Category: mungenet

Statue in Korean War Memorial

B52 in Distance, War Memorial in Seoul

C-??, War Memorial in Seoul

Plane, War Memorial in Seoul

T-34, War Memorial in Seoul

Helicopters, War Memorial in Seoul

T-34, War Memorial in Seoul

Sherman, War Memorial in Seoul

Planes, War Memorial in Seoul

More Planes, War Memorial in Seoul

Anti-aircraft machinery, War Memorial in Seoul

Tracker, War Memorial in Seoul

Bofors, War Memorial in Seoul

Midget Submarine, War Memorial in Seoul

Various Captured Russian/Chinese Tanks, War Memorial in Seoul

Entrance to War Memorial in Seoul

Captured North Korean Fighter, War Memorial in Seoul

American Guns, Korean War, War Memorial in Seoul

F-4 Phantom, War Memorial in Seoul

F-86 Sabre, War Memorial in Seoul

Various Tanks, War Memorial in Seoul

M1 Garand Clips from Korean War, Korean War Memorial. Dec 03

Various guns from Korean War, Korean War Memorial. Dec 03

Plane from Korean War, Korean War Memorial. Dec 03

Duotones: Photoshop to InDesign CS

What are duotones? From the Photoshop’s Online help file:

Duotones are used to increase the tonal range of a grayscale image. Although a grayscale reproduction can display up to 256 levels of gray, a printing press can reproduce only about 50 levels of gray per ink. This means that a grayscale image printed with only black ink can look significantly coarser than the same image printed with two, three, or four inks, each individual ink reproducing up to 50 levels of gray.

Sometimes duotones are printed using a black ink and a gray ink–the black for shadows and the gray for midtones and highlights. More frequently, duotones are printed using a colored ink for the highlight color. This technique produces an image with a slight tint to it and significantly increases the image’s dynamic range. Duotones are ideal for two-color print jobs with a spot color (such as a PANTONE Color) used for accent.

Duotones is a generic name given to monotone, duotone, tritone etc images. The mono- prefix here denotes the number of colourants (plates) in the final file generated by Photoshop.

Generating Duotones from Photoshop

The greatest control over true Duotones as defined above is going to be in Photoshop. However, there is a concept known as fake or poor man’s Duotones, which InDesign CS supports directly.

The process of converting a coloured image into a Duotone in Photoshop starts with converting the image to grayscale. The quickest, and rawest method of converting is to go Image>Mode>Grayscale

After converting to greyscale, the next step is to Image>Mode>Duotone change the grayscale into a Duotone image. The dialog box that appears allows you to change the spot colour that makes up the second colour. If you would prefer a monotone, change the first “Black” ink in the list to the spot colour. The curve box permits tweaking of the ink density where the second colour is applied.

How do you get Photoshop Duotones into InDesign CS?

To place this file in InDesign, the format that we need to save the file is Photoshop PSD or Photoshop PDF. InDesign Prepress: Photoshop to InDesign workflow

In InDesign, File>Place the Photoshop file saved above. Once the image is placed, you will notice that InDesign adds a new Swatch to the Window>Swatches palette.

From this point, the new Swatch is considered a Spot colour. To preview the output of this InDesign file, use Window>Output Preview>Separation Preview. Managing this spot colour at print time the same as managing Spot colours in InDesign: through the Ink Manager.

Poor Man’s Duotones in InDesign CS

Grayscale images can be directly made into Monotones in InDesign 2.0/CS. Here, we are assigning the Black (K) plate to an alternate colour, including potentially a Spot Color. The user-interface needs to be carefully described as there is a little twist: something the help file doesn’t quite explain. The order of steps below are critical!

1. Place the Grayscale TIFF or Photoshop image into InDesign 2.0/CS
   
2. Open Windows>Swatches
3. Ensure that the Swatch, Spot or otherwise is in the Swatches list
   
4. Select the Direct Selection Tool
   
5. In the Swatches palette, ensure that the Fill is selected at the top:
   
6. Click inside the Greyscale image with the Direct Selection Tool
7. Click on the Swatch you would like to apply to the image:
   

Looking north on Las Cuevas Beach, Punta Mita, Mexico

Pacific Ocean, looking NZ-wards

Avril leaving home

Another day, another airport lounge. Qantas Club, Sydney International Airport.

View from our Room, Punta Mita, Mexico

Cabanas, Las Cuevas Beach, Punta Mita, Mexico

Lovely bunch of coconuts, Punta Mita, Mexico

Cactus at Punta Mita

Iguana sunning on the rock

Four Seasons, Punta Mita: view of main building

Mariarchi Band rocks on playing Smoke on the Water

Avril chats up Manuel, our tour guide through the Sierra Madres

Mike Zahorik goes exploring in Mexican fishing village.

Volcanic sand, umbrella. Beach is Monterrey Beach somewhere over the Sierra Madres in Mexico.

Monterrey Beach, Mexico

Nick and Avril with various avian friends.

Avril gets close to Wiggy

Life is hard in Punta Mita.

Nick in Puerto Vallarta. Somewhere 14000 kms away over the Pacific is New Zealand.

Tim Burton’s inspiration: Mexican Death Masks. Shop in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.

Hills behind Puerto Vallarta. We ran out of shops, so had to turn back.

Candles outside our room, Punta Mita, Mexico

View at Breakfast, Punta Mita, Mexico

Lounges on southern beach, Punta Mita, Mexico

Northern Beach, Punta Mita, Mexico

Casa de Fernandez, Punta Mita, Mexico

Hammocks on Monterrey Beach, Mexico

Church, PV

Nick at the info booth at Kare Kare.

Kare Kare – North Bluff and stream

Kare Kare – North Bluff

Kare Kare – the hills behind

Southern Bluff, Kare Kare, NZ

Nick in front of city centre map, Te Awamutu, New Zealand. Just to prove I’ve been there!

Rose gardens, Te Awamutu, New Zealand

Rose gardens, Te Awamutu, New Zealand

Rose Gardens, Te Awamutu, NZ

Photo of a painting by Phil Judd. A portion of this was on the Split Enz ‘Mental Notes’ album. Displayed in Te Papa Museum, Wellington, NZ. November 1998.

Sorry about the out-of-focus. Split Enz costumes displayed in Te Papa Museum, Wellington, NZ. November 1998.

North Bluff, Kare Kare, NZ. May 2000. I love this image.

Southern Hills, Kare Kare, NZ. May 2000

Kare Kare, NZ. May 2000

Looking at Kare Kare from the Southern exit road. Has to be the best photo I have ever taken. May 2000.

Beach, Kare Kare NZ. Looking South-South West. May 2000

Nick on jetty, Bay of Islands, May 2000.

Piha, NZ. Looking toward south beach.

Piha, NZ. North beach. Used on Mungenet. May 2000

Lion rock, mid-Piha, NZ. May 2000

Nick at Kare Kare, NZ, May 2000. Photo taken by Victor Guerrero

InDesign 2.0: Export or Distill PDFs?
Nick Hodge
Should you Export PDFs or Distill PDFs from InDesign 2.0?

InDesign 2.0: Generating Composite, Trapped PDFs
Nick Hodge
Using InDesign to generate Composite Trapped PDFs

InDesign 2.0: How to Export and Place Pages back into InDesign 2.0
Nick Hodge
Why should you export pages from InDesign as PDF rather than EPS

InDesign 2.0: Photoshop to InDesign workflow
Nick Hodge
The best way of taking Photoshop files into InDesign 2.0

InDesign 2.0: Photoshop with Spots, InDesign and Composite PDF
Nick Hodge
How to take Photoshop with Spots, Transparency and Vector into InDesign 2.0 for composite PDF

InDesign 2.0: Photoshop, Duotones into InDesign
Nick Hodge

InDesign 2.0: Printing Output Choices and Flattener Tricks (including force Greyscale export!)
Nick Hodge
How to use the Flattener to get greater colour control at output time

InDesign 2.0: Spot Colors, Transparency
Nick Hodge
InDesign 2.0 has great support for Spot Colors; this is how they work with transparency

InDesign 2.0: Text and the Transparency Flattener
Nick Hodge
Explaining how Text and Transparency Flattener interact in InDesign 2.0

InDesign 2.0: Trapping Journey with Prinergy
Nick Hodge
Specific settings in Prinergy that effect InDesign output

InDesign CS Printing Guide

partners.adobe.com: CS Printing Guides

Printing Acrobat 5.0/PDF1.4 Generated by Adobe InDesign 2.0
Nick Hodge
How to successfully generate quality print results from a PDF 1.4 from InDesign 2.0

Sydney Harbour bridge, lit up on a rainy night in January 2004

Finns concert, 2-Dec-2004, Bondi

Generating Composite, Trapped PDF from InDesign

Well created, Composite PDFs are the most commonly requested format for printers in this part of the world. So, how exactly do you generate a composite, trapped PDF?

InDesign 1.5.x, 2.0.x and CS have support for Application Built-in trapping. The trapping engine inside InDesign matches many of the features of Adobe’s InRIP trapping engine; usually found in higher end RIPs from Creo, Heidelberg, Agfa etc.

Trapping is the process of changing the shapes of certain objects in a printed output to reflect the way the ink will run when printed. Each of the inks are laid down on the paper by different cylinders of the press. As the paper (substrate) are impressed by these cylinders, there might be a misregistration – where the inks don’t quite line up. In this instance, the plates contain extra overprinted areas of dots to cover up any unsightly gaps that may be left in the final output.

Highend PDF workflows today are bedevilled by the “Who is trapping this?” question. In controlled workflows, this is easy to coordinate. Prepress know which press a job is running on, and apply some visual checks on the job and may make trapping changes to the source file prior to output. However, when there is a hand-off to an unknown press and printing environment, the creator will not know the press conditions. Today’s digital workflows largely assume that the final RIP (imagesetter/platesetter) will trap the document.

In some workflows, this trust may not be enough. We need to make composite PDFs for onscreen viewing, simplicity and size; yet trap them so there are no ugly white patches at print time.

With InDesign 1.5, 2.0 and CS, the Adobe trapping engine takes InDesign created object (text and vector objects) and traps them to placed images, text and vector shapes. InDesign does not trap placed PDF or EPS objects. These are assumed to be trapped. InRIP trapping solutions will trap the entire page stream. To use Adobe In-RIP Trapping, you must use In-RIP separations. Built-in trapping limits trap widths to 4 points, regardless of the value you enter for the trap widths. For larger trap widths, you will need to use Adobe In-RIP Trapping.

From QuarkXpress, the trapping information as setup by the Trap palette only comes into play when printing separations. With QuarkXpress 4.0 and above, overprinting and knockouts as set by the palette are retained in composite Postscript output. Saving Pages as EPS from QuarkXpress 3.32 and higher does result in overprints/knockouts being retained. (see QuarkXpress, PDF, Trapping and Overprint)

InDesign 1.5.x, 2.0 and CS preserve knockout/overprint attributes in Composite Postscript output. As you would expect, Adobe’s Applicaton Built-In trapping works when printing separations.

Back to the topic at hand: A significant workflow difference with InDesign is that it can also apply Application Built-In traps when printing InRIP separations.

What are InRIP separations? Essentially, programs like InDesign send composite Postscript to the RIP with some extra commands telling the RIP to take a completed page and produce n-plates based on the colourants on the page. For simple process jobs, this would result in a page each for C, M, Y and K.

The implementation of the Postscript showpage and copypage operators have the capability of producing pages for each colourant. If the output device doesn’t have this colourant, then the alternativeSpace colourant is used; failing this, DeviceCMYK is used. There is a Postscript engine inside the Distiller, and it yields DeviceCMYK colourant output.

Acrobat Distiller has a Postscript engine inside: what does it do with InRIP separation-marked Postscript? Distiller 4.0x and 5.0.x ignore the operators for producing pages for each colourant, and produce a composite PDF. The colours stay as CMYK (or spot colours if used) if the Distiller options are left to “Leave Colour Unchanged”

Now InDesign 1.5.x and 2.0.x allow you to apply Application Built-in trapping to the composite Postscript when printing as InRIP separations. Yes, I know its a little mind bending! If you then send the resulting Postscript to Acrobat Distiller, the Distiller discards the commands to separate, but it does retain the extra “trapping” Postscript commands. The final PDF holds these trap commands, and they can be viewed in Acrobat 5.0 by turning on Overprint Preview.

The final outcome is a Composite, Trapped PDF.

Steps

1. Ensure that your Trapping settings are correct. Please consult the InDesign CS Printing Guide, the manual and your Prepress/Printer before assuming the defaults are correct.

2. Assign a Trap Style to the page. In this instance, I am using InDesign’s [Default] Trap style as viewed above.

3. Here is the File>Print dialog box. In Output, Color is set to In-RIP Separations, and Trapping is set to Application Built-In

4. To make it easier to use the same settings on the next document, you can save a Printer Style for later use.

5. This is the source document in InDesign 2.0/CS

6. The final PDF inside of Acrobat 5.0 or 6.0, (available here: Example CompositeTrapped PDF)with Overprint Preview turned on. The darker areas around the type etc. display where overprinted strokes have been applied based on the inking requirements.

7. Using Quite Revealing from Quite Software, I can also reveal the overprinted strokes separately.

For more information about Trapping, and specifically the Adobe trapping engine:

Adobe Trapping Technology (white paper)

Adobe In-RIP Trapping Workflow

How to Trap Using Adobe Trapping Technologies

Thanks to Steve Amerige, Matt Phillips for their assistance with some of the finer details.

Tuesday, 14th June, 2005

Leaving Mexico, and the sanctuary of the resort was difficult. A quick lesson in spanish has taught us many words, but none that describe the feeling of being thrown back out into the world where email and mobile phones work.

At Punta Mita resort, the only place you can get signal is out on “the rock” or in front reception – and its an amusing sight to see people holding up their blackberrys/nokias/sonys to get a few SMSs in and out. But strangely for me, the lack of communication has been refreshing. Not hearing about Michael Jackson and learning spanish was a good call.

Hour bus ride back to PVR, into Alaska (why are we flying Alaska from Mexico to California?) airlines. All checked baggage is hand-checked by a cheeky security guy. The only surprise in ours is a magic pillow of Avril’s that expands and contracts into amazing dimensions.

We board the MD-70, and fly back in time/forward in time to LAX. Tom Bradley Intl at LAX can be daunting, and not something we were looking forward to. Well, we’re through immigration (friendly agent who quoted the Immigration Act of 1976 re: I94A forms) and customs, having collected our bags, in less than half an hour.

Look out LAX, the Hodge’s are here and we’ve only spend AU$150 in the last week!

Sunday, 12th June, 2005

It’s difficult to describe the roller coaster of the last few days.

On Friday, Avril was able to fulfil a life long wish and swim with Dolphins (Not my scene, so I left the tuna-eaters to her), and we’ve walked around the resort.

On Saturday, we took a 6 hours Unimog ride through the local country-side and Sierra Madres mountains to the Pacific ocean. Visiting a beach on the Pacific ocean side of the peninsula was great. Reminded me of 14000kms away in NZ: volcanic sand beach. Our tour guide, Manuel, introduced us (or in my case, re-introduced) to Tequila. Drinking spirits in the open back of what is essentially a truck on a main road has not been one of my dreams. But a thrill, never-the-less. One could get addicted to this cactus juice. Salute! Antonio delivered us safely (but dusty) to the resort.

Sunday has been relatively easier: capped off by a visit to PV, and specifically the “old town”. The shopping could have been better; but it was difficult on a Sunday night. Buses had numbers like the WWII German Atlantic submarine fleet: U-35. They looked equally as comfy (refer: movie “Das Boot”). We found one of two Italian restaurants and had a comparative meal (we like to test the Italian food around the world) Did some damage to the cash balance, but not so much as to solve Mexico’s trade balance.

Thursday, 09th June, 2005

Up and away on Thursday 6.50am. On schedule.

Our meagre bags weigh in at 24.3kgms. I will be comparing this to what we leave with. I suggest that Customs should just impose an import duty on the nett weight of in vs. out. On second thoughts, lets scrub that one. I don’t earn that much

You know you travel too much when the guy on the Immigration desk leaving you saw last night in Customs entry.

12.5 hour flight to LAX in the 747-400 was pleasant. 4 seats spread over 2 people is a good thing. Little sleep however.

Arrive in LAX on Thursday at 5.50am. Therefore, we’ve arrived an hour before we left home. Arriving at the new Qantas arrival at T4, its a short wait for Immigration, bags waiting, waved through Customs – and we are in the US of A. My 21st visit here. We quickly walk to T3, to jump on an Alaska flight to “PV” (alias Puerto Vallarta, Mexico). You know you are in America when:

1. you have breakfast at Starbucks and the coffee is bitter
2. The guy to your right is reading ‘the art of spiritual healing’
3. the amount of carry-on luggage the person to your left has defies logic

Carry-on baggage has grown since my last visit to the US (June 2003). Its an evolutionary survival of the fittest going on: the larger predators survive.

Crowded House’s Pineapple Head plays as we wait for 50m in the LAX heat before leaving to PV.

PV, Mexico, Hola! Its a balmy 28degC, 80% humidity. Quiet dinner, and we are asleep at 11pm local time. +36 hour day with less than 3 hours of light sleep means we sleep the sleep of the peaceful.

The database

There are three basic tables in the MySQL database. One contains content, and referenced by mcid. The second contains any binary content (images, PDFs) and is referenced by an miid The final contains sections referenced by msid, which are a mechanism for organising and classifying content and images.

Around these three tables live some utility tables that contain basic logging information (a simple page count per fragment) and caching. Each page, when first rendered, is cached to a separate table. This enables faster response on the second and subsequent hits. To ensure that only current pages are cached, there is a simple cachetree implemented such that when a change or deletion to a record is made, the cache is pruned. (the page cache is presently disabled)

These sections provide the underlying hierachical structure of the site. This structure is tightly bound to the navigation through the site. As this is in the database, it is very easy to change the underlying navigation structure without changing how individual pieces of content are referenced. Usually, the structure is defined as a folder hierachy on the server. As soon as you start moving the folders around, the references from one piece of content to another breaks – forcing a mass update of the site. External search engines that may have the links stored in their database get 404 style errors. In the mungenetengine, each content, image and section is referenced individually without relationship to its place in the navigation structure.

Each fragment of content or image belongs to a section. These sections are the hierarchy behind the site – so each section can belong to another section, and a particular section can have multiple child-sections. A section can only have one parent. As you move to another section or page within another section, the mungenetengine (renamed to mne.php) can generate a navigation fragment; which is a template driven hierarchy containing links to the parent section, sibling content pages or sections, and any children.

In fact, each content entry is just a fragment of html. A whole page may actually comprise of other referenced contents elements, each inserted into the final html that you seen in the browser. The process of building one page from another is a process called templating. Its not as simple as one page referencing another; this process is recursive – one page refers to another until the final page is built. The concept here is to only enter data only once into the database. Each content can insert other fragments (or images) into the html output.

There are different types of content fragments. For instance, one is an external link – these contents are resolved, and wrapped into an HREF style link.

Images are in fact binary objects. They are wrapped into the final html – except they refer back to the mungenetengine – which grabs the images out of the database and serves them up. html fragments that are generated automatically add the width/height, alts and hrefs normally associated with images – if they are in the database. PDFs and other non-image content can be linked to so the user can download them, or embedded into the HTML fragment.

SWF and SVG can also be stored in the database. When rendering out these elements, the engine generates object embed tags. The width and height are not read from either format as yet. Whilst it is possible to read the ‘twips’ from a SWF, it seems overly complex to do – just yet

The engine can also generate what are known as breadcrumbs (next and previous links) — this is easy as the structure and relationship between objects are known and map to the navigation

PHP, the server side scripting language, munges the data together from the MySQL database and serves it up. As at early February 2003 this code is about 1870 lines long. I am testing this on WindowsXP and transferring it here to a Linux box for production. I really only have a choice of three server side scripting systems (PHP, Perl or Python). Learning PHP has been a great experience.

The next stage is to transfer the experience here into using a better language that has more object orientation. I have chosen Python as the langauge to accomplish this task. How long this takes, only time will tell!

InDesign 2.0: Adding Tab to Table Cells
Nick Hodge
A mini-VB application that adds a Tab character to Cell text

InDesign 2.0: Pasting As Text Only on Windows
Nick Hodge
A mini-VB application that permits the pasting as Text Only on Windows

InDesign 2.0: Automating Adding Words to the Dictionary
Nick Hodge
Scripting in InDesign 2.0 to add words to a Language Dictionary

InDesign 2.0: Word Count using Visual Basic
Nick Hodge
Scripting in InDesign 2.0 to add word count