Developing for proprietary file formats is much like breaking codes or being a Cryptologist. Cryptography is a very interesting study, dating back to the Greeks usage of transposition ciphers, but surely was used long before that by Mesopotamians and Egyptians. Thus it was with interest that we read this WSJ article titled, “Two Centuries On, a Cryptologist Cracks a Presidential Code” about this man who broke a 200 year old coded message sent in 1801 by Robert Patterson, a mathematics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, to then-president Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson, who has patents and inventions which included the portable copy press, also dabbled in secret code (The Wheel Cipher):

“Jefferson even wrote about his own ingenious code, a model of which is at his home, Monticello, in Charlottesville, Va. Called the wheel cipher, the device consisted of cylindrical pieces, threaded onto an iron spindle, with letters inscribed on the edge of each wheel in a random order. Users could scramble and unscramble words simply by turning the wheels.”
SOURCE: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124648494429082661.html

What more creative way to kick off your Monday morning graphic designers, publishers and print professionals than with this little invention history from one of the founding fathers of the United States!  Read more... (253 words, 2 images, estimated 1:01 mins reading time)

Save FreeHand! They call themselves FREE FreeHand, but let’s face it, when you are up against such factors as ex Macromedia and the mighty Adobe, a miraculous “save” (I guess they would settle for an effective “import”) comes to mind…
http://www.freefreehand.org/

Yes, you read it correctly. I guess there are a lot of Spaniards on their list, for last I heard, Spain was one place that would not give up their favorite vector drawing app that easily.

FlightCheck supports preflighting FreeHand 11.0 (MX) down to version 7. Although not on our short-list for other file formats to add to our new indexing, search and text extraction technology, PageZephyr, it would also make sense to be added here in the future.

Free Freehand aims actually state this VERY PROBLEM that legacy files pose and Markzware, with it’s file format conversion knowledge, often helps solve:

“We want FreeHand to have a future. Not only because we love to work with it, but also because we have thousands of files from the past we may need access to on any given occasion (well, they open in AI, but are converted into chaos).” SOURCE: http://www.freefreehand.org/index.shtml  Read more... (572 words, 1 image, estimated 2:17 mins reading time)

How do you plan on profiting from your online content? Here is an interesting development:

Wikipedia founder ties with HP to add magazine printing platform to Wikia site

Tim Sheahan, printweek.com, 26 October 2009

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has revealed a new tie-up between user-generated information site Wikia and HP’s MagCloud service that will allow users to create and print magazines.

“We are doing all kinds of things like that to think about ways to sustain this idea of participatory culture. We have no idea if this will be popular,” Wales told news agency Reuters.

Users can source content to print from the 3m web pages and more than 50,000 communities presently on Wikia, which is now making a profit for the first time since it was founded five years ago.

MagCloud enables user to produce bespoke glossy, full-bleed, full color magazine printing through a web interface that allows them to select content and do online magazine printing.

HP has also announced it is using its BookPrep digitizing and printing service with the University of Michigan Library to make 500,000 out-of-print books available for on demand digital printing.  Read more... (304 words, estimated 1:13 mins reading time)

“Electronic books may transform publishing industry” read the title on MarketWatch.com and the tag-line was, “Executives discuss impact of e-books at Frankfurt Books Fair.”

By Polya Lesova, MarketWatch

FRANKFURT (MarketWatch) — Electronic books may transform not only the publishing industry, but the very definition of what constitutes a book. E-books — whether read on an iPhone, a Kindle or a laptop — are a hot topic at this week’s Frankfurt Book Fair.

“Books are just devices. Wikipedia is the new Britannica,” said Ronald Schild, managing director of Germany-based MVB Marketing- und Verlagsservice des Buchhandels GmbH.

“Digital content is superior in many ways,” Schild said Thursday at a panel discussion on electronic books at the fair. “Reading today is solitary process, but there are many other ways of reading. [In the future,] it may become more of a conversation.”

While electronic books still account for only a small part of global publishing, their popularity is growing. Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN ) , which sells the electronic-book reader Kindle, is facing growing competition from other e-reader producers. In addition, many users are reading electronic content on their laptops, PCs and multi-functional mobile devices such as Apple Inc.’s (AAPL 189.91, -1.39, -0.72%) iPhone.  Read more... (692 words, estimated 2:46 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)

“Content is free. Formats are not” is the article’s title from cnet. Now, this strays away from purely printing, although content in the digital printing world and certainly the publishing sector faces a similar fate:

“Content may be free, but the format in which we buy it certainly is not. As Apple, Google, Red Hat, and others increasingly demonstrate, consumers and enterprises are happy to pay for “free” when packaged in convenient formats that add value to digital goods.
….
All of these (re)purchases strike me that the media world may have problems, but they are mostly of discovering convenient formats in which to deliver content. Formats that suggest, and sometimes demand, payment.”
….
Good content is a necessary precondition to getting paid, but it’s not going to be reason we pay anymore. That reason for payment is the format in which the content is delivered.
Perhaps it’s always been that way, but the physicality of the delivery mechanisms confused us: we were buying the paper but thought we were buying the news.”
Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10369471-16.html  Read more... (348 words, estimated 1:24 mins reading time)