Gordon Woolf's Blog

Coping with long URLs

URLs are one the most difficult things to cope with in written material, whether that is text in printed form or on the Web.

One way to solve this in layout programs such as InDesign is to specify the URL as having "no language" (you can even set up a character style to specify "no language" as the language). InDesign will then only break the line when it has to and will not insert a hyphen.

But in most such programs, the way to deal with URLs has improved in the last couple of versions. The biggest problem is that if the URL is broken in a word which is in the program's hyphenation dictionary it will make it impossible to just select the web address and either click on it or copy it into a browser winodw. To a computer, the hyphen turns iot into aan entirely different address.

It is also common to use a "discretionary line break" linked with a character style to put the DLB after the @ sign or before the dot of .com

Some time ago (CS3?) InDesign's internal rules for line breaks changed to include the slash(/), back-slash(\), underscore(_), ellipse(...), commercial-at(@), any dash (en-dash, em-dash, etc). They also added some algorithms that allow breaks at periods within URLs but not abbreviations... that was definitely getting better at the time I stopped keeping track and is by no means easy to achieve.

There may now be even better ways to solve the problem and I would be surprised if it cannot also be done in the latest QuarkXPress.

My main point is that there are now ways to ensure that a web address is not broken by adding a hyphen and proofreaders should feel confident in marking bad URL breaks and perhaps even suggest some of the possible solutions. In checking proofs it is also worth ensuring that if an address does include a hyphen, it is one that is meant to be there and not one which may have been added because of a line break that no longer applies.

On web sites those responsible should also ask why they are using long URLs in a visible form, though I have to admit I have been guilty, as it does ensure that if web text is copied for use in other media that the URL is copied, and not just the text of a link. Where that is not likely, just embed the full address in the HTML code as an href attribute.

For MS Word the advice is to enter the URL in both the address and text-to-display boxes of the edit hyperlink dialog. You can then add a space within the text of the URL without upsetting the link, or better still, use the zero-width space character or a no-width optional break after a character in the URL such as a forward slash. This character has no shortcut key but you can allocate one in the insert special characters dialog if you need them often.

If you have a better way, let me know.

The strange case of uP and dOWN

What is the most annoying key on your keyboard?

For me, and maybe for you, it is the CAPS LOCK key. It seems to get in the way whenever I intend to hit the Shift key. If I'm lucky I may be in Word or some other program which allows me to highlight the mess which results and hit the command to change case, but in others there is no option but to delete and type the phrase or sentence again.

In Word 2010 you go to the Home tab and then in the Font area click on the Aa button to select from a wide choice including lowercase, Sentence case, Capitalize Each Word or tOGGLE cASE.

The CapsLock is a remnant of the old typewriter keyboard that has continued to exist to this day and has survived the many changes in computer keyvoards over recent decades which has seen the number of keys and the positions of some of them go from 83 on the original IBM PC to 104 for the US, Australia and most other countries, though many European layouts have 105 and some in Brazil and Japan have 107 and 109 respectively.

But there is something you can do about that caps lock key, and even about the strangest key, the one labelled SysReg. SysReg is also named as PrtScn, which doesn't actually print the screen but does put a screen dump or image into memory ready to be pasted in an image editor program such as Paint ot even Photoshop.

So, how do you get rid of CapsLock? 

The answer lies in Windows Registry Editor. In Vista and Windows 7 you can search for the local machine code control keyboard layout and replace the scancode which activates when you press the CapsLock key. It then involves entering a sequence of around 20 hex codes.

But there are easier ways. For example, go to:
http://www.randyrants.com/2006/07/sharpkeys_211.html
and download SharpKeys

I went for the MSI version. When installed, press the Add button, select the "Special Caps Lock" with code 00 3A and change it to the default which is "Turn Key Off". You could also change it to another version of the Spceial Left Control key which may be more helpful in reaching many control key combinations.

Think carefully before selecting to write the change to the Registry (you do have a back up of that, don't you?). Then you need to reboot to see it take effect. Though the program says for Windows systems up to Vista, it does work with Win7 too.

You can also download another program, KeyTweak, from http://webpages.charter.net/krumsick/
I've read equally good reports of that but have no practical knowledge.

There are other websites you may find helpful, such as How-to-geek at:
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/disable-caps-lock-key-in-windows-vista/

That page includes a downloadable set of .reg files to do what I've just done or to a Shift key or to swap the Caps Lock with the Scroll Lock key that may be sitting up there on the right between SysRg and Break. Did you even know you had those? Break dates back to the teleprinter and telegraph. It was a way for operators at each end to know that outlaws or bushrangers had not cut the line. When did you last need to know that?

This article appeared first in the November issue of PC Update, the magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group. It may be reprinted at no cost under Creative Commons conditions with Attribution.

Getting started with ebooks

The question: I prepare books for print and I'm wondering what are good resources for taking authors through the process of Kindle publishing; this seems a useful ability to pick up.

Getting in at what is still a relatively early stage would seem to be a good move -- and what Kindle books I've downloaded so far (admittedly mostly free) are, to put it mildly, not very well done. My first experiment a week or so ago of just a 2-page file was, at least in my view, well up to average standards. But the couple of print-prepared documents I've experimented with since have been disasters.

I found Joshua Tallent's site at kindleformatting.com very useful, but the free trials so far of various software to convert from pdf to epub and the mobi format (the latter being what the Kindle uses) have been disappointing. The best so far has been the conversion aspects of the Calibre ebook library and uploading/conversion program: calibre-ebook.com

A trial version of Adobe InDesign in the new CS5.5 edition holds out promise with its new Article palette to take a print file and reorganise the items into the order needed in an ebook and to leave out other items like running heads and page numbers. That will convert to Adobe's favoured epub format that Calibre and other programs can convert to .mobi. However getting InDesign for just e-publishing at its present level would seem an expensive outlay.

I would be interested in learning from others who have dabbled or more with Kindle or other e-publishing and what software they used.

My guess is that we have yet to see the software which will let us seemlessly change a print-publishing file into one for e-reading.

Windows 7: should it be Windows Silver?

November 1985 saw Windows first shipped in the USA and not long afterwards in Australia. So I wonder why Windows 7 wasn't called Windows Silver?

I can still see quite vividly that MSDOS screen in front of me at the newspaper in the small High Country town of Myrtleford that required me to click on a file entry to start the runtime version of Windows which then started the desktop publishing program PageMaker.

I'd already used the same program with Apple Macintosh in Western Australia but a PC was half the cost. And had used Xerox Ventura on a PC with the GEM "graphic environment management" system on top of DR (Digital Research) DOS, but Windows was still a massive advance.

Businesses weren't buying Windows because they wanted to but because it enabled the program they needed to run. Even the most hard hearted accountant could see that new equipment was worth buying when it would pay its full capital and running costs in less than six months compared to how the job had been done before.

The hardest job, a year or two later, was persuading newspapers in the bush that they really needed a network to transfer files, and that "sneaker net" with a shoebox of 5.25" disks had had its day.

Nonsense outlasts sense

If you want to insert some dummy text in a Word document, start a new paragraph, type =lorem() and hit Enter.

This will add three paragraphs of Lorem Ipsum characters in your document but if you want more text, use the formula =lorem(m,n) where m is the number of paragraphs and n the number of lines that should be included in each of these paragraph. Be warned it is not very accurate.

In OpenOffice type dt and press the F3 function key. Less control, in that you cannot vary the lengths or specify para numbers, but you can repeat as needed.

There are dummy text plugins for either program which give more control and many layout programs
have an option to "fill with placeholder text".

But you may wonder about the name Lorem Ipsum.

Those are the first words of what, supposedly, is some text set in the earliest days of movable type. The story goes that it got shoved together after it fell on the floor and was thereafter used to fill space until the actual typesetting was ready.

It has remained virtually unchanged for hundreds of years, which is more than can be said for any language, so nonsense has outlasted sense.

Jack's an artist. That's what we need for the layout

It is a common question: The illustrator for my book is a talented artist, but should I ask him (or her) about doing the book layout?

It may also be suggested with magazine layout: he's a good artist, we should ask him to do our newsletter.

The real question should be to ask whether he has any experience and whether he wants to do the work. Then the publisher, or self-publisher, should ask himself or herself if they have time to cope with problems.

In a recent case the artist was being honest, and would have been prepared to put the time in (at his cost) to find out all the technical information he needed to know. However, there should be at least one person who has the professional knowledge of what makes a good book or magazine layout in the team.

The danger lies in the fact that publication layout and file preparation for printing is detailed, systematic work, and the skills for that are seldom those needed to be an artist and illustrator.

There are a few who manage to combine both skills but they are a minority and deserve every cent they can command. They will, for example, know that the uses of a book cover for thumbnails on the web or in catalogues and ads and possibly for posters as well as for the cover itself, puts severe restrictions on artistic talent.

More common are those designers and layout people who can take other people's illustrations and turn them into good looking and good working covers and pages and produce files which will print without problems. The person who creates good publication files and the illustrator and graphic artist may use much of the same software, but they tend to use it in vastly different ways.

The kind of questions one could ask someone who may be able to do this work could be whether he or she knows the common standards for relative margin widths, on the differences in specifications for different binding methods, and, for example if this includes, as is most likely, an all color cover, the maximum ink levels according to the printing process and paper stock.

He or she may not know the detailed answers but should know what you are talking about (even if you do not). Then (especially if there is time to go elsewhere if necessary), by all means give him or her a go.

Adobe v Apple: It's happened before

On the AppleInsider blog, Daniel Eran Dilger gives the background to the current Flash war with the comment "This all happened before".

His story and timeline of PostScript, the Laserwriter, TrueType, Aldus PageMaker, Macromedia's Freehand is almost all as I recall it and heard at the time from mainly Adobe insiders. The only statement I see which is a bit questionable is his assertion that Adobe did not realise when buying Aldus that the rights to Freehand did not come with the sale since they still belonged to the originators. Not until they bought Macromedia 10 years later did Freehand enter Adobe's fold.

However, if you think that lack of foresight (or what is now called "due dilligence" is impossible I can quote a tale from Australian media history. Our main TV weekly program guide which once sold a million copies a week was part of a publishing company sold off by News Ltd (which many years previously had been in the free-to-air TV business here) and ultimately sold to one of our major TV channels. After the final sale, the other leading TV company "revealed" that they owned 50% of the title. Within a week the magazine was being published by that company's publishing arm, from another city, with an entirely new staff.

Quite a blow for the other TV channel -- but I worked for that magazine several years earlier and as a fairly junior player I knew that the magazine was only half owned by the company publishing it. So I question how the money/management people did not know that essential fact when talking of multi-million deals. Could Adobe have not known about Freehand in 1994? Maybe.

It does not seem long ago that there were continuing email list discussions on the relative merits of true PostScript and the clones built in to printers. It dawned on most of us very slowly that the future lay in postscript interpreters resident on the computer, so slowly for me that the PostScript 2 laser printer I paid $5000 for (and $500 for each cartridge) we were unable to give away. It recently ended at the tip despite still being in working order.

The column is at:
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/05/14/adobe_apple_war_on_flash_reminiscent_of_postscript_struggle.html&page=1

Skating on the Photoshop sliders

I noticed that the occasional mono pages which one of our local newspapers runs had pictures which were very muddy. It's a strong possibility that they are preparing all their pages in colour and just accepting that some of them may be run in black and white but a little time really should be taken to adjust for the lack of colour before it becomes almost a forgotten art.

It's a couple of years since a DTP-er I know was having trouble coping with instructions from a printer that detailed their pic specs as no less than 5% highlight dot, 80% max shadow, and midtones of 35 to 40%. The printer then added that this particular press might want the midtones down by another 10 or 15%.

That seems like a lot of old newspaper presses I know. Though, on second thoughts, they'd be hard pressed to hold a 5% highlight dot. My instructions on one paper were to drag both sliders in Photoshop in significantly, then drag the gamma slider across most of the way: no point in talking numbers, this was like engraving with a chainsaw -- provided you could hardly see anything on screen, there was a chance the final result would be fine.

The really amazing thing is that the final results were quite good.

This is the skill in working without color, and it is a good idea to ask a printer to show you what the original looks like for any black-and-white photos that look good (and maybe to give you the file) so you can see what you have to produce. Once you know what an original should look like on your screen, it is less necessary to work by the numbers. And some of those movements in the sliders within Photoshop can be far more than you would try without seeing an example.

The same principles apply to photocopying. Color is more forgiving than mono, but it is still worth learning some of the old skills. They can produce better color pics too.

And why do some pages have to run in black and white? That is because it does not matter to a large web press whether it is printing one color or many. It is the total number of plates which matter. A press can have the paper run from the reel (web) in many different ways so if fewer color plates are needed then more pages can be printed in the one run. So, some late ads can be accomodated without a second run and collating the two sections if some of the existing pages can be printed in one color instead of four.

'Large print' is not just type set larger

An interesting suggestion I saw on a publisher forum a while ago was to produce a large print edition and to just reduce the pages of this to make the standard edition. The logic was that some of the readers for which the book was intended were sufferers of diabetes, which often brings sight problems.

Unfortunately the internationally researched standards for large print books, are not just an enlarged form of normal typesetting. And there is a big difference in producing books for those who are substantially sight impaired, and books for those of us who may have a slight deterioration in sight within the normal ranges of variation with age.

A chapter in the current edition of Type & Layout (the book by Colin Wheildon republished by The Worsley Press) -- although this is a chapter in the additional material by Geoffrey Heard -- does describe how preparing a book for the non-fluent reader is different to preparing a book for a fluent reader who may have minor sight problems, or no problems at all.

Just one quick example: although Wheildon's research showed that for reasonably fluent readers, justified serif type is by far the most readable, that is not true for someone who is less fluent, either through education or sight.

The chapter also includes information on the alternative of "Clear Type", a standard developed by the Royal National Institute for the Blind, with standards which, while being acceptable to a wide range of those with site problems, is more acceptable to others. While tending towards sans faces it does accept fonts with a good serif definition such as Bookman.

I would therefore warn against producing a smaller version of a large type, or even "Clear Type" book as a normal edition.

If the text of a book is correctly tagged in its preparation it would be a very simple matter to run it through with alternative layout specifications. I'd estimate an hour or two in a program such as InDesign, maybe even less in an entirely tag based layout program such as TeX.

There will need to be an entire new round of research into legibility on ebook readers.

Software that refuses to die

How many software programs from 1994 are you still using?

When I upgraded to Windows 7 and chose the 64-bit version, I expected to say goodbye to some of the pieces of software that I've used for many years.

But my barcode creation software, UPCTools, bought in 1994, refuses to die...it just keeps on working, now with its fifth operating system since it first ran in Windows 95 (or was it Windows 3.1?).

Admittedly it now runs in XP Mode, but I can select it from the Start menu of Windows 7, and then just use the UPC Tools menu item "copy" to copy the result in to InDesign (which was no more than a twinkle in the eye of some of the software people at Aldus when this software was written by Jerry Whiting at Azalea Software). The barcode fonts, which were in Type 1 Postscript format, installed in the Windows 7 font folder by just dragging them in en masse. When viewed now within InDesign those fonts show up as just one font with eight styles (to suit three inkspread requirements plus half height versions. 

Yes that is Windows 7 and the software running does say Copyright 1994. Some software was written with the future in mind!

Incidentally, to get software that runs in the XP virtual environment to show up in the Start menu of Windows 7 you have to put a shortcut in the "All Users" subfolder of the Start menu in XP and then reboot your PC. It took me a while to work that one out.

Of course I'm not suggesting you should buy the 1994 version of UPCTools but if you are looking for barcode software that will work in to the next decade, You'll find lots of info about barcodes in general at http://www.azalea.com/FAQ/

Overall, I'm happy with the decision to upgrade and the computer with its extra memory is performing well -- not a BSOD since the upgrade, though I was previously thinking it had to be replaced.