Tip 1

See The Bottleneck
If Mac OS X begins to slow down, you can get a clue about the culprit by launching Activity Monitor (in Applications/Utilities). It shows details on all running applications
and background processes, such as how much CPU and memory each one is
using. It also shows your Mac’s disk usage and network activity as well.
MacAddict 06/04, pg.23


Tip 2

Copy Pages Between PDFs
To copy a page from one PDF to another, open both in Acrobat 6, open the Pages tab in both (or Thumbnails tab in Acrobat 5), and drag the thumbnail of a page or pages from one PDF to the other. To select more than one page, either Shift-click to select several contiguous pages, or Command-click to select discontiguous pages. You can also rearrange pages within a PDF this way. To make the process easier, Tile the PDFs to see them all at the same time: Window> Tile> Vertical or Horizontal.
PC Graphics Report, 04/04


Tip 3
 
Drag FreeHand Items into InDesign
Macromedia likes to point out that FreeHand is just as compatible with Adobe’s products as Illustrator is. For example, you can drag and drop items from a FreeHand document into Adobe InDesign or Photoshop, or use Copy and Paste to accomplish
the same result. The FreeHand items can then be used as frames or paths. If you drag and drop and nothing happens, make sure Free- Hand’s Export Preferences
are set to “Convert Colors to: Photoshop 4/5.”
Sandee Cohen


Tip 4
 
Change Defaults in InDesign
To change the default font, or the default options of any tool in InDesign, do this: with no documents open, choose the appropriate tool and then make your changes in the Control palette, the Character palette, or any other palette that lets you change attributes. You can create new character and paragraph styles, new colors, assign default strokes and fills to tools and much more. To add defaults to an existing
document, open that document and then make the changes as above.
Anne-Marie Concepcion
www.senecadesign.com


Tip 5

Mysterious Missing Fonts in QuarkXPress
When you open a document in QuarkXPress, the Missing Fonts dialog box will list missing fonts that are used in style sheets, whether the style sheets are applied to text or not. It will also list missing fonts that are used on Master Pages, usually with strange names like –37269, yet when you open the Usage window that font is not
listed as being used. To fix this, switch to your Master Page(s) and open the Usage
window again. You’ll probably find the missing font there. (Reason: QuarkXPress’s Usage feature attribute doesn’t pay attention to Master Pages unless you’re viewing a Master Page.)


Tip 6

TIFF vs. EPS Files in QuarkXPress
Experienced production professionals use the TIFF file format for saving bitmap images, unless they have a good reason to save them in EPS format (such as when the image is a Duotone or they need a clipping path). This is because TIFF files are smaller than EPS files, and QuarkXPress can downsample them when necessary for faster printing. However, QuarkXPress documents are larger when you import a TIFF
than when you import an EPS. That’s because QuarkXPress creates its own 72-dpi previews from TIFF images, but it uses the built-in preview from an EPS image, which is often smaller. Because every preview is included in the QuarkXPress document
when you save it, if you have large picture boxes or many of them (i.e. a catalog),
the difference can be meaningful — not only can the QuarkXPress document file size be ten times as large with TIFFs, but the picture import process is much slower than with EPSes.

One trick that lets you use TIFFs and still have small QuarkXPress documents is to hold the Shift key while you import TIFFs into your QuarkXPress document. This tells QuarkXPress to build a 36-dpi preview instead of a 72- dpi preview, saving 75%
of the file size of each preview, and speeding screen redraw significantly as well. In our tests, documents containing TIFFs imported with 36-dpi previews were much smaller than with imported EPSes.


Tip 7

16-bit vs. 8-bit Images: Any Advantage?
Some scanners are capable of delivering 16 bits per channel, instead of the usual 8 bits. Photoshop 6 and above are able to work with 16-bit images, but is there an advantage to doing so? Imaging expert and author Dan Margulis invited his high-end
clients to provide an example of an image that benefited from being manipulated
in 16-bit space rather than 8-bit space. In the end, there were none that showed any visible improvement from being kept in 16-bit space. However, Photoshop does a better job of reducing 16 bits to 8 bits than some scanners do, so you may get a better image if you let Photoshop reduce the file, rather than your scanner. Dan’s book Professional Photoshop, from John Wiley & Sons, is full of insightful realizations
such as this. His seminars are listed on our page 3, under “Upcoming Events.”
John Wiley & Sons Inc.
www.wiley.com


Tip 8

Sharper Screen Captures
If you intend to print images captured from the screen image on your Mac, you can keep them sharp by doing these things: 1. Before converting from RGB to CMYK in Photoshop, go to Edit> Color Settings and set the CMYK popup menu to Custom
CMYK, and use GCR with Maximum black generation and set the Black Ink Limit to 100%. This forces all the type in your screen capture to the Black printing plate. Set the other options for the type of printing you’ll be using. 2. Increase the image size
in Photoshop to 291 ppi, using the Nearest Neighbor option (Image> Image Size). This will cause each pixel to become a four-pixel-wide solid square, which will fool the
output device into thinking it has more detail than it does (so it won’t try to upsample the image, and soften it).
Ben Willmore
www.digitalmastery.com



Tip 9

Better Line Art Scans
One way to get a good line art scan is to scan it as grayscale at a high resolution,
sharpen it, then adjust the Threshold (Image> Threshold) until it displays what you want, and no more. Then convert to Bitmap mode at the resolution you need.