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Large companies have spent many years and millions of dollars ensuring that computer-generated text looks great.

Sometimes, we’ve got to roughen the text up. Make it look more natural. Remove the clinical accuracy of computer generated type. Here’s a technique using Adobe Illustrator 10’s Transparency and Warping features to make text look bad.

Step 1: Type the Text. In this instance, I am using ITC American Typewriter-Bold.

Step 2: Window>Transparency. From the flyout menu choose “Make Opacity Mask”. This will hide all of the text behind a mask. Opacity Masks in Illustrator 9 and 10 work the same as Layer Masks in Photoshop. In Illustrator, however, they are vector shapes that hide (black areas) or show (white areas) the underlying object. The Opacity Masks can be placed on an object-by-object basis. Using levels of gray, you can partly reveal underlying objects.

Step 3: Paint into the Mask. Here I have selected the Mask as the target (you see a solid black line around the mask in the Transparency palette). Using a Paint Brush, stroking with White (no colour) and using a particular brush from the Brushes palette I have painted white into the mask, thereby revealing the underlying hidden text. Brushes in Illustrator are vector shapes, so this will be sharp on output.

Click onto the left-hand preview of your object in the Transparency palette. By clicking back on the text (or object) on the left hand side of the transparency palette, you return to normal editing of objects. The beauty of this technique is that the text is still live and editable.

Step 4: Now to subtly warp the text. The process here is to create an envelope over the text.  Illustrator 10 cannot warp live text, so what we are going to do is warp a rectangular shape that live text is enveloped into.

Firstly, create a rectangle that just encompasses the text.

Step 5: Envelope Distort: select both the newly created rectangle and the Text. Go to Object>Envelope Distort>Make with Top Object. The text is now distorted slightly into the rectangular frame.

Step 6: Use the Warp Tool. In this instance, I have used the Pucker tool to permit simple warping of the rectangular frame around the text. As the text is inside the frame, the text warps into this shape. As this text has an Opacity Mask applied, this is also warped.

Step 7: (Optional) To edit the text, Click on the object and go Object>Envelope Distort>Edit Contents. You will find you can still edit the underlying text.

Thanks to: Colin Smith for the first transparency brushing technique.

Well, this special event is in the past. If you would like to see it on again, please email me!

The leading graphics applications are also leaders in automation. Learn how scripting Adobe applications can save you huge amounts of time and money, and create more customised solutions that pay for themselves quickly.

Venue:
Adobe Systems
Level 4, 67 Albert Avenue
Chatswood, NSW 2067.

Hosted by Nick Hodge, Adobe Systems
Presented by Shane Stanley, Myriad Communications

Dates:
Wednesday, 21st August 2002
Thursday, 22nd August 2002

Times:
Registration 8:30am
Lunch 1:00pm
Finish 5:00pm

Topics:

Wednesday: Scripting InDesign day: Creating and modifying documents, placing and manipulating pictures and text, dealing with picture links, page items, colors, tables, inlines, styles and fonts, printing, exporting PDFs, using libraries and creating hyperlinks.

Thursday: Scripting Photoshop, Illustrator and Acrobat: Photoshop: opening and saving/exporting in different formats, adjusting and filtering, and using javascript with the Action Manger. Illustrator: creating documents, dealing with layers and paths, working with colors, importing and exporting. Plus a session on integration: bringing it all together in workflows.

Cost:
Free

Registration Process:
Email Nick Hodge

Requirements:

• Knowledge of AppleScript. If you need a refresher, or to learn AppleScript, Shane is running a fee-based course on Tuesday 20th August.
• If you can bring a PowerBook, please do. We’ll ensure you get at least the 30-day trial version of the software installed.

What about Windows?
If you are interested in learning how to script using VBScript, please contact Nick so we can guage interest. This course is AppleScript-based, intensive and exclusive.

Have you received an InDesign 2.0 document and are not sure of its heritage? Maybe there is something that just doesn’t seem right, and before going off the deep end – you need to confirm your suspicions.

Here’s how to check:

• MacOS: hold down the Command (Apple) key, and go to the Apple menu, “About InDesign” (MacOS X: it’s under the “InDesign” menu)
• Windows: hold down the Control key, and go to Help>About InDesign

A dialog box will appear that displays indepth, support information related to the topmost document.

As you can see in the above screen dump, this document started life out as a QuarkXpress 3.32 document. Knowing this, you may be able to double check for text wrap issues, font missing problems and any left over ‘bits’ that may have accumulated in the Xpress document over time.

Whilst this is in InDesign mainly for support reasons, I happened to have accidently found this menu when noodling around InDesign for “easter eggs”. Thankfully this is no zapping alien. It is way more useful than that!

Thanks to Cari Jansen for assisting/clarifying me on this one!

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

A question: what is the difference between these output formats when printing from InDesign? I must admit, its something I wasn’t too clear on. So I decided to hunt down a definitive answer by doing some intensive testing.

Let’s start with an InDesign 2.0 document that contains many elements and see what changes at print time. There are three panels: all of the elements within these panels are defined in the colour space CMYK, RGB or Spot colour. The Placed PSD is a normal Photoshop 7 .PSD file; the four rectangles are created in InDesign and the placed EPS is saved as an Illustrator 8 EPS from Illustrator 10.

Printing from InDesign 2.0 using Composite RGB results in all InDesign created elements and placed bitmaps being converted to RGB. Placed EPS or PDF elements stay in their placed colour mode (RGB or CMYK or god forbid, both). Spot colour elements; either created in InDesign 2.0 or placed stay as spot colour elements.

Printing from InDesign 2.0 using Composite CMYK results is virtually the as the above: all InDesign created elements and placed bitmaps being converted to CMYK. Placed EPS or PDF elements stay in their placed colour mode (RGB or CMYK or god forbid, both). Spot colour elements; either created in InDesign 2.0 or placed stay as spot colour elements.

This conversion is triggered from the document colourspaces. You will notice a different if you turn on colour management, or assign profiles to bitmaps in the InDesign document.

A little Transparency Flattener Magic

In the above example, this is the resulting PDF when printing Composite Gray, but with placed PDF or EPS elements. They are not converted to Grayscale. So, here’s our little technique with transparency applied.

The Flattener is your colourspace conversion friend. If you take a placed EPS or PDF element that you are not sure in CMYK or RGB, just set its transparency to 99.9% Normal. Now when printing, this element is routed through the magic of the Flattener prior to output. It sees that your are printing “Composite CMYK” or “Composite RGB” and converts the output to that colourspace. The next question is “what happens, doesn’t this make it see through? Won’t it blend with the colours underneath?” Well, no. 0.1% is a VERY small percentage, and it rounds back to a full number (evidently, some stuff is represented as integers, so 0.1% of 255 is a 254.75, which rounds back up to 255)

You can also use this to force a document into Grayscale. Setting placed EPS/PDF elements with 99.9% transparency and printing Composite Gray results in a 100% Grayscale PDF [watch for spots!]. Good for Newsprint applications. Be warned; the grayscale colours chosen might not always be what you want at print time.

What about exporting EPS or PDF?

Yes, this same process applies.

EPS: you have a choice of CMYK, Gray or RGB. The flattener trick with 99.9% transparency works here too, as elements have to be flattened in the Postscript stream.

PDF: you have a choice of CMYK, RGB or Leave Unchanged. Again, the flattener is invoked where required.

What is the Difference Between InRIP Separations and Composite CMYK?

When printing InRIP separations you are printing Composite CMYK (as above), but InDesign adds some extra Postscript commands to the output device. This instructs the RIP to generate a page per colourant in the file. So, if there is spot colour in the document, it will be separated onto its own plate.

By the way, Acrobat Distiller 4 and 5 ignores this “separate” command, and you get a PDF from the Postscript that is the same as a Composite CMYK PDF. Except that InDesign gets a chance to apply “Application Built-in” trapping prior to creating the Postscript. (ref: InDesign 2.0: Generating Composite, Trapped PDFs)

Different RIPs have different settings for line screen ruling/angles — and in some cases override what the application outputs. Usually because “the application gets it wrong” according to prepress operators I speak to.

What is the Difference Between the two Transparency Blend Spaces?

When Flattening two objects at print time, you’ve got to do some mathematical stuff to determine how colours will mix together. The colourspace this is executed in may change the effective colour of the resulting flattened object. This is similar to the difference you see in Photoshop with some blend modes in RGB vs. CMYK. The recommendation is to set this to CMYK for printed output, and RGB when doing on-screen Acrobat 4.0 style PDFs. Acrobat 5.0 PDFs are not flattened at export time. You can also see a subtle change on screen in InDesign 2.0.

(my testing procedure: Printing from InDesign 2.0.1 through Acrobat Distiller 5.0.5 using the Press.joboptions [leave colour unchanged] and checking colours in the resulting PDF using PitStop 5.0)

The New mungnetbar

Using Visual Basic and Simon Fell’s pocketSOAP, I created a small interface that communicates between my desktop and the server. There is a special SOAP interface to the database that permits remote updating of the mungenetengine without using the traditional web-based interface.

This is the mungenetbar. It sits at the bottom of my laptop’s screen and tells me:

• the number of page views on the site
• the number of unique users to have visited the site
• the current ADBE share price

If I double-click on the mungenetbar, I can see either select the content or images within a particular section of the site.

The edit window for a content or image allows me to update the “metadata” etc for a piece of content. If I “persist” the data, this downloads the HTML, images, CSS into a folder that permits editing in GoLive 6.0

When looking at images in a section, I can download the image to the desktop, and automatically open Photoshop 7.

The +blog button is a quick weblog addition/edit button. Weblogs on the front page of the site are updated more often – so this input permits quick editing. The Check Site button asks Internet Explorer to go to my home page URL and display a recent addition to the ‘blog.

There is another way of adding elements to the site. By dragging a HTML, JPEG, GIF or PDF to the mungenetbar, it will display the content dialog box permitting quick insertion of content. If the image or HTML fragment contains metadata, the mungenetbar recognises this and changes the data on the site.

On the server-side, I am using nusoap PHP Libraries as my server connector. After working though WSDL — which is a little of a mind-bender, the VB client the PHP server works well. Even with complex types! I can highly recommend both pocketSOAP and NuSOAP.

The next step is to recreate the legacy VB code in C-sharp. This will be primarily a learning process.

Reversing Footage in Premiere 6.0

A question from a customer in an email: how do you reverse a piece of footage in Premiere 6.0? I know how to do this in AfterEffects, but never looked at the problem in Premiere.

A few quick experiments later (what, read the manual?) – its even easier than I first thought.

Here we have a piece of footage loaded in a bin. It is going to be our target we are going to reverse time over:

Right-click (Mac users: control-click) on this piece of footage and select "Speed"

Now all we need to do is change the rate at which this plays. Typing in a negative number doesn’t change time and entropy in the universe, but it will reverse the playback of this clip. -100% means run it at the same speed, but in reverse. Viola!

Thanks Gil-Ad.

FileMaker Pro to Photoshop 7.0

Taking data from FileMaker Pro 5.5 to Photoshop 7.0 is simple with AppleScript. So simple, I challenged myself to write the code on the flight from Sydney to Auckland on the Photoshop 7.0 User Conference/Roadshow/Tour in May. After a little modification “in the shop”, and comments from the great Shane Stanley, here it is in all its glory!

Firstly, lets look at the database supplied. This is quite simple: there are 3 fields and three records. The very important field is the filename pointer field. This contains the file name of the template for this record:

The definitions of the fields is important. The script uses the names of the fields to point out layer names in the Photoshop template files:

This is the template Photoshop file. Notice the layer name of the text layer. Again, these layer names are used by the script as the linkage between FileMaker Pro and Photoshop 7.0:

The end result in the file system. It is very important that you check the properties at the top of the AppleScript to point to directories you would like the script to look for the source templates and where to place the end results:

The final JPEG as displayed in the browser, this time with the data inserted by this script:

The FileMaker Pro database and Script is available for download: filemaker to photoshop 1.0.sit

I have only tested this on MacOS X 10.1.4 with Photoshop 7.0. You will also need the Photoshop 7.0 Scripting Plugin 1.0.2a (Mac) available from the Adobe web site.

Comments are welcome!

Experimenting with “faux” transparency in the design. If this page were composed in SVG, it would be much easier. The wrapping to the right is also faked (using a table) and the Recent area has a background image in the table cells that blend from one colour to another. The image behind the main content area is in the CSS layer, and ghosted out in Photoshop prior to saving the JPEG. Its probably a little overboard, but interesting to see how far you can go.

Minor UI tweakage… the image inside the content area. Also: MSIE 4.5 Mac renders the page correctly (see yesterday’s note on content areas) whereas MSIE 5.x Mac does not. Also fixed. I am pleasantly surprised that it all works on a 1999-era browser. Last century.

Distilling PDF into JPEG Photoshop 7.0’s scripting on Windows

Problem from a customer: they want to take a directory of PDFs and make mini JPEGs that are previews of the spreads.

So, out with the newest Adobe application on the block: Photoshop 7.0. Photoshop 7.0 has a major new addition: Scriptability. Using AppleScript on MacOS, VB (COM) scripting on Windows and Javascript on both platforms, you can write scripts that interact with Photoshop and other applications. For scripters, this is the holy grail. From my first days at Adobe, one of the gurus of AppleScripting Shane Stanley, hounded me about Photoshop scriptability. In Photoshop 7.0, we’ve finally delivered.

This version is an application written in Visual Basic. Using the Scripting Object (FileSystem object) and some UI classes to do the “watching” and directory selection, we look in a directory you nominate and place the resulting PDF and JPEGs into the destination directory.

You will need the Scripting plugin for Photoshop 7.0 Windows: Photoshop 7.0 Scripting Plugin 1.0.2a (Win)

And my compiled script, and source which are here:    Moonshine for Windows (ZIP)

January/February 2002	Future of Design Roadshow India, Malaysia, Singapore and Australia. Created video versions of demo content for placement on local Adobe web site.
March 2002	3DAPv2 rolled out (Magazine Ad Delivery Standard). Web site finalised and published.
April 2002	Photoshop 7 Roadshow with the great Russell Brown
October/November 2002	Assisted Pacific Publications roll out of InDesign 2.0