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.

Dealing with PageMaker Automatically Cropping Bitmapped TIFFs

by Olav Martin Kvern <okvern@ix.netcom.com>

There is an undocumented "feature" of PageMaker that has plagued unsuspecting users for years. When you import black and white (monochrome) TIFFs, PageMaker automatically crops out ny white space suttounding it. In some cases, this is not what you wanted, forcing you to "uncrop" each file manually after you place them.

Note: If you are having this problem, make sure aren't re-importing the graphic — that is, selecting an existing image and then, with it selected, importing the TIFF with the "Replace existing graphic" option. If you do that, you will be presented with an option to "Retain cropping information" (or the equivalent) at the bottom of the dialog box. Deselect that option.

Way back in time, bilevel bitmaps were the norm — none of this fancy grayscale and color stuff. When PageMaker placed them with the white background, everyone yelled at us (Aldus) about it. "How hard can it be to detect the edges of a bilevel bitmap!" they raged. "You morons!" they added. So we changed the import filter so that it would crop out the white pixels surrounding the image. "Wow, this is great," our happy customers said.

Now, ideally, we'd have made it an option, but we didn't, and very few people asked for us to put it back the way it had been. So, what can you do today?

Convert your bilelvel images to grayscale (this seems like a lot of disk space to spend to cure a minor nuisance).
Convert your bilevel images to EPS.
Write a script to "uncrop" the image.

--Assumes you have an image selected.
--myResolution is the resolution of the image (you must know the
--image resolution for this script to work).
myResolution = 96
--Set the measurement units to inches.
measureunits inches, inches
zeropointreset
getcroprect>>myX1Crop, myY1Crop, myX2Crop, myY2Crop
getimageframe>>myXOrigin, myYOrigin, myWidth, myHeight
--Get the value crop distances in measurement (rather than device) units.
myX1Offset=myX1Crop/myResolution
myY1Offset=myY1Crop/myResolution
myWidth = myWidth/myResolution
myHeight = myHeight/myResolution
--Get the page coordinates of the upper-left corner
getobjectloc topleft>>myX, myY
--"Uncrop" the top left corner
crop lefttop, myX-myX1Offset, myY-myY1Offset
--Get the page coordinates of the upper-left corner (again)
getobjectloc topleft>>myX, myY
--"Uncrop" the bottom right corner
crop rightbottom, myX+myWidth, myY+myHeight

This is crude, but works for me. It's made much more difficult by the fact that PageMaker's getcroprect and getimageframe queries return their values in image units (pixels), rather than page units (inches or whatever -- I have to convert to inches because PageMaker scripting can't add and subtract picas), but the crop command expects page units. So you have to convert, and conversion requires that you know the image resolution.

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