Desktop Publishing?

[Cliptin]

I need to combat some problems here at work with training. Due to the nature of the business, many documents are being created that have tons of pictures in them. These spacious documents are causing problems with regards to network traffic, drive space and email storage because eveyone creates these documents but no one knows how to reduce the file size. Part of the training will be geared toward simply making the pictures smaller but I'd like some feedback on various publishing techniques.

When is it appropriate to use a website for internal company commuications vs. email and Word or Acrobat? What are the advantages of using Acrobat over Word (excluding security and cross-platform benefits)? Does this indeed fall under the realm of desktop publishing or should I be google-searching for something else? Any good reading material? Thanks.

 

[blakerwry]

hmm.. in professional writing class we never went specifically over the topic of when a website vs email would be apropriate.

However, If the documents need to be accessed by multiple people over a period of time(esp if the document needs updating) I think that would be sufficient in making a case for using a website instead of email.



As far as when email vs a hard copy is concerned, this really depends on (1) your company and what the standards are (2) The person you are communicating with and (3) The formality or topic of the communication.

Use your best judgement, if the company encourages email and you are writing an informal memo, then email is appropriate as long as the recipients expectations will still be met.




The debate over word vs PDF is a bit less complicated. Some copanies prefer that all finalized documents be created in PDF format for compatibility purposes, but some dont care/have a set practice on this. I have used the "print2pdf" to make pdf documents form my word files, however the PDF version is almost always larger.




As far as pictures in word documents go, I am not sure if you have as much control as you would in a website. If you have a copy of photoshop you can choose the option to save a file for the web. This allows you to choose between different quality/file type settings and easily see and compare the final quality of any picture after it will be saved.

However, one of the simplest ways to save space on a website is to make all line drawings low color(64 color is usually overkill) gif's and make everything else Jpeg's with a quality level around 60%. If you need a picture to be very large or of high quality, you might want to make a thumbnail and allow the viewer, at their discretion, to click on that thumbnail to see the larger/higher quality version of the pic.

 

[.Nut]

The number one fundamental question here is: What printer are you using? Graphics in documents are *supposed* to be optimised for the target printer.

Calculating and creating optimal imagery for a documents is fairly easy. Keywords: Halftone, greyscale, DPI...


> What are the advantages of using Acrobat over Word (excluding security and cross-platform benefits)

For one thing, if you go the Acrobat way, you will definitely be spending some significant money to be able to create and/or edit PDF files.

 

[Mercutio]

Not necessarily. There are some very nice open-source programs for making PDF files.

I personally take the view that the only thing that should go over email is plaintext. If you need to find a way to share something else, dump it on a webserver/exchange public store/file share and provide a link to it in your message.

But then, I'm a neanderthal when it comes to email.

 

[Fushigi]

Most companies treat email as a somewhat transitory; messages are not meant to be kept forever. Hence messages with attachments or links will probably be deleted over time. Using a web or file server with a decent hierarchical structure is probably the best way to store/distribute the documents. I would store them in a dir structure on a web server & have a content management system (CMS) maintain links. You'd also gain search capability. The CMS can be a commercial product or Joe the web dude.

Store the docs in Word or PDF; it probably doesn't matter very much. As to PDF costs, the docs can be produced in Word. The person who adds the doc to the CMS can convert it to PDF and should also be knowledgable in optimizing images for size + clarity. I personally find text within PDFs to be somewhat fuzzy and slightly more difficult to read than plain Word docs or HTML files. PDFs are nice for some things, but they do not provide the best readability.

For true DTP, PageMaker is still a viable option and is a better solution than Word.

Images .. if they are screen caps (Print Screen, Alt-Print Screen), be warned that Windows captures at the full color depth that the display is running. Running at 32 bit colors will create images much larger than if running at 256 colors. When documenting, 256 colors is typically more than enough for anything. If I'm doing a lot of screen caps, I switch my display to 800x600x256 first.

- Fushigi

 

[Buck]

For true DTP, PageMaker is still a viable option and is a better solution than Word.
- Fushigi

<tisk> QuarkXpress. :mrgrn:

 

[Cliptin]

Not necessarily. There are some very nice open-source programs for making PDF files.

I personally take the view that the only thing that should go over email is plaintext. If you need to find a way to share something else, dump it on a webserver/exchange public store/file share and provide a link to it in your message.

But then, I'm a neanderthal when it comes to email.

The big problem is that there are no corporate standards. Or, at least no one can tell me where they are. In essence, whatever I teach them will be the site standard. But we need standards for sure.

In general, I'm of the opinion that large files should not be handled by the email system. Mail the link to 15 people. Don't mail a 22MB acrobat file to 15 people.

These files are not for external publication. They would be best described as internal manufacturing reports for retrofit work. I do not believe the reports are edited after they are sent. They only reason they would be printed is if it was sent to one of those people who keep every email in their inbox indefinately as well as archive an electronic copy and print out a copy for the file cabinet. There are several (~100) licenses of Acrobat installed and I'm getting requests to install more. The Acrobat users are only using it because they were told to. The person who told them to does not know why he told them to use it. :wink:

Money expenditure is certainly playing a role in my annoyance as is the abuse of IT resources.

 

[blakerwry]

never save anything as a .bmp..... that's like saving a video in uncompressed format. you should atleast use a lossless compression such as gif or png. Jpg is good because a little quality loss is acceptable or might not even be noticable, but the file size savings are often huge.

 

[.Nut]

For true DTP, PageMaker is still a viable option and is a better solution than Word.

<tisk> QuarkXpress. :mrgrn:

PageMaker is an all around decent DTP application. I've used it ever since it was introduced in the mid-1980s. The less-expensive MS Publisher and several other "low end" DTP applications are plenty for most people performing basic page layout work.

Quark XPress is, well, quirky. Quirk XPress has been one of the most bug ridden mainstream applications that I have ever encountered. V3.32 was the most stable version, then everything went downhill swiftly after that. All versions and revisions (LOTS of revisions!) of 4.x were abysmal. It's still quirky at V5.0, though less quirky. Yes, a lot of people still call it Quirk XPress these days. Quark XPress only supports a limited number of printers. Other than that, if you are using a supported printer, Quark XPress has some excellent and well-known page layout tools and composition capabilities that are generally unequalled in the short document and page layout business. Adobe's competition with Quark Xpress is Adobe InDesign; close but no cigar.

If one is looking for a DTP application to generate longer documents or just professional looking laser printer output, you would be smart to avoid the *expensive* and -- yes -- quirky Quark XPress and instead focus on Adobe PageMaker (formerly Aldus PageMaker) , MS Publisher (comes with Office Professional), or one of the many other inexpensive DTP / page layout applications.

 

[Buck]

I was waiting for your pro-PageMaker comments Gary.

 

[Cliptin]

What is the definition/function of desktop publishing?

 

[GIANT]

I was waiting for your pro-PageMaker comments Gary.

OK. I think John Warnock, PhD (CEO, Founder, Adobe Systems and billgates-like monopolist) ought to be kicked for *still* foisting 3 individual DTP packages upon the marketplace -- I'm talking about InDesign, PageMaker, and FrameMaker.

Get a clue Johnny boy!

 

[Dïscfärm]

GIANT! What the hell are you doing my job for? Leave the virulent acrimony and mudslinging to me damn it!


...ya, kick U upside yo head Johnny boy!

 

[Pradeep]

From what I understand FrameMaker was perfect for long technical documents (and available in a UNIX version to boot).

I used PageMaker for a while when creating newsletters etc, then moved into Publisher 2000. But of course not many brick and mortar printers can handle a Publisher 2000 file (still in a Mac only lala land), so back to Pagemaker/Photoshop I went. Sometimes I design with Publisher and copy into PM (screws the layering tho).

 

[Handruin]

I've never had a problem with QuarkExpress. In fact I was so happy to get rid of page maker (aligning items was a PITA for me in PM 6) and switch to quark. For me it was more efficient. I don't have a concept of how the latest version is for quark, but I had no problems with version 4.

At work we have an internal website for managing all documents. Most of them seem to be PDF, and almost all of our product guides ship as PDF from what I've seen.

I think acrobat has some nice management capabilities as far as shipping documents back and forth and also making changes to them. You can highlight and make notes and then send them back. You will also be able to retain the fonts (provided you included them in the acrobat distiller) when you ship documents to others. This may not be a big deal, but from time to time I find I won't have a font in a doc and it ruins the format.

The new FAQ system on this site uses an open source version that will generate PDF files for people. I have not finished setting up the FAQ system, but when it is finished the FAQ's will also be available in PDF if people want.

I would personally prefer to have a website for internal company communication rather then e-mail. E-mail is great, but I don't always have access to e-mail on every machine I go to. You could use a website that manages PDF files and incorporate some type of check-in/check-out system for managing the files.

I think the advantage of PDF over word is formatting. Acrobat should retain the format of the original document no matter where you go. So in a sense the benefit is cross-platform, and also cross-similar platform for font reasons as I've mentioned above.

The printing aspect is also another area to look at. If I'm not mistaken, postscript fonts are better then true type, but the exact reason why escapes me at the moment. I believe acrobat can manage postscript fonts, which is something the Macintosh is not foreign to. This again comes back to cross-platform issue.

 

[Fushigi]

The printing aspect is also another area to look at. If I'm not mistaken, postscript fonts are better then true type, but the exact reason why escapes me at the moment. I believe acrobat can manage postscript fonts, which is something the Macintosh is not foreign to. This again comes back to cross-platform issue.

Look at the companies who developd the technologies... :wink:

Anyway, another advantage to a web-based CMS is that delivery over SSL can occur to anywhere in the world. Sure, your documents are mostly for internal use, but there may be some folks who would want to review their documents from home. Web mail or bothering with a VPN is not as convenient as simply logging in to a secure site & viewing right away.

Our intranet uses a mix of doc & pdf files .. it's a little inconsistent but I don't think too many folks care.

- Fushigi