It's cheaper and better.  Plus, Corel used to be based in Ottawa which is my hometown.

Adobe Acrobat is pretty bloated. Plus it makes PDF files that occasionally can't be read by some paying subs of our subscription-based newsletter service. This is a real annoyance when I get stuck on the hook trying to explain why the PDF file won't open to some non-techie guy.

Basically, I try to get people to use anything other than Adobe Acrobat/Reader. So here you go, please buy.

Start da promo here:

All-in-one PDF creator that lets you view files, plus assemble, edit and create PDFs. View more than 100 different file types just by dragging and dropping them into the Welcome Screen.
Corel PDF Fusion - Copy "Save $30 on the New Corel PDF Fusion. All-in-one PDF creator. View more than 100 file types. Only $39.99. Limited Time Only."
Save $30 on the New Corel PDF Fusion. All-in-one PDF creator. View more than 100 file types. Only $39.99. Limited Time Only

Michael Jahn has a new blog up over at blogger. He's working now for Compose USA. There's some link love for you baby. Always enjoyed you bouncing around the old prepress forum asking everybody "Why so serious?"

Michael dropped a line to ask how I was doing. Nice of you to ask.

I'm busy. It's 10:45 pm and I've gotten to do some work tonight for all three clients but I'll be lucky I get stuff done for two, it's late and I've had too many late nights over the last year. But I guess it's good to be busy isn't it?

Well I don't know about you guys, but I grab a lot of images off the web to play with in Photoshop. Lots of time wasted in downloading an image, loading up Photoshop and finding out it's too low-res or it's got artifacts up the ying-yang.

Which is why I use...drumroll please... Image Zoom in Firefox. It allows you to click on the image and then right-click to zoom up.

That's all it does. But what it does is just perfect.

I always buy my desktops off craiglist. For usually around $150, I get a decent machine that suits all my need and usually a legal version of MS Office 2003. Good enough for what I do.

However, my netbook is brand new. Why? Because Futureshop (and no doubt other stores) offer up to $300 off laptops and netbooks if you sign a contract for an internet stick (about $40 a month).

For us work from home types, a internet stick is a must-have anyways, so it's a no brainer. Nothing like having urgent email to answer and you pick a coffee shop with the wifi down. Or you are stuck in a meeting at an office where there's no wireless because the IT guys are security-freaks.

Anyhow, if you have a crappy laptop and you're a road warrior, there's no excuse. If a cheap guy like me buys new, then so should you:

http://www.futureshop.ca/en-CA/category/computers/1.aspx

M-bossed did a blog listing his top 10 print blogs. There are some familiar ones there, like Gordon's Quality in Print, and the group bloggers at PrintCEO. There are also some  print blogs I've never read before, like the dieline, a blog for the packaging printers (the pictures are gorgeous, by the way).

There was also a mention of  the tough love for xerox blog, which I've peeked at every once in awhile. I don't follow it that much because he does talk mostly about (guess) Xerox and while Xerox is my favorite digital printer, I'm not obsessed with it. On the other hand, Michael (the tlfx owner) is getting into Twitter a bit and its fun to watch that.

There are two blogs that should have been on my list but weren't (in my opinion, of course). One is the venerable and authoritative Prepressure and the second is Poor Richard wordpress blog. I'm suspecting that Laurens of PP got bumped the list because he has prepress in his URL?

But I'm not surprised that Poor Richard is left off the list since the guy writes beautiful essays but never links to other printing blogs so nobody knows about him. I know that smacks of cronyism but hey, I don't spend all day searching Google for other blogs that write about printing and prepress. I usually find out about blogs in one of two way: 1) They link to a story of mine and I get a pingback (notification somebody linked to me) or 2) I'm reading a familiar blog and hey, they mention a blog I've never heard of before. Let me be blunt on this: If you don't do the linky-link with other blogs of your ilk, you're not going to get the traffic in the long run, unless you bang out beautiful essay day after day. And that's hard.

However, I don't think Poor Richard gives a bleep anyways, as he is too busy running a real live print shop, as opposed to Prepress Pilgrim who spent way too much last week trying to configure a virtual private server for an upcoming client site migration.

And try as I might, there was no way I was going to make a semi-interesting blog post out of THAT adventure, hence this blog post must suffice.

I last wrote about digital picture frames here. Slowly but surely they are gaining market share, but of course one barrier is usability.  Like my Mom loves getting pictures of the gran- kids but is not one to set up an electronic picture frame so that its ready for action.  The market needs a digital picture frame where you can just email it pictures. Why hello Kodak Pulse 7-Inch Digital Frame.

This is a great gift for geeks to give to their Moms because you open up the packaging, configure it, re-package it and send it off. Then when you have a new picture of the kiddies, you can email it to her. Awesome.
Mind you, you just don't have to buy it for your Mom. Let's say you have a girlfriend, you could buy it for her and email pictures of you so she is always reminded of the one she loves. Then, if she breaks up with you, you can email pictures of you drinking with the boys and whooping it up and having a good time, just to show that you are over her.
Wait, did I just write that?
Anyhow, Popular Mechanics liked the Kodak Pulse too, it was one of their picks at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas.

So this idea of a blog post was bubbling around in my head for a least a couple of weeks, maybe more:  I thought it would make a nice end-of-the-decade summary. Plus, it would be easy to write. After all, there has been a lot of innovation in prepress over the last 30 years, n'est-ce pas?

Actually, there has been too much innovation to be comfortable in writing a blog post about in 30 minutes or less. The recent history of prepress is similar to the history of flight in the mid-twentieth century: In 1939, the speed record for a turboprop plane was under 400 miles an hour. In 1969, men landed on the moon. It's been like that in prepress.

So, after about a week of writer's block, I emailed 3 fellow bloggers, (Laurens of Prepressure, Gordon of QualityinPrint and Dave Kauffman of davekauffman.blogspot.com) a list of about 14 innovations and asked them to pick their favorites. All of them quickly emailed back their rankings along with suggestions of their own. All of them pointed out significant innovations which I had overlooked, and this only led to more writer's block. It didn't help either that we got a Wii in the family household for Christmas (swordfighting in Wii Sports Resort is completely addictive for me).

But time marches on. The blog post must be written. And so, without further ramblings, here is the list:

1. The Apple-Pagemaker-Laserwriter Combo (1985)

This choice was the clear winner with two of the three judges picking it as #1, and the third listing Pagemaker in the third spot.

Unless you were there, it is hard to understand the excitement that one felt the first time you sat at a Mac and design something and printed it out. It was like hey I got some saltpeter here, and a little of charcoal over there, let's add some sulphur, mix it all together.  BOOM! Gunpowder.

Note: I remember reading some years ago, that the developer of the Laserwriter Postscript interpreter nearly went insane (or at least suffered a nervous breakdown) while coding it. If anybody knows of an authoritative link to the story, please email me or drop the link in the comments.

2. Postscript

The programming language of print. The #2 choice of everybody except for Laurens who thought it shouldn't mentioned at all because it was covered by the #1 spot.

Postscript was a notoriously hard language to learn, but it in the memory-constrained 1980s (remember when 128K was a lot), it worked well enough (Except when the RIP crashed. Which did happen frequently). It is not an overstatement to say Postscript was the foundation of Adobe, and without Adobe there would have been no prepress revolution.

3. (tie) Portable Document Format (PDF)

Everybody had PDF on their list. Technically, PDF is part of the Postscript oeuvre, but that misses the point: When the 1.3 specification of PDF was released in 1996, the second revolution of prepress started and the "PDF workflow" became the dominant form of prepress today in an amazingly short period of time. Who remembers CEPS?

4. (tie) Thermal CTP

Printers were going computer-to-plate well before Creo released the Trendsetter in 1995. Of course they were doing it with YAG lasers that were only slightly smaller than your bedroom. Without thermal ctp, it is likely that most printers would still be burning film.

5. PDF Workflows: Apogee and Prinergy

Does anybody remember the productivity controversy of the late 1990s? At that time, economic statistics were showing an unexplained burst of productivity in western economies. Some economists were argueing that investment in computers and IT was finally playing dividends. The more pessimistic economists were claiming that the productivity bump was nothing more than a mirage.

And the prepress managers of the time, who had invested in Prinergy or Apogee were shaking their heads and saying "HOLY-MOLY, productivity just went up 500%. Out of the ten guys working in prepress right now, which two do I keep?"

Note: The top five were unanimous picks. The bottom five only made on two out of three lists.

6. Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop 1.07 added support for CMYK (1991) - making 4-color processing much easier and especially much more affordable. Photoshop was also unique in that it never really had any competitors that seriously competed for marketshare in the digital imaging niche (although Corel Photo-Paint had a hard-core following, and Live Picture was brilliant, until Adobe bought out the company and strangled it in the crib).

7.  Digital ICC-based Color Management

The ICC spec combined with Apple's ColorSynch in 1993 was a stunning innovation to a generation of graphic designers who didn't really know how their printed piece would look until they saw it on the press. Color management went from mechanical, analog, craftmanship to digital science.

8.  Quark

Quark just squeaked onto the list. Yes, Quark-bashing has been a recreational sport in the prepress world for at least the last ten years but Quark 3.32 was a thing of majestic beauty in comparison to its peers at the time.

On a side note, the firing of the original Quark's team in Denver and the offshore of future development in India will go down as one of the most botched software projects in all of the history of graphic design/printing/prepress whatever.

9. Indesign/Creative Suite

After 20 years, Adobe invested in reproducing the optical kerning from phototypesetters that defined high quality typography that disappeared from the market during Quark's market domination.
By bundling InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop in one single package, Adobe managed to finally completely dominate the graphic arts software industry - a situation that isn't likely to change in the years to come.

10. The Digital Connection to the Imagesetter

Back in the eighties, and well into the nineties, prepress specialists weren't really called prepress specialist but... strippers (insert bad joke here). The job of a stripper was to photograph galleys and pierce together (or "strip") the film so press plates could be burned.
With Linotron/Compugraphic imagesetter connectivity in 1989, and then the publishing of Preps, the first professional imposition package, the job of the stripper became obsolete almost overnight.

Notable mentions:

CEPS Systems - Barco & Scitex Brisque

Before the desktop revolution this was how magazines were done - high end, custom hardware, proprietary software, real engineering marvels.

Agfa-Gevaert, DuPont, Eastman Kodak and 3M introduce daylight films (1980)

Still used today at thousands of companies worldwide.

Staccato screens  (1998)

Made FM screening a practical process and transformed how a great deal of printing is done (e.g. 80% of phone directories and ~70% of newspaper inserts now printed FM).

Lastly, just for laughs, Microsoft starts shipping Comic Sans in 1994, soon to be the most loathed font in the world.

About the Contributors

Gordon Pritchard

Formerly Print Quality Marketing Manager for eleven years at Creo/Kodak. Presented at print technical conferences, trained printers and buyers regarding print quality issues in Europe, N. America, and S.E. Asia. Articles published in trade journals, co-authored TAGA paper on halftone screening, authored BRIDG's guide to halftone screening. Previously Technical Director of Hemlock Printers - Western Canada's largest commercial sheetfed shop. Created Laser's Edge, Canada's largest prepress service bureau. Former Creative Director at McCann Ericksson Vancouver. You can contact Gordon at qualityinprint@gmail.com and of course visit his blog on printing, prepress and other stuff.

Dave Kauffman

Dave learned Postscript at a course given by Stephen Herron in the mid-80's and wrote a small application that let you customize the PostScript screen dot shape, which basically got him a job at Creo. After learning the vagaries of PostScript and OPI with the development of PlateMaster he worked with DJ and Dave Hylands to build a PostScript optimizer called PreScript, which lead to the the PDF 1.2 spec and a viable format capable of building Prinergy.
Dave Kauffman's blog is here. His latest blog entry is on the future of Adobe.

Laurens Leurs

When Laurens from Prepressure.com isn't photographing ancient printing equipment, he 's probably staring at old phototypesetters and outdated prepress equipment or worrying about the current state of our industry.

*Attributions to specific contributors were removed after 1st draft as in the opinion of the group, it detracted from the focus of the piece. Therefore, consider all factual errors and clumsy turns of phrase to be the fault of the owner of this blog. If you read something particularly clever or insightful, it was somebody else who wrote it.

**Dave is being far too generous in according credit to me in development of the seminal product known as Prescript. The core development team consisted of 3 people: Glen Cairns, Raymond Mak, and Creo's first principle software engineer, Dave Hylands.

My role on that team was one of tester. Oh, and to get the coffee. In my defense, entering the coffee room at that time was considered hazardous, as that was the same room where Amos Michelson, then CEO of Creo, got his coffee. One time I dallied too long reaching for extra cream, and was sent to Wisconsin to deal with an upset customer whose files were taking too long to rip. (And I'm not kidding. I really was sent to Wisconsin. Same day. In January. )

child soldier

The guys over at mostinspired.com have a nice collection of print ads with notable typography design for you to look at.

Two things:

First: I was running paid traffic to one of my niche game web sites hoping to make some affiliate commission by targeting a video game (Rockband Beatles) that I thought would be popular this Christmas.  I a nice domain name, I signed up to affiliate that would drop-ship the product, and the Google adwords campaign was set and ready to go. The price seemed pretty good, about $150 with shipping included. Ran it for a week and then Amazon went Black Thursday about a week earlier and dropped their prices to $99. Oh gees, thanks. Dropped the campaign.

Second:

I had a nice phone chat with some people in the printing business about the availability of the Prinergy developers that got laid off this weekend. Smart people trying to make good solid moves in the printing business. Said they need developers, lots of them so they could re-engineer their production costs an order of magnitude lower. Needed good smart developers to tweak the algorithms, you know. The goal, the holy grail of course was to printing nothing more (and nothing less) than a production line. No craftsmen, no unskilled labour, heck no skilled labour, no humans getting involved at all to muck things up.  It's been more than 10 years since thermal CTP and digital workflow took flight in this industry, and still innovators are stepping up and saying, hey, we can still do more, and faster.

It happens every years and nobody marvels anymore. Computers get cheaper, cell phones get cheaper, HDTVs get waaaay cheaper. Take a walk in the real world and everybody worries about government running deficits and the growth of the money supply and inflation. Leave the "real" world and enter tech world where inflation only refers to the ever-increasing sizes of LCD screen and companies have to figure out to keep their margins up with price drops of  10-30% a year, year-over-year.

Where is prepress going? It's getting dragged kicking and screaming into tech world. What are the implications of that? What do you think?

Every once in awhile I like to shut off my brain (Yes, there's a rumour I have one) and surf the web looking to post news in prepress and throw links to other people's website. Anything to knock Wikipedia out of the first spot for the Google ranking of the word "prepress."  Sure it's a bit of a hopeless mission but it doesn't stop me trying.

First thing I noticed, not much is happening in the world of commercial litho, except a fair bit of whining here and there, some of started by your truly. But let's not go there today, like I said, the brain switch is firmly in the off position. Oh sure, Canon bought out Ricoh but to a software guy like me, so what? Come on, what fun software packages have the digital print guys ever contributed to the industry?  Name one.

But when it comes to packaging, ah that's a different story. Should have listened to Mom when she said "DJ - Packaging! That's the future!" But no, I went into making film for commercial litho. Hey, you should have seen my stock portfolio in 2001.

Anyhow, back to the news at hand: Check out this vendor: Astute Graphics. They make this neat (and cheap) little plug-in for Illustrator that allows you to edit bitmap images in Illustrator. It's called Phantasm, yours for maybe $50. Really, I'm not doing it justice, you should go to their web site and check it out.

Second of all, check out the packaging and essentials website. Now this is a wordpress site that essentially takes press releases and posts them up and doesn't allow any comments (boo!) but oh my, check the sidebars. Lots of interesting links to niche web sites (Look! Bison Gear & Engine has a Facebook page).

You could spend hours checking out the web sites listed there.