Author: Nick Hodge

XSL-FO

Having lots of fun with XSL-FO. I don’t know why I didn’t go and learn this stuff sooner. In my experiments, I am using styles and flows as defined by Adobe FrameMaker overriding the XSL-FO commands. Next stop: XSLT.

All this is in aid of some Adobe Document Server demonstrations I am doing over the next couple of weeks. Also learning how to use JScript as an ASP language. I would have preferred to be coding in PHP; but the COM to PHP stuff is a little beyond my ken at the moment. Keep things as simple as possible. Oh yes, the music of the 1980s assists greatly.

Fixed

www.nickhodge.com now works. All is good in the world. Learnt waaaaay too much about DNS. Thanks to Hilton (Alan Rosenfeld’s brother) and Max at Hostforweb for their effort and assistance.

Creo Prinergy

Thanks to David @ Creo Australia, I spent the afternoon yesterday with the new version of Creo Prinergy, 2.1. It will take an Adobe Acrobat 5.0 PDF (PDF1.4) and flatten the transparency out of InDesign 2.0 in the RIP. This means that as printers install 2.1, you can export Acrobat 5.0 PDFs from InDesign which is way faster and have the RIP do the hard flattening work. Oh yes, it also works with spot colours, too. In many workflows, the ability to late-stage edit a PDF is paramount. With all the transparency features in InDesign 2.0, the flattening does produce complex PDFs that are difficult to edit at a late stage. With Acrobat 5.0 PDFs, the ability to do editing is improved.

One of the new servers as announced yesterday, the Adobe Document Server 5.0, permits PDF to EPS generation on a server. You can feed CMYK high resolution PDFs to the server, and it can feed back CMYK EPSs for placement into QuarkXpress et al.

I recall speaking to an Adobe executive in 2000 about “getting in the server space”. Now we have many!.

MINI

Getting a MINI Cooper S next week. Woohoo! Its a little sad to see the Honda Civic VTiR go, but I am sure it will serve the next driver well.

DNS issues still up in the air, but getting closer to being resolved. Just waiting for the nickhodge.com IP change to propogate out onto the Internet and resolve to the new server. Then I’ll transfer to the appropriate DNS host.