Design philosophy: all information in this web site should be accessible to the intended audience regardless of platform, browser, or size of screen. Graphics are kept to a minimum to reduce download times. If you see a frame or an animated GIF, feel free to flame me mercilessly.

This site uses fully compliant cascading style sheets (CSS). Older browsers should display text in their default fonts, while more recent browsers will all display fully formatted text. (However, the styles sheets will look best viewed in Internet Explorer 4.0 or above.) The site also complies with major accessibility standards.

Colophon

The base font for this page is Trebuchet MS, a free font from Microsoft designed for on-screen readability at small point sizes. The headlines are 32 pt Times bold italic, combining elegance, classical proportions, and compactness.

The logo is variation on the original logo from Aldus PageMaker and depicts Aldus Manutius, a student of Johannes Gutenberg and inventor of italics. This is to echo the roots of desktop publishing, both in the 1450s and the 1980s. The logo uses Courier from ITC to evoke the feel of metal type and Poetica from Adobe Systems to evoke the era of hand lettering.

Made on a Macintosh using Adobe Photoshop and Macromedia DreamWeaver.

Report from Seybold Boston 1999

Wed, 3 Mar 1999

At the last minute, I was able to go to Seybold. Here are my notes on the keynote introducing InDesign and on a demo I saw at the Adobe booth. I'll be fairly brief, since so much information is already available, including this list!

John Warnock began by saying InDesign was modular and a platform for the next century. The core of the program is 90% available to plug-ins and 80% available to AppleScript or Visual Basic scripts. He then introduced an InDesign product manager named Mark who started by dragging a Quark file onto InDesign and opeining it with everything intact including guides. The interface is what we expected, including a swatch pallette. Start saving for that bigger monitor. He then imported a native Photoshop image and it came in with layers and clipping path intact. You can edit the clipping path with the pen tool. He showed off several "gee whiz" text effects including stroke and fill, distort, and convert to paths. Everything worked with antialiasing. He went to Illustrator and copied a file, then PASTED it into IND with a high res preview (including transparency) and edited it. He edited the color of the PS file but it failed to update in IND. But the Illustrator object updated correctly when he edited it. To show the quality of the image, he zoomed in to 4,000% and you could read the time on a watch in the image.

You can have multiple master pages and "sub" master pages, which are masters based on other masters, like paragraph styles. (There are also character-based styles. Paragrphs can be multilingual and IND ships with 20 language dictionaries for H&J and spell checking.) He duplicated the master by DRAGGING IT ONTO A "DUPLICATE" ICON. Gee, that's easier than a menu? If there's not a keyboard shortcut for this, you can add one. All the keyboard commands can be re-mapped, as in MS Word. All this is AppleScriptable, as he showed with a script to create multiple masters with differing colors. He then saved the file and went to open it on the PC and got a Blue Screen of Death. (No clue if this was NT or 98). "Oh dear," he said. "Well, let's go back to the Mac."

(Another glitch: In a handout, Adobe wrote "Work with Bezier path tools, such as Adobe's reknowned [sic] pen tool." I hope they didn't spell check that with InDesign!)

He showed off multi-line composing, which allows the composition engine to check a user-specified number of lines above and below for tweaking to imporive H&J and overall text color. Very nice. "Gutenberg did this," he said, "but for desktop publishing, this is brand new." IND also does drop caps and optical alignments based on actual glyph shape. As an example he zoomed in on an "h" with a quote kerned into the glyph space.

He placed a multipage PDF and in the Place dialog box scrolled to the page he wanted and placed it. IND warned him immediately of a missing font. IND now distills directly to PDF, which may finally be ready for prepress. One example he showed had bleeds and crop marks. He called this "Press Ready
PDF." IND has enhanced HTML export including cascading style sheets, but he did not show this off. Don't hold your breath. Finally he showed off Adobe PressReady which is a reasonably priced ($149) way to proof pages on an inkjet. At the Adobe booth thay had a Canon 8500 and a designer for Adobe press said he used it instead of Match Prints, saving thousands of dollars.

Warnock came back to predict that the industry would "rally" around InDesign and show some videotaped testimonials from Kinko's ("InDesign is standing ovation stuff"), Knight-Ridder, and Time, but the best may have been a woman from Fortune who said someone asked her "But can you take the file back to Quark?" to which she replied "Yeah, but why would you want to?"

Winners: plug-in manufacturers, color publishers, and those who will "repurpose" designs to print, PDF, and the web.

Losers: Quark. This is a real Quark killer, from the seamless opening of QXP files to the choice of a Quark keyboard for easy migration. Also people on a budget. We're talking serious hardware requirements here, and since PM will still be the platform of choice for a lot of projects (no mention of books in IND, for instance), you may want BOTH.

Of more interest to most of you will be news of "PageMaker 6.5 Plus." This will be a $99 upgrade available March 1. Good news to those of you with 5.0 or 6.0, but I was told that if I am already comfortable using PageMaker at a professional level and have my own style and art, it's probably not worth it. The main new features are interface tweaks, including a toolbar, and bundled templates and art.

InDesign is aimed at the very high-end publishing market, such as color catalogs and magazines. PageMaker is aimed at creating marketing collateral, brochures and so on, and FrameMaker will be for the technical publishing market. Adobe sees those markets as separate from the audience that they are targeting for InDesign, and will be selling InDesign, PageMaker, and FrameMaker all at the same time to different audiences. I asked if the price point of PageMaker would drop to counter Microsoft Publisher, and was told no. It seems Adobe does not believe they can compete with Publisher for little flyers on an inkjet but will be there with PageMaker for people when they realize they can't do professional work with it.

I had a delightful chat with an Adobe type products manager, who showed me ATM 4.5, with several nice enhancements including a Suitcase-like "temporary" setting. It also has the ability to drag an ATM set to disk to create a folder for the print shop and the ability to drag a folder onto ATM to create a set. Most important, it includes a long overdue "Find Duplicates" feature. I asked him about merging ATM and Adobe Type Reunion so they could talk to each other, and he said that was something he really wanted to do. "In 5.0?" I asked. He smiled and said maybe.

He also said there will probably never be Type Reunion for Windows due to Microsoft's architecture. Basically, every application draws its own font menu, so it would be a nightmare for Adobe to try to modify everyone's type menu. But there might be a plug-in style ATR for, say, PageMaker for Windows. But no guarantee. Finally, he assured me that Adobe and Microsoft are hard at work on OpenType and that Apple would have full support for it. In the future, fonts should be identical across platforms, to the point that you could take your Windows fonts on disk to a Mac printer and they could use them. Adobe is pushing hard for such typographic enhancements as the equivalents of the ligature swash managers from Apple's ill-fated QuickDraw GX. Adobe's type library will not be radically changed in the short term, but of course UniCode and OpenType are the future of type.

I was also interested to see Adobe's changes to Acrobat and their plans for CyberStudio, which they acquired when they bought GoLive. As expected, they announced a Windows version of this formerly Mac-only product. If you're not aware of it, this is the best HTML design tool, hands down, with full support for DHTML, CSS, and site maintenance. CyberStudio introduced the free placement of images on a web page, using tables to position the image properly in the browser.

Mark gave a demo of GoLive 4.0, the Editor Formerly Known as CyberStudio, after rebooting the PC and proving he could get InDesign to work. Unfortunately, after he launched GoLive, the PC hung (keyboard stopped responding) and he had to move to the Mac again to do the demo.

GoLive uses the same "point and shoot" variant of drag and drop. It does simple JavaScript without editing, utilizes QuickTime Pro 3, imports PDF and SVG (see below), and even allows you to edit links embedded into PDFs. You can use timed triggers in a QuickTime movie to trigger events in HTML. He created a page as we watched with a movie, a high-res PDF, a DHTML animated logo, and a "rollover" menu (the kind where the choices are highlighted as you move the mouse over them) via point and click -- no JavaScript code. He placed a logo and dragged it all over the screen, just as you might in PageMaker. Finally, all assembled, he saved it from the Mac and opened the resulting page in MSIE 4 on the PC, and as the movie played, the contents of an adjacent frame changed based on the instructions in the movie. Very nice.

An important part of all this is SVG -- scalable vector graphics -- which is Adobe's proposal to the World-Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for a standard way to present high-quality graphics on the web. Warnock said they expected approval of this standard in August. All Adobe products will export to SVG, which is "closely aligned to the Adobe imaging model." No more converting complex Illustrator drawings to JPEG! In SVG, for example, type is not rasterized, it is type. Finally, quality type (with ligatures and kerning) which prints at the resolution of your printer! SVG graphics can include such niceties as transparency and triggers, which offer the functionality described above in the JavaScript "rollover" and the QuickTime movie. Mark showed this off by zooming in on a SVG to show
that you could read the time on a watch, and as he moved his mouse over a placed map, the name of the store he was pointing to highlighted in an adjacent frame.

I mentioned Acrobat 4.0 briefly yesterday. Adobe is still committed to PDF and said they are serving 50,000 copies of Acrobat Reader from their servers PER DAY. Acrobat 4.0 is still a bit limited in editing, but offers these important new features: improved annotation, markup, and editing tools (with revision tracking and security, with separate passwords for read-only or read-write access); page cropping; PostScript 3 support; and the ability to embed ICC color profiles. Job tickets will be done eventually in PDF 1.2, not Acrobat 4's PDF 1.3, to be compatible with existing equipment.

An exciting new feature of Acrobat 4 is the "web capture" utility. Just choose "Open URL" from the file menu, specify the number of levels deep you want to go, and voila! You get a PDF of the web site. He didn't show a live demo of this (it would take a lot longer than saying "voila!"), but had a nice example from NASA's Mars Pathfinder site that allowed you to zoom in on the high-res JPEGs of Mars.

The most surprising -- stunning, even -- thing I learned later was that web capture, table capture, and digital signatures were left out of the Mac version. This is from "Seybold Report on Internet Publishing": Adobe was obviously embarrassed to admit this in the keynote. Or maybe they were afraid they wouldn't get out of the hall alive? Maybe they don't realize that publishing is still heavily Mac-centric? Let's be charitable and say they felt these features were more needed by the Windows folks. They will be available for the Mac in a "future point release," whatever that means.

Andreas Polizo gave a demo of the database portion of GoLive. For people who manage large sites with content coming from multiple sources, this should be a real boon. Webmasters can create templates, artists and writers can drop in content, and the site is automatically updated on a user-defined schedule.

John Warnock concluded by reiterating that Adobe wants to "seriously upgrade the web." (This echoed Chuck Geshke's earlier comment that the web today was like "publishing on a dot matrix printer." Chuck said Adobe was committed to "driving standards to elevate the web.") He briefly discussed digital media management and "enabling you" and concluded with "You ain't seen nothing yet." Sounds like it's time to get that cable modem and memory upgrade you've been putting off....

STEPPS -- Stop Tax Exempt Private Property Sprawl -- Framingham