A lot of anniversaries this year. Last week we got reminded of InDesign’s presence on our computers for 10 years! Before this, we saw that Adobe Photoshop has been with us 20 years. Earlier this year, we posted about how Desktop Publishing and its subsequent revolutionary effects on print communication turns twenty-five in two-thousand-and-ten (DTP Turns 20) and now we learn this:

Dot-com marks 25th anniversary

(CNN) “It was 25 years ago — March 15, 1985 — that the first dot-com domain name — Symbolics.com — appeared on the Internet, ushering in the commercial age of the World Wide Web.”

It is also the 10th anniversary of the dot-com-bubble bursting. There is a lot of convergence this year, which is very interesting (Let’s call that content convergence) . What is wild, is the fact that ALL of these products, services or events sharing these anniversaries are inter-connected.

Wow, what a year! There is at least one other anniversary this year… any guess which product that is for?

First we realized Desktop Publishing itself turns 25 this year, then it was Photoshop that also turns 20 in 2010 and now this:

Adobe InDesign 10 Years on the Creative Desktop!

http://www.indesign10anniversary.com/

Need to preflight or convert to or from Adobe InDesign, then Markzware is your source to free your content. Adobe InDesign Plug-ins and world-class applications that have been with InDesign and DTP every step of the way… Markzware.

Happy birthday InDesign!

Was Johannes Gutenberg the Steve Jobs of his day?

Johannes Gutenberg and his invention has intrigued me for just about as long as I have been in this business. There is however not much historically know about arguably one of the most important inventors of our times. There was a great fictional book though, which used all historic facts know and filled in the rest with ideology and other common ways of things back in those days called, “The Justification of Johann Gutenberg” by Blake Morrison and it is a book I recommend for anyone in desktop publishing and certainly printing and prepress.

Thus, it was with great interest I clicked through to this article on WIRED.com (via a Tweet I believe):

Feb. 3, 1468: Closing the Book on Gutenberg

“1468: Johannes Gutenberg dies in Mainz, Germany. His name lives on.

Gutenberg made one contribution to technology in particular and to civilization in general, but it was a doozy. The printing press made the mass production of printed material possible and revolutionized human communication.”
Read More http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2010/02/0203gutenberg-dies#ixzz0eYsw6Y53  Read more... (750 words, 1 image, estimated 3:00 mins reading time)

Received this InMail from a connection on Linkedin, one of the many in response to our popular post on the history of desktop publishing late last week and wanted to share it with you all… Congratulations Mike!

Re: Desktop Publishing turns 25…
From: Mike Hilton
Date: January 24, 2010
To: David Dilling

Hi David,

And so too is Graphic Repro – having launched in SA in 1985 – the year everything started to move from Electronic Publishing…

Best regards,
Mike Hilton

>> Regarding David Dilling LinkedIn Status:: David Desktop Publishing turns 25 ? Aldus-Adobe-Macromedia-Quark. Timeline: http://bit.ly/8xo3EA (Fitting w/ Apple tablet on way)

This is shared with Mike’s permission and he added that one can learn more about the history of Graphic Repro magazine and it’s present day online site and thus printing via the hyper link.

Personally I will add that his weekly email newsletter is a must-read. I like the jam-packed format filled with the latest news from not only the South African print, prepress and publishing market, but really from the world. The “Technology-related articles” near the bottom is nice to keep an eye on as well!  Read more... (202 words, 1 image, estimated 48 secs reading time)

No need to spend thousands just to mine text content
from Desktop Publishing file archives any longer!

Liberate YOUR content locked up inside expensive native applications such as Adobe InDesign, QuarkXPress and Microsoft Publisher with this exciting new and simple search engine for your Desktop Publishing layouts and texts:

Look at it like Google for your DTP layouts or a simple Digital Asset Management (DAM) search and find application. This new search-engine goes beyond simple searching, but provides advanced queries and text mining. You also can extract text from .INDD or .QXP material, with a simple click to RTF or up to a WordPress blog! See:

http://pagezephyr.com

You can get a demo here:

http://bit.ly/5BMOLN

Great for book, magazine and newspaper publishers, content managers, eDiscovery technicians, scientific discovery, editors, journalists, prepress operators and many others. Have archives or detailed InDesign or Quark files? Yes, then you will want to try this demo today!

— — — Democratize your Content — — — —> Search | Edit | Extract —> PageZephyr

This was a nice overview on what a DTP’er for printing or web designs does and what the daily publishing workflow is like-

Hi mom, this is what I do as a Desktop Publisher or DTP layout artist at work:

Interesting the comment about a blend of print and web layout. Are you a DTP artist? Then perhaps this new desktop search-engine for DTP file formats is for you:
PageZephyr – http://pagezephyr.com

Watch the introduction (NEW) here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zN9n1uvveIU

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With Markzware’s new desktop search engine for page layout file formats such as Adobe INDD and Quark QXP just out, makes this article all the more interesting:

Five “Real Time” Search Startups You Should Know

“For the past few years, there have been many ways to navigate the web to find out what is going on right now.  You could go to cnn.com to see breaking news, or you could perform a search at Google news to search multiple media outlets.  However, while media outlets aren’t able to cover every story, the power of the internet enables most every story to be discussed.  From this, the real time web was born.”
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-five-real-time-startups-you-need-to-know-2009-12

They mention several cool new Internet based search engines such as Sency and Topsy. So if Internet users are getting real-time search, why not you graphic designers, advertising agencies, publishing houses, printers and marketing departments able to search their DTP (Desktop Publishing) documents with ease and in a split second on their desktop?  Read more... (248 words, estimated 60 secs reading time)

Printing tips on the prepress side of things for graphic designers. How to create color graphics and InDesign layouts, which will ultimately print perfectly, or output to PDF without problems.  First, here are the 10 most common preflight problems or things you should avoid:

This graphic is from about TEN YEARS AGO! Amazing how it all basically stays the same: Missing fonts, incorrect trapping (when two different colors overlap), incorrect color usage, images in the wrong color mode, improper page set-up settings, unlinked graphics or images, inadequate bleeds, no proof (soft or print), missing images, too low (or too high) image effective image resolution.

With this in mind, here was a great, colorful blog post titled, “10 Pre-Press Tips For Perfect Print Publishing” which I wanted to highlight. The 10 items from the post, which are of course from a strictly design perspective are:

1. Use RGB Color Mode For Photoshop Images
2. Specify The Right Color Settings
3. Ditch Photoshop EPS Files And Use PSD Files Instead
4. Accurately Simulate CMYK While Working In RGB
5. Selecting the Right CMYK Output Profile For The Job
6. Use InDesign Instead Of Photoshop To Make The Final Color Conversion
7. Download All The Profiles
8. Exporting A Perfect CMYK PDF Using RGB Images
9. Avoiding Errors When Using RGB Images And Spot Colors
10. Share Your PDF Files With Acrobat.com
Source: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/  Read more... (300 words, 1 image, estimated 1:12 mins reading time)

Markzware launched, at PRINT 09 in September, a new content search engine technology called PageZephyr. This beta Macintosh application will index desktop publishing file formats such as Adobe InDesign, QuarkXPress and soon other document types, like PDF, Microsoft Publisher and even “the rage” of it’s day, PageMaker. Here we see some of the excitement generated from the show-floor and one simple exclusive press release, which Mary Gay (Public Relations) pushed up court… and re-tweets via Twitter! Watch Patrick Marchese, co-founder and CEO of Markzware, demonstrate PageZephyr…

It is amazing how fast information can travel in this day and age; which is one of the said purposes of PageZepyr; to bridge the printed world with the Internet or online world.

TRANSCRIPT:

All right, so “Content Search Engine“, so Mary Gay, tell us…. Hey everybody, were here at Print 09 in Chicago. It has been a pretty interesting show here, because we have announced a new product that, which is completely different from our “normal joe” that we’ve been showing here at the shows with preflighting. Were going into a whole new direction, which is ‘exciting’! Because were looking into the future with, well, here it is- Content Search Engine.  Read more... (925 words, estimated 3:42 mins reading time)

This was a very nice image that our Swiss distributor, Kursiv, designed for their FlightCheck Professional v6.5 Swiss German mailing. Check it out; and for those from Switzerland, you may want to see the text below, for there are some great offers on stand-alone preflighting for multiple desktop publishing file formats via FlightCheck:

Preflighting für (fast) alles

Sicherheit in der Produktion – das erreichen Sie durch standardisierte Arbeitsabläufe. Eingehende oder ausgehende Dokumente können auf Fehler untersucht werden. FlightCheck Pro prüft alle wichtigen Dokumentformate aus der Druckvorstufe – sogar ohne dass Sie über die Originalprogramme verfügen müssen.

FlightCheck Pro 6.5
FlightCheck Professional 6.5 ist die neueste Version von Markzware’s Preflighting Tool, welches sowohl offene Dokumentformate (XPress 3–8, InDesign bis CS4, Word, Illustrator, usw.) als auch Ausgabeformate wie EPS, PDF und PDF-X prüft.

FlightCheck Professional läuft als eigenständiges Programm, und Dokumente werden durch einfaches Drag-and-Drop auf das Programm-Icon geprüft. Dafür müssen die Originalprogramme nicht installiert sein. Flightcheck Pro generiert sofort einen vollständigen Report gemäss Ihren Einstellungen. Perfekt für Ihre AVOR.
FlightCheck Pro unterstützt auch eine Batchverarbeitung mehrerer Dateien, und lässt sich durch Presets einfach für verschiedene Aufgaben konfigurieren.  Read more... (270 words, 1 image, estimated 1:05 mins reading time)