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File back-up/recovery

We've recently talked to a number of customers who've found themselves in dire straits without a backup. To make sure you don't wind up in the same spot, here are a few suggestions on ways to protect yourself from losing data. The most important thing to remember: If you can't afford to lose it, BACK IT UP.

• Both InDesign and Quark feature document recovery commands that will help you recover from a crash. But what happens if the device you are saving to goes down? A portable storage drive such as Western Digital's MyBook provide an extraordinary amount of data backup at a very low price. The current market is about $200 for 1 Terabyte (1,000 gigabytes — that's a lot of files!). These are pretty much ready to go as soon as you take them out of the box, plugging them into an available USB port without the need to load a driver. Keeping the drive in a fireproof safe adds another level of security.

• Use your operating system! Apple's OS X Leopard features Time Machine, and Windows XP/Vista users have the backup/restore wizard, which is pre-loaded with the OS. Using these options with another drive — such as the ones mentioned above — make for a robust system.

• Online backup companies such as Mozy or iDisk, or our own teamWORKS offer online backups for low rates. The nice thing about going online is that your files can be restored from anywhere in the world. A cheap alternative is to set up a Google Mail account and e-mail files to yourself — a free standard account comes with almost seven gigabytes of storage and a 20MB attachment limit. Be sure to choose a financially stable company.

• If you've accidentally erased files off of a USB storage device (typically images from a digital camera), believe it or not, all is not lost! Check out Card Raider (Mac) or Digital Photo Recovery (Windows) — they work quickly and efficiently.

• If your drive physically crashes and you don't have a backup, there are specialist companies that still might be able to help. BeckITSystems and Drive Savers have both successfully recovered files for our customers at a reasonable price. Here's hoping you'll never face that scenario.

Color recommendations

Why do some magazines consistently have great-looking colors, while others vary widely? It may be because of the designer’s selection of colors. Below are a few of our recommendations. Please note that the exact color shown here in your web browser is for guidance only; it may help to refer to printed swatch books to see these colors as ink on paper.

Best: One color screens. As these are made up of percentages of the four process colors, they are very stable on press:

Better: Solid of one color, and screen of another. This will result in a purer, more solid color since only one color is screened:

Good: Two-color screen builds with non-similar screen values. When colors are defined by multiple uses of the process colors, it doesn't take much shift in registration, ink density or dot gain to visibly change its appearance, especially when the values are similar. These examples help by keeping the number of colors low and values different:

Troubleshooting InDesign

If you ever run into a corrupt InDesign file, it’s sometimes possible to fix it by exporting it as an InDesign Interchange file (File > Export > Format: InDesign Interchange) and then loading it back via FIle > Open.

If the program continues to crash, it might be time to delete InDesign’s preferences file. Do this by quitting the program, then holding down Command-Option-Shift-Control (Control-Alt-Shift for Windows users) while re-launching. A dialog box will prompt you before it clears itself. Of course, your preferences will be reset to the default settings, but if this solves your problems it’s a pretty small price to pay.

Exporting PDFs from Quark

When exporting PDFs directly from Quark, you’ve probably noticed that you’re given a choice (under Options > Job Options) about how to compress the images as the PDF is created. Unfortunately, the description of the settings is a bit confusing: If you want to maintain a high quality, should you pick “high” or “low” compression?

Because it refers to the amount of compression that will be applied — or how much of the image quality you’ll lose in the process — the right answer is “low.” If you’re creating PDFs that are meant for print, set compression either to “None” or “Automatic ZIP/JPEG Low.”

Crop-mark offset

When an advertiser sends in a PDF file, it may include crop marks to indicate the positioning of the file. However, we’ve recently noticed some PDFs that have the crop-mark offset at less than 9 points (.125”). Since this number is less than the amount of the bleed, the crop marks may actually show up on the printed page! Please remind your advertisers that if they plan to include crop marks, the offset should be more than 9 points. Your designer will love you for it, too.

File associations

Have you ever double-clicked on a file in OS X or Windows and had the wrong program launch? The battle over file associations on your desktop is pretty fierce, especially when it comes to audio and video media. Installing a seemingly benign program may change all your associations to use the new program instead of your desired applications. If you're tired of having PDFs load in “Preview” and not Acrobat, you'll be happy to know that the fix is extremely easy.

In Windows, just right-click on a sample file and choose Open With > Choose Program... Then, choose the program you’d like Windows to use and click on “Always use this program to open this kind of file." You should be good to go.

In OS X, single-click to select a sample file, then go to File > Get Info > Open With. Here, you can choose your desired application and click on the “Change All” button if you want to make your choice permanent.

You'll have to perform this task for each file type you want to reassign.

Finessing line breaks in InDesign

To improve text in InDesign, turn optical character alignment on. When deciding how to hyphenate a line of text, InDesign will consider how the text will appear to the eye and not just how the math metrics add up.

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