The 2010 archive
These comments and polls appeared on the home page of Prepressure.com during 2010:
July 2010
PrepressPete is tweeting
Watched ‘Print Hard’ – about a bald macho printer who stops a turtlenecked terrorist from forcing the world to read everything on an iPad.
I’m late when it comes to late binding
A recent discussion on the PrintPlanet forums made me realize I never put any information about late binding on this site. I remember hearing about it for the first time about 10 or 12 years ago. A guy selling a competitive workflow kept rambling on about the advantages of late binding. I didn’t understand a word of what he said so I just kept nodding and going ‘Uhmm… mmm…mmm’. As soon as he left, I found out that my colleagues had no idea either but fortunately the web (or was it still CompuServe in those days?) came up with the answer.
Since this is an important aspect of modern prepress, I’ve added a dedicated page discussing early and late-binding.
June 2010
PrepressPete is tweeting
Boss spent his time at IPEX in the Komori bar & staring at the SpeedMaster CX102. The only thing he learned is that he likes Pilsner Urquell.
The poll: How do you edit PDF files?
The page on how to edit PDF files is one of the most popular ones on this site. It brings up the question which tools people actually use for editing PDFs.
There are lots of cheap or free utilities but I only listed the more prepress oriented professional solutions in the poll. Users discussed their preferences in this thread on the B4Print forums.
Which tool(s) do you use to edit PDF files?
- Adobe Acrobat (42%, 109 Votes)
- Pitstop Pro/Extreme (22%, 58 Votes)
- I never edit PDFs (14%, 36 Votes)
- Adobe Illustrator (13%, 33 Votes)
- Another PDF editing app (7%, 19 Votes)
- Infix PDF Editor (2%, 6 Votes)
- Quite-a-box-of-tricks (2%, 4 Votes)
- Callas pdfToolbox (2%, 4 Votes)
- another Acrobat plug-in (0%, 1 Votes)
Total Voters: 262
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Had my first blue screen ever since upgrading to Windows 7 a few months back. Old habits are the most difficult to get rid off!
May 2010
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Our phone company only wants to work with ‘green printers’ – pretty ridiculous since most phonebooks are dumped the day they are delivered.
The poll: Ready to upgrade to CS 5?
Adobe seem to stick pretty well to an 18-month upgrade cycle for their Creative Suite software. Having only recently upgraded to CS4, I am not exactly itching to upgrade once more. Some of the new Photoshop features are tempting though.
Below are the results from this poll about everyone’s plans with CS5. Also check out this related thread on the B4print forum.
Upgrading to Adobe CS5
- Done already (28%, 54 Votes)
- Maybe later (27%, 53 Votes)
- In the next 6 months (20%, 38 Votes)
- I'll skip this release (15%, 28 Votes)
- I don't use Create Suite (10%, 20 Votes)
Total Voters: 193
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I scrutinized a brochure for the iPad. It said ‘Designed in California, printed in China’. Somehow that didn’t surprise me at all.
Admiring typography in Lisbon
During a recent trip to Portugal a few beautiful examples of typography caught my eye.
Bertrand's bookshop
The signage at Bertrand’s Bookshop (‘livraria’ in Portuguese) is a nice example of this. The spacing between the V and R on the first line does seem a bit off though. Check this page if you want to see some more samples.
PrepressPete is tweeting
Found a DVD with an early beta of QuarkXPress 9 in a pub near the expo center!!! Interested? My asking price has dropped to 5$….
April 2010
PrepressPete is tweeting
Remind me to never ever do a drinking contest with the press operators again. They seem to spend their working time in some kind of desert!
The poll: Is Adobe Acrobat crash-prone?
I have always been pretty happy with Acrobat 7 Professional. After upgrading to version 8, I quickly found out that this release was less stable and would crash frequently, at least on my systems. Initially Acrobat 9 looked promising but meanwhile I have the impression that it is also less reliable than version 7. I don’t understand why this is the case. Photoshop has always been rock-solid on any system it ran on. InDesign is pretty good as well. Why is Acrobat, which is essentially an elaborate document browser, less reliable than these complex editing apps? Weird!
I asked visitors about their experience with the various releases of Adobe Acrobat or Acrobat Professional. The topic also gets discussed in this thread on the B4print forum.
How reliable is your copy of Adobe Acrobat?
- Acro 9 is rock solid (30%, 91 Votes)
- Acro 9 crashes regularly (27%, 81 Votes)
- Acro 9 crashes sometimes (21%, 64 Votes)
- Acro 7 crashes regularly (10%, 29 Votes)
- Acro 8 is rock solid (9%, 28 Votes)
- Acro 7 is rock solid (9%, 26 Votes)
- Acro 8 crashes regularly (9%, 26 Votes)
- Acro 8 crashes sometimes (7%, 21 Votes)
- Acro 7 crashes sometimes (7%, 20 Votes)
Total Voters: 303
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CS5 is on its way. Dear Mr. Adobe, can you please also tell it to the 2 genius designers that still deliver Pagemaker files to us? Thanks!
White space – to the extreme
In page layout, white space refers to the blank area between characters or graphic regions. Last week I saw a magazine that made extreme use of this concept. In my copy a signature that was only printed on one side got through and was used in finishing. In the first part of the magazine there was a set of blank pages and obviously near the end, the same happened again.
It is not unusual to see printed matter with registration issues, a low-res image or some problem with fonts. It is however the first time ever that I saw unprinted pages in a magazine. Maybe ‘NaturFoto’ were trying to improve their carbon footprint?
PrepressPete is tweeting
Global warming? The boss just told us our wages and prepress budget will remain frozen for the third year in a row. I’d love some warming!
March 2010
PrepressPete is tweeting
Wisdom from the PrintPlanet forums: A consultant is really just a dealer with a laid back approach.
Ereaders? No thanks, not yet!
The past few months I have been investigating ebook readers. I need a replacement for my 5 year old Palm T3, on which I’ve read hundreds on books. Unfortunately these devices aren’t exactly cheap and none of them can convince me to spend my money. Check my rant about ‘5 reasons not to buy an ereader – yet‘.
Fortunately new devices seem to show up every week. I have yet to try the Sony PRS-600 pictured above and obviously the Apple iPad is also something to look out for.
February 2010
The poll: a career in graphic arts
There are numerous movies in which the main character somehow goes back in time and gets the opportunity to restart his or her life. I asked forum visitors if, given the opportunity, they would once again go for a career in graphic arts or avoid it like the plague. Compare the poll results to those of early 2008, when I asked the same question.
Would you work in prepress again if you could do it all over?
- Of course! (43%, 65 Votes)
- No way! (34%, 51 Votes)
- Maybe... (23%, 35 Votes)
Total Voters: 151
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Finally went to see ‘Avatar’ – it is so depressing that you never see newspapers or any other kind of print in science-fiction movies.
Every little bit helps
The January advertising earnings of this site have been donated to Médecins Sans Frontières, to support their efforts in Haiti.
Mac & Firefox are doing fine…
I had Photoshop open while staring at Google Analytics, so why not share some data just for fun? It is no surprise that Prepressure.com is popular with Mac users. A lot of them are working in prepress and design. It is however interesting that FireFox has pulled ahead of Internet Explorer! I am surprised that Chrome is doing so well. January is also the first month in which this site got to 5000 page views on some working days.
- OS & browser statistics for January 2010
… but Playboy isn’t
While waiting for my turn in the local barber shop, I read a few ‘articles’ from the Dutch version of Playboy. One of them seemed to be a reprint for which the pictures had been rescanned from an earlier copy. The woman in those pictures had an ugly zebra moire-pattern across her skin. It is amazing that Playboy seems to have dropped its standards so much that they accept such bad quality.
My barber caught me staring for an embarrassing amount of time at one of those pictures, so I deemed it better not to ask if I could borrow the copy to photograph the effect. You’ll have to buy a few issues yourself ‘out of professional interest’ 
PrepressPete is tweeting
JOY is having a back-up but not telling the sales idiot that you could recover the report that he once again ‘accidentally’ deleted .
Fun jokes from ‘Customers from hell’
The client horror stories that can be found at the ‘Customers from hell’ blog are mostly from web designers. There are however a number of print related fun stories on that site as well. Here are some of the highlights:
“We need a 4-color, 1 sheet picture menu. PICTURES ONLY, NO WORDS. It’s for the blind and hearing impaired”.
“Can you add an infinitesimal amount of red?”
After I sent a client a mockup with lorem ipsum as filler text: “It’s good but there is a weird language on the page. It will either need to be translated or removed”.
“We don’t like the font in the logo – could you use the one Microsoft use in their software…I think it’s called Arial. I think everyone likes that one – you see it everywhere”.
“Could we try a darker black?”
“Can you send that logo over in electron form, at the highest granularity you have”.
Prospective client: “$400 for a logo?! Why are you so expensive? My nephew has Photoshop—I can just get him to do it”.
Me: “Does your nephew have Microsoft Word?”
Prospective client: “Yes”.
Me: ” Then have him write you a novel while he’s at it”.
“Can you make the circles a little bit rounder?”
“Yes! I want all them, embossing, de-bossing, foil, gold ink, thick black card. I want it to be the most amazing and truely unique business card ever that people say WOW too”.
Client: “You see where you have a full stop at the end of the first sentence?”
Me: “Yes”.
Client: “Can you change it to a comma?”
Me: “Er, well I can, but you should put a full stop at the end of a sentence”.
Client: “Oh, that grammar stuff is very old fashioned”.
“Can you make it red, but not red, you know? And maybe try a primary color, like green”.
“That’s not Quark red. I want Quark red”.
Client: “You’re fired”.
Me: “Why?”
Client: “You printed it upside-down”.
Me: “You’re holding the board upside-down”.
Client [when briefing a designer]: “I am not going to tell you anything, because I don’t want to limit your creativity”.
“Can you make the font more dangerous?”
“Can you please put page numbers on the two-sided postcard? I’m not sure people will know how to get to the other side”.
“No, I said that everything should be in all caps. That’s how important the message is”.
“Please remove the bold styling from the table headers. It will save ink”.
Client: “I want a poster that’s bigger then a piece of printer paper”.
Me: “Well, a lot of people also get 11 by 17 posters made up”.
Client: “How big is that?”
Me: “11 inches by 17 inches”.
Client: “Yes, but how big is it?”
“The proof just has too much purple. Can you just pull out some of the purple ink? Like 2%?”
I sent a client the first draft of an 8pp brochure with Lorem Ipsum filling in for the text I hadn’t yet been supplied. The feedback I received the next day was something along the lines of: “I don’t think we should put the text in French. It might seem a bit elitist to people who can’t read it. Otherwise all looks fine…”
Client: “We’d like to have the background color a bit lighter.”
Me: “The background color is already white #ffffff.”
Client: “Is there anything lighter than that?”
Me: “We can’t print this; this image is really low resolution, even for a 72 dpi thing off the web. It’s literally 300 pixels and we are printing it on a 6×9 inch postcard.”
Boss: “It’s fine, just go with it.”
Me: “But we are a commercial printer—if our own ads look like crap, why should anyone hire us?”
Boss: “We just have opposing philosophies.”
“Could we print the brochure in RGB? You know, it would be cheaper if we use one color less…”
“All these drawings about dinosaurs… Why can’t we have photos?”
“I really like the gradient – going from red to yellow – but I don’t like orange. Can you make it go through another color?”
January 2010
The poll: Using XPS
Looking at recent stats of this site, I noticed a sharp increase in the popularity of my page on the XPS file format. XPS, in case you forgot, is the Microsoft alternative to PDF. Maybe the interest has to do with the success of Windows 7, which ships with tools for creating and viewing XPS files. Global Graphics, who worked with Microsoft to develop this standard, is hoping XPS will increasingly be used in the business world for sharing print-ready documents. That would mean people will also want to print such files on digital presses or maybe even using offset. In prepress, I have yet to encounter my first XPS file or meet someone who actually uses XPS instead of (or next to) PDF. The poll asked people if they had ever created or received XPS files. That was also discussed in this thread on the B4print forums.
How much time do you spend in front of a computer screen each day?
- 8 to 10 hours (32%, 169 Votes)
- > 10 hours (28%, 148 Votes)
- 6 to 8 hours (21%, 112 Votes)
- 4 to 6 hours (11%, 58 Votes)
- < 4 hours (8%, 40 Votes)
Total Voters: 524
Loading ...Posters at ‘Het huis van Alijn’
The print shop had vanished in this museum when I visited it during the Christmas break. Fortunately there was still a lot of printed matter from the 1920’s to be seen. It isn’t just the technology that was different in that age, but also the mindset. Take the card shown below, which was sold to tourists in those days. Lift the boys dress and you will not only see a series of pictures from the city of Ghent, Belgium but also his bum. I think you’d have trouble getting this printed and sold these days!
Check my page about Het huis van Alijn for some colorful examples of posters from the early 20th century.
30 years of prepress innovation
DJ at Prepresspilgrim.com posted an interesting look back at the 10 most important prepress innovations of the past 30 years. I am one of the people that he invited to vote but I won’t spoil the fun: go read his article!
What I find interesting is that some technologies didn’t make it to that list, even though they have been around for quite some time and been hyped by many. JDF is a prime example. It has up to now been a technology driven by a few big vendors, instead of being pushed forward by a quick adoption rate by printers and premedia companies. Variable data processing is another example. Sure it exists and companies are making money using the technology but this hasn’t yet become the game changer that many people thought it would be. There are other innovations that are simply kept a closely guarded secret. The VistaPrint secret sauce falls in that category. Anyway – go read DJ’s list and if you cannot get enough of it, browse through this site’s history of prepress.