > Commands dialog box.
Luckily you can still retrieve it. Open up that dialog box (in either the Mac or Windows versions of Word), click on the Tools category, and scroll down until you see the command "Tools Calculate." Drag the command and drop it onto a toolbar you use all the time. (I dropped it onto the Standard toolbar.)
Now you can make just about any sort of selection in your Word document -- if you don't have a Word document to begin with, just copy/paste a table or text from your layout program into a new Word file and run it from there -- and Tools Calculate will tell you the sum of the numbers contained in the selection.
And that's the beauty of it. Unlike AutoSum or even Excel, the Calculate command ignores everything that's not a number in the selection when it computes a total. It works with selections of table columns or rows (even if the selection includes text, merged cells, or empty cells). It works with columns of numbers made with tabs and spaces. It even works on sentences and paragraphs!
For example, if you select the sentence, "Mary had 15 apples, Joe had 10, and Jennifer had 3;" and click on the Tools Calculate button, the status bar at the bottom of the document window reports, "The result of the calculation is 28." If poor Joe had -10 apples (negative 10), the message would say, "The result of the calculation is 8." Pretty smart!
You don't have to memorize what the status bar says. Word automatically puts a copy of the calculation in your computer's Clipboard memory. So after running the Calculate command, you could click a text insertion point in the Word file (or in any document in any program), choose Edit > Paste (Command/Control-V), and the calculation result is pasted into the text flow, matching the current formatting.
And that's how I ended up adding up the columns of numbers in my InDesign table. In the original Microsoft Word document, I selected a single column's worth of numbers (with some unavoidable text and empty tabs mixed in) by holding down the Option key while dragging with the text cursor. (That's another little-known Word feature, by the way, that I wish my layout programs had. Option/Alt-dragging in Word lets you make columnar text selections through multiple paragraphs.)
With a column selected, I clicked the Tools Calculate button on my toolbar, flipped over to InDesign and pasted in the result at the bottom of the matching column in the table. Rinse and repeat a few times, and I was done.
Who needs a calculator when you've got Word? And it can be used as a word processor, too.
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Last Chance for my 2-day ID CS3 Expert Class
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It's not often that I get to teach an open-to-the-public, hands-on class in Adobe InDesign; in fact I can't remember the last time I did one. (Almost all my training is customized to a single company and done on-site.)
But I'll get a chance to do so this August 15 and 16, as part of a new seminar series called the Mastering Prepress Essentials Conference. I'll be leading a two-day hands-on class called Adobe InDesign CS3 Expert Training (more on this below). Organized by the Waukesha County Technical College (wctc.edu) near Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the conference is sponsored by Adobe, Kodak and Heidelberg. The class sessions will be held in the beautiful Harry Quadracci Printing and Graphic Center on the WCTC campus.
I'd love to see you there! Registration for my class closes August 7, so if you want to reserve your spot (limited to 36 students total), contact them directly to register:
262.695.6576
cctmatrix@wctc.edu
Or you can download the PDF brochure, which has a map, a description of the other classes at the conference, and registration info, here:
http://senecadesign.com/promo/Prepress_Ess_Conf.pdf
My Adobe InDesign CS3 Expert Training class is designed to bring current InDesign users up to speed with the new features in CS3, as well ramp up their skills with the beyond-the-basics kinds of things that have been in InDesign for awhile, including tables, styles, transparency, and troubleshooting. The goal will be to equip everyone with the knowledge they'll need to pass the Adobe Certified Expert exam; either the CS2 one that's currently available; or the soon-to-be released CS3 exam.
The two-day class with limited seating is only $389 per person for both days, and includes a continental breakfast, lunch and textbook. That fee is much less than what my company normally charges for custom training -- indeed, far less than what most training centers charge for their public classes.
As with all my hands-on training, everyone is invited to bring in any problem-child files or issues that we'll dissect during class, and all the students receive three years of 24/7 follow-up support by phone or e-mail from me.
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Speaking of Bleeds ... The Game!
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So you think you know your design jargon? Check out this neat Flash game I found on the web:
Find the 25 Design Terms
http://www.collemcvoy.com/findthe25designterms/
After you enter the game you're confronted by an illustration of a spooky street corner at night. See the dead guy in the gutter with a pool of blood? Click on the blood and the screen highlights it, shows a definition of Bleed ("An element that extends beyond the edge of the page") and fills in #1 of the 25 design terms contained in the illustration.
If you can find the other 24 within the time limit you can win a limited edition poster of the illustration, otherwise you can always purchase one. It took me four tries before I was able to locate and click all 25 representations of design and prepress terms within the time limit.
Have fun!
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MASTER THE LATEST DESIGN APPS WITH HERGEEKNESS!
Do you like what you read in DesignGeek? Find anything useful? Bring me or any of my hand-picked Associate Geeks in for a session or two of hands-on training for your workgroup; here in Chicago or any other city near an airport, and you can have this level of expertise all to yourself. All training comes with three years of 24/7 follow-up support for each student by phone or e-mail.
To learn more, or hear what other clients have to say, contact us or fill out the no-obligation "Request a Training Quote' form on Seneca's site:
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Recent training clients in Chicago and throughout the U.S. and Canada include Columbia College (InDesign); PeerDirect (InCopy); Paragraphs (InDesign); McGraw-Hill (InCopy); Goldberg Kohn (QuarkXPress, Photoshop); MacArthur Foundation (InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator); Advanstar Media (InDesign, InCopy); and Marquette University (InCopy).
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DesignGeek is a free monthly 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:
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Copyright 2007 by Seneca Design & Training, Inc.
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