Nick Hodge's Blog

This was published at Taking the high-tech road. Thanks to Wayne Cosshall

Essentials

1. Buy a laptop that has international warranty, or where the vendor is an international vendor. Finding “Fred-in-the-Shed” laptop manufacturers in India is probably minimal. I only travel with Dell, and where required for the job, Apple laptops. This gives you a degree of comfort if the electronics (screen, motherboard, cards) fail in the laptop. Obviously, there are other well-known brand names that have service facilities in other regions.
2. The next most common problem is a Hard Drive failure. Always take your backup CDs with you. I constantly travel with a current OS install CD (Windows XP) and core applications install (Office XP, Adobe applications) This will mean that if the hard drive fails, I can restore my HD and at least communicate with the world. As I backup my data to CD (manually), I take the most recent backup of data too. DVD burners are also affordable, so instead of taking 5-6 CDs, take on DVD containing the bare essential installers.
3. Ensure that the power supply you take with you supports a “wide range” of voltages (V) and current (A). In countries like India, the power supply fluctuates wildly, and even in 5-star hotels gets cut off at the most inconvienent moments.
4. Always arrive at the airport with the laptop having fully recharged batteries. In some countries, airport security will require you to boot up your laptop to ensure that it is a laptop. Its best to be able to do this without needing to plug into power. Secondly, if your flight is delayed you can at least startup and do some work. If there is a phone line around, you can check the news, mail and other essential things.
5. As my laptop has an internal CD burner, I carry a few blank CDs (just in case). As it also has a Firewire (IEEE1394) connection, I also carry an external 10Gb hard drive for emergency backup.
6. NEVER install new software whilst on the road. NEVER buy pirate software in whatever country.
7. Be careful with hardware purchases in other countries. Incompatible power supplies are usually supplied, and support is sometimes limited to the country of purchase.
8. Choose an ISP that gives you a local dial-in number in the country you are in. Taking a laptop with you means that you are not relying on Hotmail-style email accounts, and therefore need to get onto the Internet. Again, in the absolute worst case, enable data communications on your mobile phone and use the Infra-red capabilities to use your mobile as a 9600 baud modem. My Nokia has IrDA and Bluetooth, as does the laptop. I can use this as a modem to at least get connected to the internet, get and send mail. Due to the cost of doing this, especially overseas, use it rarely.
9. Purchase a good bag to contain your precious cargo. Ensure that it protects the laptop and contains the essential elements needed to be working. Assume that your main, checked in luggage is going to get lost.
10. Modem communications was once a black art. Now its just a grey art. You still hit strange problems in some hotels. For instance in New Zealand, some older hotels have digital telephone exchanges requiring you to use a special cable to connect from your RJ11 on your PCCard/Laptop to their phone system. I am finding a majority of hotels have “data port enabled” telephones in their rooms that permit laptop style connections. Sometimes I disconnect the cable coming from the wall to the telephone and use this in my laptop when all else fails. In Thailand recently, I had to use the business centre’s computers as the ISP’s phone lines were down for many hours. Thankfully, the RJ11 connector is reasonably universal in the places I visit. If you travel to RAR Australia, I suggest taking the old PMG style connector.

Pleasures

1. I have recently subscribed and used Skynet Global. In Qantas Clubs, this gives you extra connectivity whilst you wait for your flight. Using wireless cards, you can connect to the Internet, get your mail etc.
2. Singapore Airlines (and others) have in-seat power. With the purchase of a ~$250 Targus style power supply, you can use your laptop in-flight without draining batteries. The sooner Qantas do this, the better.
3. Hotels with high-speed internet access such as Intertouch (http://www.inter-touch.com/) This is a godsend if you are an internet junkie.

Wishes

1. The US would use GSM in the same frequency as the rest of the world.
2. Every hotel and public telephone had highspeed/ethernet style access
3. laptops were smaller and batteries lasted longer
4. a combination mobile phone, PDA and digital camera – that doesn’t make you look like a nerd.
5. Universal, wide-area 802.11. Wireless everywhere, always on!

Visit the new InDesign Prepress Section: Adobe InDesign: Prepress Techniques

Why is my text printed from InDesign (a) fat (b) outlined (c) fuzzy (d) or all of the above?

This article describes the Adobe Support Database Text Is Rasterized When You Print to a RIP from InDesign (2.0 on Windows or Mac OS)

In this example, you can see there has been a Photoshop file placed into a layout:

The Photoshop file on the red-marked layer (named: “photoshop file”) has been masked out of a background image, and saved as a .PSD . A text wrap has also been applied to this Photoshop files alpha channel (or transparency) causing the text in the yellow layer (named: “body text”) to wrap. Nothing too strange about this, however when printed to Postscript and Distilled, the following occurs:

This is a screen dump of the PDF generated from the InDesign 2.0 file above (Print to Postscript as CMYK, using the [High Resolution] Transparency Flattener Style. Distilled using the [Press] .joboption in Distiller 5.0.5)

As you can see, around the marker “A”, the text looks “fatter” and “fuzzier” than the text next to the marker “B”. This is the result of the transparency flattener. (NB: in Acrobat, in Edit>Preferences, Display if you turn on the “Smooth Line Art” option, this fuzziness goes away.)

Lets zoom into the area where the Photoshop file and the body text overlap. You can see in the above image that the red outline of the image overlaps certain lines in the underlying body text. In this instance, the Transparency Flattener has decided to covert the all the text to outlines in the lines that run underneath the image.

The effect we are seeing here is the Transparency Flattener in action. In Postscript, there is no way to have a semi-transparent image (the masked portion of the car) blend into type. Therefore, the flattener converts the relevant text to outlines and “clips” into the outline shape any image information that is required to generate output. The important end goal is to generate output in print that matches the designers intent.

To an average observer, at high resolutions (I have examples at 2400/133lpi Computer-to-Plate output) — its difficult for the naked eye to pick “outlined” vs “normal” type with serif text at low point sizes.

How do you solve the problem?

There are two possible solutions to this problem. One key point I would like to make before I continue is that you must choose one path or the other for the whole job.

Choice 1: Convert All Text to Outlines.

InDesign 2.0, Edit>Transparency Flattener Styles… Create a New Transparency Flattener style that turns on the “Force Text to Outlines” option.

Now when printing using this Flattener Style to the Distiller (ie: same process as above), the end result will look like:

The result is that all the text in the document is converted to outlines. When you compare a page printed (at 2400 dpi/133 lpi) with text converted to outlines side by side with a page where the text is normal, the difference is just noticable to the naked eye.

If you use this flattener style consistently throughout the job, the result will be that all the text looks consistent. The downside is that the text is no longer text – it’s paths – unsearchable and to a trained eye slightly fatter.

Choice 2: Change Layer Ordering

This is my preferred option, and when designing documents in InDesign its best to follow a process where all body text in the topmost layer.

In the InDesign document, I am going to change the order of the layers so the body text sits above the image:

In the above example, you can see that the “photoshop file” layer is underneath the “body text” layer.

QuarkXPress Users: don’t panic! As you would realise, in Xpress, your text wrap is based on the positioning of objects in layers. Images above text pushes the text out of the way: creating text wrap. Not so in InDesign. Text wrap in InDesign is object-to-object based. It doesn’t matter that the image is underneath the text, it will still cause the text above to wrap around.

Prepress operators: don’t panic! Changing layer ordering like this will not cause InDesign 2.0 to re-wrap the text.

InDesign CS2 Update: Note in InDesign CS2, there is a Preference (in the composition area) that effects text flow, too. The setting “Text Wrap Only Effects Text Underneath” may effect how text flows around objects underneath.

What is the result?

In this final result, you can see that the text has not been converted to outlines. This example was printed from InDesign 2.0 using the standard [High Resolution] flattener style.