A Beautiful Book

I have a confession to make. 

Any former English professors of mine can turn away their eyes for the next line or two. Even with my chronic reading habit and English background in school, I have never read Moby Dick. And even worse, (in some eyes) I have never even wanted to. Not even a little bit. I know what it is about, and I just haven't been motivated to pick it up. Ever. Well, until one day. . .

A few months ago I was perusing the website Fonts In Use, and came across an article about a small (short run) edition of Moby Dick. The article discusses the beautiful use of fonts and space in the layout of this edition of the book. The original Arion Press edition uses hand-set metal type and hand-made paper. It also includes many woodcut engravings, and the initial caps and titling was done in a font specifically created for this edition, named rather appropriately Leviathan. The article tells us that not surprisingly, this book won an award for being one of the "100 Most Beautiful Books of the Twentieth Century."

Well, needless to say, I suddenly wanted to read Moby Dick (well, not just the book, but this exact edition of the book). To whet your appetite, here's the first page image that Fonts In Use used with their article.

 Doesn't it just draw you in? I highly recommend you go over to the original article to see the other mouthwatering images of this beautiful book, so you can ooh and ah over them, too. Plus, Fonts In Use is just a fun website to visit. I particularly liked the article on the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Co.

Now I have high expectations, and I will only read Moby Dick if I get my hands on a copy of this edition. Luckily for us little people, the University of California Press has reprinted this edition in a paperback format. While not using handmade paper or metal, hand-set type, they did keep the layout intact, and the price is a lot more affordable. So maybe some day I will eventually read Moby Dick.

An Online Resource for Creatives

I've been browsing around the website http://www.creativepro.com/.

It has some great resources, reviews, tips, tutorials, blogs, and some all around good info in topics such as fonts, graphics, photography, print, and web or mobile.

For example, in one article I learned about a cool InDesign feature called Quick Apply. It's easy to turn on and off, and it allows you to keep your hands on the keyboard instead of searching through menus for those features that don't have keyboard shortcuts (or for features that have keyboard shortcuts, but you just can't remember which key combination it is) (Here's the link for the article.) I think I'll be trying this one out.

There are articles on more than just InDesign. I also found some reviews on products I'd heard of but didn't really know much about, some articles on kerning and type that were informative, and even some free Photoshop brush downloads that were tempting.

But, just a warning, you could get sucked into browsing the site for more time than you expected.

Important PIU Meeting This Week

On Thursday September 29, 2011, the Printing Industries of Utah will be holding a meeting concerning the new focus of the EPA on the Graphic Arts Industry of Utah.

The Utah Division of Air Quality is claiming that the entire printing industry in Utah is a major contributor of inversion and have determined that if only the printing industry decreased emissions, Utah would be inversion free. This meeting is to help everyone learn about this threat of increased regulation from the government, and also to discuss ideas on how to minimize our VOC contributions.

The meeting starts at noon, with lunch. It will be held at the LDS Printing Division, 1908 West Industrial Circle, Salt Lake City, Utah. You can sign up by calling Lola at 801-253-1329 or email to Lola Monsen(at)piofutah.com. (Just change the "(at)" to @ in your email) The cost is $10.00 for PIU members and $15.00 for everyone else.

2011 PIU Printer's Ride

On Wednesday, August 31st, the Printing Industries of Utah hosted their second annual Printer's Ride. Some folks from Lorraine Press attended, and here's their report.

Everyone first met up at the old paper mill at the mouth of Big Cottonwood Canyon ready to ride. This is the site of the first paper mill in Utah that produced paper suitable for printing on. 

The second stop was at Intermountain Rigging and Heavyhaul. Here the group was shown equipment used to transport printing presses and other heavy equipment. The hydraulic lift in the photo below can hoist up to 400,000 tons!

Third on the ride was Rocky Mountain Recycling. Here the intrepid motorcyclists were given a tour and shown the large amounts of recyclables Rocky Mountain processes. In the picture below, you can see recycled paper and aluminum (plates and cans). The second picture below shows a carton of compressed Styrofoam. Each one of those blocks contains enough uncompressed Styrofoam to fill a train box car.

And then the fourth stop was at Graphic Ink. These talented people produce some of the inks that we at Lorraine Press put into our presses. Below, you'll see the Graphic Ink representative giving a tour, one of the mixing blades used to mix ink, and a mixer full of soon-to-be magenta ink.

The next set of photos shows some yellow ink being mixed in a mixing vat, and then being milled to further grind the particles in the ink substrate. 

Then the fifth stop was at Media One. This is the place where our local papers are printed. To help you get the scale of this place, here's a model of one of their presses. I don't know if you can tell from this photo, but there are to-scale little men on the black platform in the center of the model. This press takes up a lot of room.

The newspapers come off of this press cut, folded, and ready to go out. Talk about automation! The photo below shows some of their shop floor. And the one below that shows the ingenious system of carrying the finished newspapers across the shop. Pretty neat stuff.

And last, but not least, the riders took sustenance at the Bohemian Brewery and Grill. 

It was an interesting, informative, and fun ride. Everyone is invited to attend next year's Ride, so if you are interested, be sure to keep an eye out for next year's Printers Ride on the PIU events calendar.

Creating Exact Guides in Illustrator

When I design something, I like it to be by the numbers. What I mean by that is when I want a design element to be one inch from the edge of my piece, I want it to be at 1.000" and not at 1.0625" or 0.9375".

A sixteenth of an inch can matter a lot, especially when creating folding pieces or dielines of pieces that will cut out. So placing color breaks, images or lines exactly where I want them on a piece is important to me. (And it will be important to your printer down the line if there are tricky folds in your design piece.) Creating guides along an exact measurement will facilitate neat, workable projects. 

Guides created in InDesign automatically select and have a measurement in the toolbar above the page. From there it is easy to see where exactly your guide is and even easier to type in a number in the measurement box to get your guide precisely where you want it. 

But Illustrator has a default setting that discourages knowing where exactly the guide has landed.

Below, in Illustrator, I dragged a guide from the vertical ruler on the side, over to the 1 inch mark. But is that guide really at 1 inch? 

To be able to tell where (to a ten thousandth of an inch!) your Illustrator guide is, first you need to go to the View Menu, go down to Guides, and then to the Lock Guides. The default for this is ON (a checkmark). While this in and of itself is not inherently evil, it stops me from knowing where exactly my guides are. Highlight "Lock Guides" to turn it off for the moment.

Below is what you want this menu to look like to proceed:

You are also going to need the Transform palette open on your work space. Go to Window and then down to Transform to activate it if it isn't already on your screen. See below.

Now that Lock Guides is off,  and your Transform palette is open, use the selection tool (the black arrow, keyboard shortcut: v) and drag over the guide.

Once selected, the guide will turn a different color. On my computer, the unselected guide is cyan (above), the selected guide is blue (below). Also, the transform palette will go from gray inactive fields (above) to white active fields (below).

Since the previous pictures show the Transform palette at an extremely small size, below is a close up. Once the guide is selected, the Transform palette shows us that the guide is actually at 1.0069 inches. Highlight this number (see below) and type in a 1 and hit enter/return to nudge the guide over to 1.0000 inch.

That's all it takes. Once your guides are in place, you can turn "Lock Guides" back on. That way you can be certain that the guides are exactly where you want them and that nothing will accidentally shift them as you work on your vector art. Thus, you can sleep tonight knowing for certain that your guides in Illustrator are precise and "on the numbers."

Happiness Day at Lorraine Press

Some calendars marked Monday, August 8th, as Happiness Day. So we at Lorraine Press decided to celebrate! Now, the irony of celebrating Happiness Day on the same day that the Dow tanked wasn't lost on us. But as one very optimistic employee said, "Hey, none of us are retiring tomorrow, and plus, everything just went on sale!" So there was a bright side to Monday.

We celebrated our own happiness by having a banana split/ice cream social. Everyone was able to create their own individual momentary happiness with the caloric intake of their choosing.

We also decided to try to increase other people's happiness by holding a canned food drive to donate to the Utah Food Bank.

And lastly, we held a contest for everyone to vote for the "Happiest Lorraine Press Employee." After counting all the votes, there turned out to be two happiest employees. A tie between our cheery Secretary and our upbeat Prepress Supervisor. Congratulations to the both of them! They each won a pair of movie tickets.

We hope that your Monday had moments of happiness, too! If so, share them with us by commenting to this post.

How to Convert CMYK Values to the Closest Pantone Color

Here's a handy tip for finding the closest Pantone color for any color with a CMYK breakdown; well, other than hunching over your color sample with a Pantone color book, flipping through the possibilities. Or perhaps you don't have a physical sample, you only have a color on your monitor. Did you try holding the color book up to the monitor and guessing? Oh, you don't have a color book? Don't fret, once you discover what the CMYK breakdown of your mystery color is, the rest is easy! No color book necessary!

(This way is not the only way, but it's easy and, as an added bonus, free, if you already have Photoshop.)

So, first, launch Photoshop. And you have now completed the longest, most time consuming, step in this process. From here on out, it's quick! You don't even need to have a picture open. 

Move your mouse over to the foreground color swatch at the bottom of the tool panel which is usually along the far right of your screen.

Click on the foreground swatch, and the Color Picker will come up:

Type in your CMYK values in the appropriate C, M, Y, and K boxes in the Color Picker for the color in which you are interested in finding a Pantone match. In this case, this morning, it was a medium blue for which I wanted to find a close Pantone match. See the image below.

Then click on the Color Libraries button, highlighted in the image below.

A Color Libraries palette then comes up. See the image below. My Color Libraries palette was already set to the color book PANTONE Solid Coated, and it automatically selected (with a thin black box around the color) PANTONE 2915 C as the closest match in that color book. Voila, there's my answer. 

It's not perfect, but it's as close as it can get for that CMYK breakdown. (Note the color difference between the top and bottom swatches in the color sample box to see how far different the two colors are.) If your color book wasn't already set to  PANTONE solid coated, continue reading!

To select a different color book, or to set your menu to PANTONE solid coated, go to the drop down menu at the top of the Color Libraries box.

Click to select whatever color collection you are interested in having a closest match to your CMYK color. As you can see in the image below, there are myriad choices!

And that is it. Now you have the power to convert CMYK values to their closest matching Pantone colors quickly and easily, wowing your co-workers and clients!

A Tour of the Post Office

Last week, courtesy of the Printing Industries of Utah, a group of designers and printers were able to tour behind the scenes at the Post Office Sorting Center in Salt Lake City. Several of us from Lorraine Press went along to see what exactly goes on behind the scenes.

We were taken through the process a letter experiences between a mailbox and its final destination. Our tour started off in the delivery bay where mail carriers bring back the mail they have collected during their routes. Then the fun started.

A letter is first individually examined by a sorting machine. No matter how the letter went into the machine (upside down, backwards, etc.), a sensor can find the stamp and then tumble the letter through the machine to correctly place the address in front of the OCR software, so the OCR software can read the address. As if that wasn't cool enough, the OCR software can correctly identify the addressee (compared to a database of all mailing addresses in the United States) within 3 seconds over 90% of the time.

Then letters are sorted into categories. If the letter stays in Utah, it goes to one machine that then sorts it to the Utah Post Office that it belongs to. If the letter is to leave Utah, it goes to a different sorting machine. If the letter goes to some one on the Move/Forwarding database, it goes to a different area. The whole system of sorters and holding areas and organization of mail was astounding. There were even little trains overhead carrying bins of mail to the correct place, and fun twirly slides for the bins to slide down to the correct machine. The entire operation is a miracle in organization and computerization.

All mail is eventually moved from that first incoming bay, to the other side of the building where trucks are waiting to deliver mail to its destination, whether that be a local post office branch or the airport. By that time, it is organized not only by mail carrier route, but also in the order of the houses/addresses within that route.

The tour was entertaining, but also educational. The reasons behind the regulations on addressing mail, especially when dealing with mass mailings became clear when one could actually see the machines that were "reading" the addresses. We saw letters of all sizes being sorted, as well as larger flats. The new regulations of the locations of the address on magazines and large envelopes allow the machine locate the address and then sort it. The Post Office saves large amounts of money when the machines are able to handle the mail.

Overall it was a great tour, and we learned a lot. Thank you to the USPS employees who took time out of their day to show us around!

A Quick Selection in Photoshop

Sometimes, (okay, most of the time) when working in Photoshop, you have the need to select stuff. There are myriad ways to do so: multiple tools, different techniques, and also varied results. Some selections are better than others and some techniques work better in specific situations. Here we are only going to cover one quick and painless way to select all the stuff on one layer.

First of all, for this selection to work, an image needs to have a layer with a transparent background. The image below (from the Samples folder in Photoshop) has 8 layers, 7 of which have stuff on them with transparent backgrounds. 

Let's say you wanted to select all the nontransparent stuff on a specific layer, the "ColorfulFish" layer for example. That's the layer with the big yellow fish on it (The layer is highlighted in the image below. You don't have to have the layer you want to do your selection on highlighted, I just did that to show which layer my cursor is going to be on.) When your mouse cursor hovers over the layer thumbnail, it turns into a hand. The big black arrow in the image below is pointing to the cursor (now a hand) hovering over the thumbnail.

When the cursor is hovering over the layer thumbnail, hold down the command key (the key with the apple on it for the Mac folks). Then a selection square appears on your cursor hand, just like in the image below.

Now with the command key held down, click the mouse. And ta-da! You have now selected everything on that layer that isn't transparent. The cursor just has to be over the layer thumbnail, it doesn't matter where on the thumbnail you command-click.

Okay the image above with the three black arrows is showing which fish were magically selected with just one click, but it's pretty hard to see at that small size. Here is a close-up. Only the three fish that were on the "ColorfulFish" layer were selected.

And that's it. Easy, right? 

You know what to do from there. You can modify your selection edges, apply an adjustment to just that part of your image, or whatever you want. Just remember that for this trick to work, you have to command-click on a layer with a transparent background. It won't work on a white or solid colored background. 

Gadget Tips You May Not Know

Every once in awhile, I come across a simple little tip or trick that makes life so much easier. Sometimes it involves cleaning something in my house or caring for my yard, something that had taken me tedious hours before, and I just didn't know that someone made a gadget or tool or product that would take care of my problem in seconds.

One of the most recent times involved replacing my car's dead battery. I struggled for a long time trying to get it out, but it just wouldn't budge. I finally called my Dad to ask if he would come help. It turns out that he has a tool especially for doing what I was trying to do that I had no idea even existed. It took him seconds to get the battery removed and replaced. (Thanks Dad!)

Many times, when I come across something new like that, I wonder what other things there are in the world that I don't yet know about. What other holes in my knowledge are there?

Apparently, I am not the only one this happens to. David Pogue, the author of a helpful article from the New York Times, titled "Ins and Outs of Using Gadgetry," writes about simple "how to" stuff for your electronic gadgets that you may have missed in your comings and goings.

He poses the question, "How is the average person supposed to know the essentials of their phones, cameras and computers? There's no government leaflet, no mandatory middle-school class, no state agency that teaches you some core curriculum. Instead, we muddle along, picking up scattershot techniques as we go."

Pogue includes some simple tips involving cellphones, cameras, app phones, web stuff, editing text on a computer, and even some Mac tips. He thinks it is likely that there is going to be something on his list of tips to which you'll say, "I didn't know that!"

So click through to this article and read through Pogue's list. And even if you don't learn something new, you can still pat yourself on the back, knowing that you are very media savvy in this ever-changing world.

Book Review - The Elements of Typographic Style

Although this is really a reference manual, it turns out to be a surprisingly compelling read. This book instructs the reader in the art and craft of typography — mainly for laying out type in books. There is a lot to say (and Robert Bringhurst says it well) about an art form that strives to be beautiful, functional, and when done right, somewhat invisible.

There are sections about the historical development of type and fonts, plus detailed instructions on pleasing and harmonious margins and text blocks on pages. But if you know you aren't going to read this book from cover to cover, try to sample at least Chapters 1 and 2. These present more general ideas and advice about typography and are valuable to one who is interested in setting type well.

One of my favorite pieces of advice comes from Chapter 6, Choosing and Combining Type. He says to "use what there is to the best advantage."

If there is nothing for dinner but beans, one may hunt for an onion, some pepper, salt, cilantro and sour cream to enliven the dish, but it is generally no help to pretend that the beans are really prawns or chanterelles.

When the only font available is Cheltenham or Times Roman, the typographer must make the most of its virtues, limited though they may be ... but there is nothing to gained by pretending that Times Roman is Bembo.

Perhaps because he uses a food analogy here, but that has stuck with me. I also liked Chapter 10 where various fonts are listed by category (serif, san serif, blackletter, script, etc.) with a short history and samples. Plus, throughout the book he uses different fonts to demonstrate his points. And while not all of us will face having to typeset Greek letters in conjunction with English ones, Bringhurst goes into great detail about how to do so successfully in Chapter 6.

You don't have to feel like this book sets out rules in stone, especially if you are a professional typesetter and you are comfortable with the basics already. In fact, I think trying to follow all of the author's suggestions at once would be counterproductive. Instead, use this book to think about the little details in typography, or to pull yourself out of your usual approaches to type and see someone else's perspective for a little while.

This isn't the only book on typography that is a good resource, but it has stood the test of time rather well. I would recommend it to anyone interested in typography.

Overprinting White Type, or How to Make Type Invisible

No, this post isn't about a cool magic trick with type. It's really about how to not end up with invisible type. White type and other white elements can sometimes surprise you by not showing up on a printed version of your design. You can see the white type on your screen, so why doesn't it show up on paper?

On your screen:

On your paper:

The most common reason is that somehow those white elements in your design have been set to overprint, and white + overprint = invisibility.

There are several ways to check if any of your white elements are set to overprint. The easiest is to turn on the "Overprint Preview" feature in Illustrator, and InDesign. Simply go to View in the menu bar, and then down to "Overprint Preview." This will simulate what your design will look like when printed. If any white is set to overprint, it will disappear and reappear as you toggle this off and on. The keyboard shortcut for this is the same in Illustrator and InDesign: Command + Option + Shift + Y.

Here is Illustrator's menu bar with Overprint Preview selected:

And here is InDesign's menu bar:

You can also check your pdfs for overprinting white type in Acrobat. In Acrobat 9, an easy way to do this is to go to Advanced on the menu bar, then to Print Production, then to Output Preview.

A menu will come up. Simply check the "Simulate Overprinting" box. Any overprinting white will "disappear" from your design when this is turned on.

No one likes to be surprised when it comes to a press check, and we don't want to hear anyone say, "Hey, where is my white type?" So Lorraine Press has safeguards built into our system that will find any overprinting white, whether it be lines or type, and correct it to knock out. But for your own files, and for those that don't print here at Lorraine (if there happen to be any!), you should always check that your white doesn't overprint.

Lorraine Press's E-waste Drive is a Success!

This week at Lorraine Press, as part of our ongoing efforts to be environmentally responsible, we've been encouraging our employees to bring in their e-waste from home. We wanted everyone to participate in Simply Mac's E-Waste Recycling Event. It is the greenest event in town this weekend, and free, too.

But LP wanted to make it even easier for our employees. We told them that all they had to do was bring in their unwanted, old electronics to work with them, and then we would haul all their stuff for them to the event to be recycled.

And today, after a weeklong accumulation of ancient electronics, we were able to cart it all off to be recycled. We would like to thank our Environmental Committee Chairperson for making this all happen.

Lorraine Press employees were able to collect almost 1500 pounds of e-waste that will now be recycled instead of thrown away into the landfill. We were all happy to see it go, knowing that it would be safely recycled.

Simply Mac did a wonderful job of organizing the event. There were plenty of helpers directing us where to go, when we first pulled up. And then they unloaded everything for us. We didn't even have to leave the truck. Here's some friendly helpers unloading our truck for us:

And here is a photo of the operation at the Maverick Center, one of the places you can drop off your e-waste. Very organized and efficient.

The E-Waste Recycle Event is still going on tomorrow, so you still have time to get rid of those old monitors, televisions, and VCRs. For more information, click here for Simply Mac's website to see where the drop off points are and a list of accepted items.

Free E-Waste Recycling in Utah This Weekend

This weekend Simply Mac is sponsoring free e-waste recycling for Salt Lake and Utah Counties. Friday, April 29, 2011 is the day for businesses to drop off their old electronics, and Saturday, April 30, 2011 is for personal electronics recycling. The hours for drop off are 9 am to 3 pm on both days. Rain or shine.

Lorraine Press would like to encourage everyone to recycle their old computers, (uncracked or unbroken) CRT monitors, keyboards, servers, switches, computer wires, hard drives, cell phones, PDAs, DVD or VHS players, TVs, copiers, and fax machines. Recycling your old electronics helps extend the life of our landfills in Utah. E-waste is the fastest growing segment of America's trash volume. For a full list of what is being accepted and what is not, click here and scroll down to the list of accepted electronic devices.

All equipment is going to be destroyed and then recycled. None of it will be re-used.

There are several drop-off locations in both Utah and Salt Lake counties.

For Salt Lake County: University of Utah, Merrill Engineering Parking Lot, 72 S. Central Campus Drive, Salt Lake City, UT 84112 AND Maverik Center, South Parking Lot, 3200 South Decker Lake Drive, West Valley City, UT 84119

For Utah County:  Thanksgiving Point, North Parking Lot, 3003 N. Thanksgiving Way, Lehi, UT 84043 AND Provo Towne Center, West Parking Lot, 1200 Towne Centre Blvd, Provo, UT 84601

For more information, see the Simply Mac website.

Do the earth a favor and recycle those old electronic dinosaurs!

Print in the News - Liberty Stamp Kerfuffle

According to an article in the New York Times, the U.S. Postal Service has printed a new stamp featuring the Statue of Liberty, but not the one in New York Harbor. Unbeknownst to the USPS, the Statue of Liberty image they chose from some stock photography is of the statue that stands outside the New York-New York Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Kudos to the stamp collector and avid Statue of Liberty fan who noticed the mix up. 

Before you run out and stock up on this philatelic error, the USPS is not recalling this one. It is simply changing the information about the stamp. So, while this is slightly embarrassing, it isn't as bad as the erroneous stamp that said the Grand Canyon is in Colorado, right?

It just goes to show that a little background checking never hurts.

From a picture to a font — OCR in Acrobat 9

Ever been handed a piece of paper by a client and told, "This is all I have, but I want you to recreate this." If it's a business card, that's not a big deal. There's not much time involved in re-typesetting someone's phone number. But what if it's several pages of type? Or a manuscript? Or a file of scanned images that a client then wants to make type changes to?

Acrobat (not Reader, but the full version) has a great feature to help out with this problem, OCR. OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition, and it can convert an image of text and turn it into searchable, real, vector text. Acrobat has had an OCR feature for many versions now, but we are going to be looking at the features in Acrobat 9's OCR. You can use the OCR feature as you are scanning the document, or if you already have an image, you can apply OCR to it.

I am going to assume you have an image file already and want the text in the image to actually be text, and not a picture. First, launch Acrobat 9. (Mac or PC, of course!) Then go to File < Create PDF < From File. Select your image file, hit okay. When it comes up, you have a pdf file all ready to go.

(A note: Adobe recommends that your compression options in converting a tif to a pdf should be changed to a lossless compression format before converting Tiffs to a pdf format. Go to Edit < Preferences < Convert to PDF, select tiff, click on Edit settings and change the compression to ZIP or for Monochrome, change to JBIG2(lossless) or CCITT G4.)

Then, go to Document < OCR Text Recognition < Recognize Text Using OCR.

When that menu pops up, choose all pages if you have a multiple page document, or the current page, or a range of pages.  For the Settings the OCR will use, I prefer the ones in the image below.

ClearScan is new to Acrobat 9 and why I like using 9 instead of a previous version. In previous versions, the best setting to use was "Searchable Image." Using Searchable Image, you end up with the picture but it is compressed, and also a type layer behind the image that Acrobat then can use for searches, etc. Since it keeps the picture, using the "Searchable Image" settings leaves you with a much larger document, especially if your "Downsample" setting is at 600 dpi. The difference between "Searchable Image" and "Searchable Image (Exact)" is that the Exact option will keep the original image without compression, giving you an even larger final document size.

ClearScan actually creates a custom font out of the picture, turning your bitmap text into vectors. This allows for a much smaller final document size and better looking letters. For the third setting in this menu, I like to use the highest resolution possible in the "Downsample" option. It also keeps the letters looking their best.

To edit your settings, click on the "Edit" button. Once they are set, click ok to continue.

The OCR will now run. How long this takes depends on how many pages the pdf has and how much text are on those pages. Also, remember that the higher resolution your original image is, the better the OCR will recognize your text.

Here is a close up sample of my pdf document of an image of text before OCR. Note the artifacting around the letters.

And here is a close up of my pdf after the OCR has run. The type is no longer bitmapped, but is magically transformed into vectors.

Voila, now I have selectable text:

Once my text is really text, I can do all sorts of things with it in Acrobat.

Or I could select it all, copy it, launch InDesign, and paste it into a document where I can select which ever font I wish my text to be and move on from there to make any type corrections or layout modifications. The image below is small, but it is trying to show that my font has been changed from the custom OCR font to Arial.

The OCR in Acrobat is not perfect. It didn't recognize the fancy drop cap on the page as text, and some of the letters came out wrong (for example, the capital letter "I" and the numeral "1" can look a lot alike in some fonts), so a quick proofread was necessary. However, it was much faster running the OCR than having me sit down and type in a bunch of pages of text, (and much more accurate, too).

Adobe has been expanding Acrobat's capabilities with each version release. There's more to it than just pdf creation nowadays. We'll look at more useful Acrobat features in future posts.

Social Media Technology & Utah

Are you interested in where social media is going in Utah?

There will be a forum with Senator Orrin Hatch and Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook speaking on this subject on Friday, March 29, 2011 in Provo, Utah at BYU's Marriott Center, 11 AM.

It is free (no tickets necessary), and anyone can attend, but it is requested that you are in a seat by 10:45 AM.  After the main presentation, the speakers will answer questions from the public submitted to BYU's Facebook page.

Background Tasks in InDesign CS5

Wonder where that progress bar went when exporting a pdf from an InDesign document? As of CS5, it's now in the background!

That's great news for those who wish to keep working on something else while a document is being exported. Not only will it export one document in the background, but you can queue up several to export, one after another. Just know that there is no changing the order of which one goes first once the documents are queued up: the order in which they are exported is the order they are produced.

For those who want to see exactly what is going on in the background, go to Window > Utilities > Background Tasks to bring up a window that shows what background tasks are in use, what order they are in, and how far along they are in the process. It's also helpful to see when InDesign is done with a specific document so you can safely close it.

Right now, File > Export (or Cmd/Cntrl + E), Adobe pdf (print) runs in the background, but not File > Export, Adobe pdf (interactive). Also, exporting a pdf from a book document isn't a background task yet. Just plain printing (Cmd/Cntrl +P) from InDesign is also not a background task. However, exporting to IDML is a background task. (This is a useful format if you would like someone to be able to open your CS5 document in CS4.)

Hopefully, this new feature will free up some time that would otherwise be spent waiting and watching a progress bar.

Photoshop CS5's Content Aware Fill

One of my favorite new capabilities in Photoshop CS5 is the Content Aware Fill. When I saw the pre-release demonstration of this tool, at first my jaw dropped in admiration, then I cheered. And then I calculated the soonest I could possibly get my grubby little hands on the new Photoshop. Gone are the days of tediously using the stamp tool to clone away unwanted and distracting objects in photos!

When you use the content aware fill, Photoshop is going to analyze your image and create a background fill of what it thinks the image would look like if that unwanted object was never there.

Here's my original image. Just an old snapshot.

Not bad, but what if the big pole on the right could go away? And the oil spots on the concrete, and also the street lights in the background? I think it would look better. (Did you even notice the oil spots until I mentioned them?)

So here we go. (in Photoshop CS5) The first step is to never work on your original photo. Either save a copy as a new file, or work on a new layer (Control/Command + J for layer duplication!)

Once you have your working photo, use a lasso tool, or your favorite selection tool to loosely select the object you want to have removed. Don't make the selection right on the edge of your object! In the example below, I used the polygonal lasso tool because my selection shape was going to be roughly rectangular.

Then, if you are working on your Background layer, you can just hit delete and a Fill menu comes up. But if you are working on any other layer in your image, you need to go to Edit < Fill. A menu comes up.

I really prefer using the keyboard shortcut for going there. It is Shift + F5.
So here is the Fill menu.

If your drop down menu doesn't say "Content Aware" (like the one above), switch it, so it looks like the image below.

Once you have this selected, click ok.

The computer will chew on this for a little bit. My selection isn't large, so it only took a couple of seconds. The larger the area selected, the longer this processing time takes. Let's see what it did…

I left the selection on, so you could see the area. It's not perfect. So you can either touch it up by hand, or you could reselect the areas that need improving, and then run the Content Aware Fill again, just like we did the first time. Here's my touched up version:

You'd never have known it was there. Hurray! Okay, so what about the oil spots? Same thing. Loosely select the areas you want gone, bring up the fill menu (remember it's Shift F5, or hit delete if you are on the Background layer) and the magical Content Aware Tool will fill it in.

And the pesky lamp posts in the background? Gone.

Even the one by the guy's head can be mostly taken out with Content Aware Fill.

Just to show the whole truth, here's what Photoshop will do if you select something too complicated:

Oops! With practice, you'll learn what will fill well, and what will end up looking like this.

Okay, after all of that touch up, here's what our final image looks like:

Your eye is no longer drawn away from the people in the image to look over at the pole. And even though the oil spots weren't terribly distracting, you have to agree the image looks better without them.

The Content Aware Fill can also be used in smallish places with the Spot Healing Brush tool. First, select that tool in Photoshop, second go to the top bar that shows that tool's options, and select the Content Aware radial button:

Then you can "paint" with that tool, and the fill will be healed using the new Content Aware capabilities.

Fun, right? Quite useful, too. With this new feature in CS5 Photoshop, you can quickly touch up photos, eliminating much of the need for tedious manual cloning in. I wouldn't want to do touch ups with out it now.