LAYOUT : the newsletter of page design

AG Neovo has added another 22-inch LCD monitor to its widescreen range. The E-W22 is a full TFT LCD display offering WSXGA+ resolution (1680×1050), also supporting native DVI/HDMI graphics and HD video playback, and it includes a pair of built-in 2-watt speakers. Other specifications: 300cd/m2 brightness, 1000:1 contrast ratio, 3ms response time. £349.99 inc VAT.
www.neovouk.com/products/products.htm

Not long after completing its protracted purchase of Gretag Macbeth, X-Rite, the colour measurement and colour management company, says it has entered into an agreement to acquire Pantone for $180m. The acquisition is expected to be finalised by the end of this autumn, and will be funded by new loans from a variety of banks. These banks have promised up to $412m to cover Pantone’s purchase price and to refinance X-Rite’s existing debt.
Here at LAYOUT, we hope X-Rite knows what it is doing when playing with the fortunes of a company that had been the bedrock of graphic design and print production since the early 1960s. Prior to the announced purchase, X-Rite enjoyed a “strategic partnership” with Pantone for just two years.

After experimenting with the Rotate, Shear and Transform tools in Adobe InDesign, you now want to return the objects back to their original appearance. Don’t waste time trying to re-adjust the objects using the same tools. Instead, switch to the Selection tool, click on one of your edited objects, then set the Rotation Angle and/or Shear X Angle fields in the Control palette back to zero. Simple, really.

Markzware has updated FlightCheck Professional, its flagship prepress preflighting package, to version 6.02. The free update speeds up PDF scanning, fully reports and collects anchored graphics in Adobe InDesign CS2 and CS3 layouts, and can handle certain ‘difficult’ QuarkXPress files that the previous version had trouble with. Other improvements include colour reporting in Adobe Illustrator CS3 files (including when they have been placed into QuarkXPress or InDesign layouts), and better AppleScript support. A progress bar has also been added to the page layout window. Mac only.

www.markzware.com/flightcheck_professional

The Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) has published its July report on national newspapers in the UK, revealing that nearly all the nationals are losing readers again. In recent years, several titles seemed to have bucked this trend by changing page size, introducing redesigns and shovelling out giveaways such as DVDs, but they now appear to be back on the slide. Compared to last July’s figures, The Guardian’s circulation has dropped by 2.2%, The Independent by 4.2%, The Times by  4.8%, The Scotsman by 6.6% and The Sunday Times by 10.7%. Most tabloids are also suffering: The Sun fell by 2%, The Daily Express by 4% and The Daily Mirror by 6%.

Only three titles have maintained stable year-on-year circulation: the remaining two daily broadsheets, The Daily Telegraph and The Financial Times, and the UK’s original tabloid, The Daily Mail. Commentators have blamed some of the losses on the wide availability of free morning and evening papers handed out to weekday commuters around the country, especially Metro and London Lite. Ironically, these two particular titles are actually published by Associated Newspapers — publisher of The Daily Mail.

It is also perhaps notable that both Associated Newspapers and the Telegraph Newspaper Group have very recently invested considerable sums in print publishing technology upgrades, while their competitors have gone out of their way to slash editorial expenditure. ANL and TNG’s success in such a difficult market suggests that you can’t expect to improve sales by deliberately making your product worse.

The latest edition of DTM provides a whole bunch of QuarkXPress and Adobe InDesign tips as usual, including: previewing colour QXP layouts in greyscale, how to ensure copy and paste work properly between Illustrator and InDesign, copying pages between ID documents, a clever use for Fitting options in ID Object Styles, and changing all picture box background colours in a QXP layout to None with a single command. DTM’s Software Closet this month contains DragNCopy and Today XTensions for QuarkXPress, two fonts (Diavolo in five weights, and the shockingly useful Unicode Symbols) and eight general purpose Mac-oriented utilities.
www.design-tools.com
And don’t forget the weekly DT podcast…
www.design-tools.com/podcast

Adobe Reader 8 allows you to run a spellcheck on text that has been typed into form fields and comments. It’s obviously a good way of ensuring accuracy when completing electronic forms before you submit them, and also jolly handy when participating in a collaborative review using Adobe Reader’s basic commenting functions. You can also expand the number of language dictionaries that Adobe Reader can use: 32 additional dictionaries are available to download from the Adobe website free of charge, for Windows and for Mac. Chinese, Korean and Japanese dictionaries (Windows only) can be downloaded here.

When you install Adobe Creative Suite 3, Adobe’s set of ICC profiles for RGB and CMYK workflows are installed too. But what if you need to make those exact same profiles available on another computer that doesn’t have CS3? Helpfully, Adobe has made these profiles available as a free download. The set includes Adobe RGB (1998), FOGRA28 Coated and FOGRA29 Uncoated. Available for Windows and for Mac.

InfoLogic has updated MathMagic Pro Edition, its WYSIWYG maths equation editor for Adobe InDesign, to version 5.6. The update includes a plug-in that works with Adobe InDesign CS3, and offers a few changes and bug-fixes. Mac and Windows.
www.mathmagic.com/product/pro.html

Extensis has released Portfolio Server 8.5, an upgrade to its networked content management system. The software allows users to search, access, catalogue and tag media assets held on the system from within Adobe Creative Suite 3 programs, including Bridge. Extensis has also updated the Portfolio Client software to be fully compatible with Windows Vista. Prices start from $6,050, upgrade $3,550. Mac and Windows.