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Welcome to Data Designs Publishing's Quick News & Tips                 September 2011

Hi Folks!

 

   Hope you all had great vacations and summer family fun. Phil keeps reminding that fall doesn't start until Sept 21, but from my perspective, when kids go back to school, summer has given way to fall. So in this last newsletter of the summer you'll find a short article to get you thinking about editing your personal photos - you may have taken lots of photos over the summer and you'll likely be taking lots over the next few months! And of course, there's tips and helpful info.   

 

    The coming of fall also means we'll be taking our vacation in a few short weeks. We're heading up through New England and into Canada and will be gone Sept 22 - Oct 1. In the meantime, Charlotte and Sandy Hooper will be staffing the office.

 

    Phil's blog is running a drawing, thanks to a generous gift offered by Mighty Leaf tea. Check out the details below to enter.   

 

    So grab a cup of coffee or tea and enjoy the newsletter. If you have any questions or need our help, please don't hesitate to give us a call. We're happy to answer off-the-wall desktop publishing questions or tackle your biggest document headache! 

 

            Sandy Hovatter, [email protected], 419-660-0500

JPG: A Great Format, If Used Properly  

There are many file formats for bitmapped images, and one of the most popular is JPG. It's popular because it provides very small file sizes. We love small files, but not when it comes at the expense of quality. The quality of your finished product is more important than how small your file is (especially with the size of today's hard drives). Ensure high quality when using JPGs by:

  • Always save your JPG files as TIF or Photoshop PSD file before editing them. JPG uses what is called lossy compression - it compresses images by losing information each time the file is saved. Save your JPG file as a TIF or PSD while you work on it. When all the changes have been made, you can save it back as a JPG, if that's your file type of choice.
  • You can't judge the quality of the JPG image (or any file format for that matter) by how good it looks on screen. Your screen displays at 72 dpi (or thereabouts). Documents are printed at 300 dpi or more. A 72 dpi image looks great onscreen and much less than great when printed. 
  • JPGs taken by a digital camera are often low resolution (dpi) with a large image size. If an image is large (e.g., 28" x 15"), the resolution can be increased as the image size is reduced. But if the image is small to begin with, there's little room to increase the resolution good enough to print well.  

If you've got any questions about images, give us a call at 419-660-0500. We can help with anything from file conversion to image editing.  

Scheduling Note: Phil & Sandy on Vacation; Charlotte Tuttle and Sandy Hooper are Ready to Take Your Calls

    Phil & Sandy will be on vacation September 22 through October 1. We'll be exploring New England and a bit of Canada.

   

    In our absence, the office will be ably staffed by Charlotte Tuttle, a desktop publishing professional who has been with us for more than ten years, and Sandy Hooper, our office manager. Don't hesitate to give them a call in our absence. We'll see you (virtually) on October 3, rested and ready to meet your deadlines and answer your questions.

 

Questions, questions...we get questions!

 

Can I globally change the data
in my InDesign� tables?


Q: I've got a table of data in Adobe� InDesign� and need to increase all of the numbers by 15%. How do I do this?

  

A: You don't - at least not in InDesign.  InDesign is a layout program, not a spreadsheet. Your spreadsheet program can't do the precision layout that InDesign can, and InDesign can't do calculations like your spreadsheet can.  So, you have at least 3 options:

 

1) Export your InDesign table as a *.TXT file, open it in your spreadsheet program, apply your multiplier, then place (or copy and paste) the revised data back into InDesign. There are lots of things to watch out for. Here's the most common:

  • If you have properly applied styles in InDesign, be sure to check the "export tags" box when you export the data. This will allow you to reapply the styles in InDesign, formatting your table to look like it did before you exported it. This will save you tons of time. 
  • When you open the *.TXT file in your spreadsheet program, be sure to define the columns properly or you may find that some text information will come into your spreadsheet as dates. For example, if you have a column of part numbers and one of them is 05-05, your spreadsheet may display it as May 5. Identifying the column as text when importing avoids this.
  • If you have special characters in your InDesign table (such as em dashes or registered trademark symbols), they will come into your spreadsheet program as a programming code. You'll need to search and replace the codes with the special characters. 

2) If it's a relatively small table, I'd probably calculate the correct values in a spreadsheet program, and then enter the data or copy and paste it into InDesign using the text tool. If your table is small, this approach will take less time than the first option.

 

3) Ask us to do it for you! We exist to make your life easier. We do this kind of thing all day long. 

 

How Secure is Your Password?

Password hacking has become a cottage industry. Cracking software exists that can either guess or identify your computer passwords by brute-force in the blink of an eye. How can you make it not worth their while?
  • Don't make it easy for them. The most common password is "123456", followed by things like "Password", kid's or pet's name, and birth dates. Danger, danger, danger. 
  • Use a longer password. The longer it is, the longer it takes to crack. 
  • Use a mix of numbers, lower case, and upper case letters. Every number that you use makes it 10 times harder to crack. Every letter that's added makes it 26 times harder.
  • This one is key: Add symbols to your password. Every symbol make it 1,500 times harder to crack!

There is a site (https://www.grc.com/haystack.htm) that estimates the amount of time it would take to crack any password that you want to test. Here's the results of a few sample passwords we fed it:

  • datadesigns = 38 seconds
  • DataDesigns = 21 hours
  • Data!!!Designs = 3,000 centuries

As you can see from the examples above, you can make a password both easy to remember and hard to crack. So like Sgt. Phil Esterhaus used to say on Hill Street Blues at the end of every rollcall, "Hey, hey hey! Let's be very careful out there!"  

 

Photo Editing Software for Everyday Use

 

To modify the images clients send us we use Photoshop�, the industry-standard editing software by Adobe�. Want a copy of Photoshop for your own use? It costs $699. But heavyweight software isn't needed for everyday photo touch-ups. You don't need to spend hundreds of dollars to make your personal photos look better. To select the best software for you:       

  • Check reviews online. This article evaluates and compares ten of the most popular personal photo editing software packages. You'll also find some great tips for selecting what's best for you.  
  • Think about what it is you want to use the software for. Do you want to capture mobile pics, add fancy borders to your images, adjust color and lighting, etc. Once you know what you want to do you can more intelligently select the best package to meet your needs. 
  • Ask your friends and family what they use for personal photo editing. Widen your search by posting a message on Facebook or Twitter.   

Looking for a free option? There are a number of free software programs available. Check out the reviews of free image editing software in this article.  

   

 Lorem what?

Lorem Ipsum. It's that filler text used in design layouts to allow the reviewers to focus on layout, not content. It has often been used to show the font and layout before the copy is available.   

 

For a bit of esoteric, geeky info on lorem ipsum, check out this link - you'll find that it's history includes a little bit pleasure, a little bit pain, and a lot of Latin from 45 BC! 

Check Out Phil's Blog
and Enter to Win a $60
Iced Tea Brewing Kit

www.SteepingTimes.com  

And speaking of geeky, did you know that Phil writes a blog about tea? Yeah, that's right. Tea. But not just any old tea. Phil's into the good, premium loose leaf stuff. It taste great, it's healthy for you, too.

 

And right now, Steeping Times is having a free drawing for an Iced Tea Brewing Kit from Mighty Leaf Tea Company worth $60. That's a lot of good iced tea! It's free to enter the drawing, which will be held on Sept. 15, 2011.Click here to enter.

 

Thanks for reading our e-newsletter. If you experience any glitches, please let us know.

If you have a tip you'd like to share, let us know that, too. If we use it in a newsletter, we'll be happy to give you full credit for it.

Just a Few of the Millers
Sandra Hovatter
Data Designs Publishing  
Copyrights & Credits:
�2011, Data Designs Publishing, Norwalk, OH. 
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