July - 2008

Creating a PDF of a web page for paying members of your site

How to create a downloadable PDF for paying members, in high quality, with everything in place.

Editors and journalists --and content providers in general-- have one thing in common: it’s not unusual for them to live by deadlines. If your publishing workflow requires you to first publish online and later convert your web page to a printable PDF file --a sort of magazine on demand-- you can save a lot of time using Safari’s Print feature and create a PDF of each content page you need to convert.

You could almost call this InDesign / QuarkXPress Server functionality on a tight budget. Safari will export your whole page to PDF, not just the visible part, and it will do so with backgrounds intact if you select the check box in the Print dialogue to let it. But in some workflows, even this simple “reverse engineering” trick will not work. Taking IT Enquirer as an example, the content pages do not have screenshots and images shown on them. Instead, users need to open a gallery in a new window where they can browse all available images for a story.

Even in that scenario, however, you can create PDFs from that online content faster than you think. Here is how… Assuming your Content Management System enables you to create a page that will hold only the text formatted as you wish, and with every image shown in a “standard” slot. In the case of IT Enquirer, I’m using ExpressionEngine, so I could set up a page that will hold all the text. Now, I have some 12 individual entry fields set up so I can cut my texts --which I locally write in TextMate or BBEdit-- into small chunks.

In-between those chunks, I would recall one image at a time instead of just calling up the whole gallery for the story. All this would be set up using a template. At editing time, I would then paste the text as required in the fields --I usually take two paragraphs per field-- and select each of the images in an order that makes sense in the text. 

Now I would almost be ready. I could now offer my paying users the opportunity to create a PDF themselves, by explaining them how to do that in Safari or Firefox. However, this would only apply to Mac users only, as Windows users don’t have PDF exporting capabilities that readily available. Instead, I could also chose to print my page in Safari to Postscript and run that file through Acrobat Distiller.

This would create a high-quality PDF file that I could offer to my premium members on the site. The only limitation with this technique is that you have only limited control over your layout. As it is all CSS-based, you can’t create anything as fancy as you can in InDesign or QuarkXPress. Ease os use comes at a price in this case!

How to convert Video to Animated GIF

With Photoshop CS3 Extended you can turn a small video file into an animated GIF advert for online use.

Photoshop CS3 Extended lets you convert video frames to layers. This is great if you want to create an animated GIF from a QuickTime movie. You can’t just open a movie in Photoshop --you’ll have to import it from the File menu.

Depending on your selection in the following dialogue, your animation will include the complete movie or just part of it. Also, you can skip frames to further decrease the size of the end-result. Finally, you can adjust the resulting GIF’s size in the Export for Web dialogue.

I’ve prepared a screencast of the whole process. The resulting animated GIF is still quite large. One of the ways to decrease the size is to drop more frames, but if you do, there comes a point at which the animation is so fast it is unusable. Therefore, I believe it is better to reduce the GIF quality. 

Given the fact that it is an animation, the quality of each frame doesn’t have to be that good, especially not when you also reduce the output size. Still, animated GIFs created this way will always be bigger than most online publishers will accept as adverts.

June - 2008

Photo calibration with ColorMunki Design

Normally, only ColorMunki Photo will allow you to optimize the calibration of your printer for photos, but here is a tip that will let you do the same with ColorMunki Design.

X-Rite / Pantone would like to think you’re either a designer or a photographer, but what if you’re both? Should you then buy a ColorMunki Design and a ColorMunki Photo? Or should you upgrade to the more expensive Eye-One Pro? Actually, if you’re prepared to take some precautions, you can do just fine with a ColorMunki Design. By preparing your photos, you can still optimize your printer profile to accommodate just about any image.

ColorMunki Design creates colour patches from images, just as the Photo version does. Although, there are only twelve of these patches created at one time, if you can create colour patches, you can also optimize a printer profile without having to buy the Photo version. The Photo version is aimed towards optimizing flesh tones better than the Design version, but that’s only because the twelve values taken into consideration in the Photo version are more concentrated on flesh tones than the Design version.

So, here’s what you’ll have to do to make flesh tone optimization work with a ColorMunki Design. Let’s suppose you have a portrait on a fairly large background. First make a copy of the photo and open it in OS X Preview or Photoshop. Crop the image until only the portrayed person or persons are still in the picture. Save this copy to a new TIFF or JPEG file.

Now open ColorMunki Design and drag the image into the working window. ColorMunki Design will immediately extract the twelve colour values it extracts from any image. Because you’ve cropped the image to only include the portrayed figure, you’ll end up with mainly flesh tone patches.

Select “Profile My Printer” from the ColorMunki Design menu, and choose “Optimize” from the options in the dialogue.

Drag your flesh patches in the spot colour area of the optimisation window, and start the calibration process. You will end up with an optimisation that is just as good as the one created with the Photo version. It will only have taken a couple of extra steps to get there, but you’ll have saved yourself some 400 Euros in the process.