Quark says it will demonstrate version 7 of Quark Publishing System (QPS) at IfraExpo next month in Vienna. As expected, QPS7 will be based on QuarkXPress 7 and QuarkCopyDesk 7, at last enabling QPS users in the newspaper and large magazine world to upgrade to the newest QuarkXPress technologies. The demos will take place in hall A, stand 620.
Archive for September, 2007
Mac users who have experienced recent problems getting Adobe Update for CS3 to complete its own downloads or even connect at all should try again now. Adobe Update is a utility that is installed by default with all Adobe CS/CS2/CS3 programs to automate the process of checking for and downloading free bug-fixes and other relevant updates from Adobe’s support servers. However, a number of Creative Suite 3 owners reported that Adobe Update has been producing connection errors, often claiming that the user’s computer was not connected to the Internet. Some (arguably misguided) discussion of this issue took place on Adobe’s forums.
Here at LAYOUT, we also suffered the problem: Adobe Update has always worked fine in the past but stopped connecting in August when the latest Illustrator CS3 update became available. Whatever was causing the problem appears now to have been cleared, and Adobe Update is working normally again.
Linotype has updated its free FontExplorer X font management program for Mac to version 1.2.2. The update changes the Font Store interface and, more importantly, includes new automatic font activation plug-ins for QuarkXPress 6.5 and 7.x users. Previous releases of these plug-ins have been causing problems to some users, so it’s a worthwhile update just for this as well as a number of other bug-fixes.
www.linotype.com/fontexplorerX
Lemkesoft has released a free update to GraphicConverter 6.0. The update includes some relatively minor additions, changes and bug-fixes — always worth having, nevertheless. For a full list of changes in version 6.0.1, go to this page.
www.lemkesoft.com/gc-en.html
Eizo has unveiled a 24.2-inch LCD display designed for soft proofing in the professional print production market. The ColorEdge CG241W offers a native resolution of 1920×1080 pixels, 850:1 contrast ratio and 300 cd m2. It contains hardware-level, 12-bit colour calibration, and achieves 6ms response which could make it useful in the video post-production market too. £1,149.
www.eizo.com/products/graphics/cg241w
XChange International has bundled together four professional-class plug-ins for Adobe InDesign CS2 or CS3 and cut their combined price in half. The InDesign PRO Plug-in Pack comprises Markzware Q2ID (full price £139), DTP Tools Page Control (full price £35), SoftCare Overset Manager (full price 65) and Cacidi LiveBrowse (full price £59). At their full prices, the four plug-ins together cost £298; purchased in this pack, they cost £149. Cryptically, XChange International says that the offer will only run for a limited time but fails to say exactly how long that is.
www.xchangeuk.com/vstore/store/detail/IDPPIPB0M01
A bug has come to light in Adobe InDesign CS3 that affects the generation of indexes for Books. A Book is a collection of InDesign documents (typically representing individual chapters) that share common attributes such as consecutive automatic page numbering, a table of contents and an index. Unfortunately, users have noted that the index generated by CS3 from a Book tends to miss out certain words and phrases, even though they might be clearly listed and referenced in the Index palette.
The following link takes you to an Adobe forum where this has been discussed at some length, and includes a workaround involving running a free script (from Olav Kvern, no less) to combine your Book into a single InDesign document so that the index can be generated correctly.
www.adobeforums.com/cgi-bin/webx/.3bc3c645?14
James King at Adobe has posted a brief update on Microsoft’s fortunes in trying to get its OOXML ‘open’ document format fast-tracked towards adoption as an official standard. Most comments on this matter have compared OOXML with non-commercial OpenDoc alternatives, so it’s interesting to see the standardisation process revealed in the light of Adobe’s own approach to dealing with its PDF ’standard’.
http://blogs.adobe.com/insidepdf/2007/09/fast_tracking.html
Adobe has issued a minor update to its Illustrator CS3 vector graphics package, allowing it to import FreeHand-format files more cleanly. Adobe acquired FreeHand, at one time Illustrator’s most direct competitor, when it purchased Macromedia at the end of 2005. Adobe has admitted that the stagnating FreeHand would no longer be developed by the company, so the ability to import FreeHand files into Illustrator is currently the only way to ensure old FH graphics are not marooned in the past.
Creative Suite 3 owners should be able to download and install the update using the built-in Adobe Updater program, but if you are having trouble with this (and many people are at the moment), you can download it using these links: Mac version, Windows version.
Sales figures for British daily and Sunday newspapers were released by the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) at the end of last week. Almost all titles experienced year-on-year losses, the exceptions being the Financial Times (+2.51% to 426,830), the Daily Star Sunday (+26.45% to 533,248), the Mail on Sunday (+0.89% to 2,305,872) and The Observer (+0.62% to 442,646). The biggest losses were suffered by London’s Evening Standard (-11.38% to 277,555), The People (-13.81% to 741,033), Sunday Sport (-13.65% to 92,803) and the Sunday Times (-12.14% to 1,190,108). However, Press Gazette magazine notes that the Evening Standard, despite its fall in circulation since August 2006, had actually increased sales by 0.89% compared with last month.
ABC results reported by Press Gazette
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