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.

Font Download Issues in PageMaker

by Jim Houghton, Brian Grebow , Jeanne Hubbard , Gordon Woolf, and Peter C.S. Adams

I have been working on a series of reports [that] contain many (as many as 81) bar graphs [...] . It takes almost 3 hours to print because it downloads the fonts each time it encounters the graphs.

There are three main strategies you can follow to avoid the slowdown caused by repititive font downloads in PageMaker:

Convert text to paths
Manually download fonts to the printer
Carefully manage font usage in workflow

It's been a while since I looked at it, but there's a file on the PAGEMAKR web site that might be of interest: What Causes Repetitive Downloading from PageMaker 6 (4 KB Adobe Acrobat File), excerpted from Real World PageMaker 6 by Olav Martin Kvern and Steve Roth. I can't recall how I came across it now, but hopefully, it was with permission. Alas, Ole's book was never released.

The general solution to the problem of fonts downloading to the printer is to manually download the fonts to the printer before you start printing. This can be done with Apple's LaserWriter Utility or with Adobe's Downloader utility that comes with the Type On Call CD. Perhaps this might come in handy for transferring unusual fonts (like Arial) to the PostScript printer's RAM, thereby speeding up the rendering process. (At least this is what it says in the manual.) The font will remain in the printer's memory, obviating the need for the computer to download it again, until the printer is turned off.

If the font is large enough and will not require editing (e.g. a headline or pull quote) you can set the type in Illustrator or Freehand and convert the type to paths before placing the EPS into PageMaker.Or use Photoshop and rasterize the type at a resolution as large as your printer can handle.

If fonts are embedded in an EPS, then PageMaker may see them as different fonts in each eps and have to download them for each instance of the EPS. If the fonts are not embedded, but just referenced in the eps, then it is necessary to make sure that the fonts are either sent to the printer in advance or hidden on the first page as actual text to force the downloading in the print file (assuming that "page independence" hasn't been selected). This assumes, of course, that you have the font on your system. If you don't the EPS creator must convert the type to outlines in the EPS.

To trick PageMaker into downloading a font, set some type in that font on the master page (or the first page in your doc), colored with the same color as your background (usually "Paper"). In theory, this would fool the printer in downloading the fonts for the first page and keep them loaded for the rest of the document

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