RobinMcL

Hello All, I would like to print a textured image and am thinking of trying the Touchstone plugin. I wonder if anyone has used this and, if so, if it was easy to use and did a good job. Does anyone know of alternatives to this software? Sincerely, Robin

Hello Everyone, Once again, the Forum (YOU) have helped me solve the problem, this time in a rather serendipitous way. For my project the need is only for an illuminated W, P and F. I have, in this same project, made good use of (what I call) effects to enhance text but now I needed the really elaborative illuminated letters (but just three of them). In an effort to make the clear distinction between the two concepts, I thought I would try to get one example and attach it (the "N" that I attached) but I did not want to rip off someone's work from the Internet. Then I thought I would try AI Art (Midjourney). I have been experimenting with several AI art generators to see if, in the future, they may help me. (During the past five years I have been hiring artists for illustration work.) So I asked Midjourney to give me "The letter W as an illuminated letter using various birds, hyper-detailed, rich colors, intricate, beautiful, Renaissance style" That's right, I asked for a W and got an N! But it was a very nice N. So, I plugged away. All I needed was a W, P and F. The "N" was so nice that I thought I would keep trying. By the time I had the W, P and F, I had most of the alphabet - so I kept going. Now, hard to believe, I have the complete alphabet in gorgeous, illuminated letters. I suppose I could easily repeat the process, asking Midjourney to use, butterflies, trees, flowers etc. This episode makes me ponder. In replying to one of your comments, I wanted to give an example but did not want to "steal" someone else's work. Have I done even worse? Certainly, legally, I have not. The (paid) user of Midjourney has the right to anything they produce (Midjourney also holds non-exclusive rights). So, I am "free and clear" on the legal side. But what about the people who paint such things as their livelihood? I could go on, but this is not the forum where I should philosophize. I just want to let you all know that my current problem is now solved, and you made it happen. Thanks, Robin

Thanks for the comments and suggestions. I have used effects on fonts but have not tried the calligraphy brushes yet but will do so now. I would really like to get the capability of doing things like the attached. I'll keep working on it. Thanks to all, Robin

Hello Everyone, I wonder if anyone can suggest how I may go about getting and using illuminated fonts. I don't simply mean colored fonts nor the use of effects. I would like to be able to create really fancy and colorful letters. Ideally, I would like the fonts but would also like some UI that would help me select and use various colors on them in a consistent way. Next to that wish would come a set of vector characters where in, say, Designer, I could color each piece by hand and then scale them. My last option, but perhaps too much work for me, would be to simply copy a letter as an image file and paint over it in Photo. Kind regards, Robin McLeod

Hello everyone., I too tried to install Gigapixel Ai and failed. I tried it both on Photo V1 and Photo V2. So, now, I don't know what to do. I have two questions that someone may manage to answer for me: Is there another upscaling app that will work as a plugin (on V2 as this is the one I will use going forward)? Are there any plans to make the Gigapixel work as a plugin in V2? Thanks to all, Robin

Thank you for the suggestion. I will investigate this app. I noticed that, if I don't use crop marks, then Publisher does not add the extra bleed. This enables me to use the following compromise. I export pages with bleed to a pdf. Then I do the imposition in the pdf. Then print from there. Of course, this does not take account of creep nor crop. Your suggestion is MUCH better. Thanks, Robin

Thanks for the interest. I was simply wanting to make sure that the source document was in Adobe RGB because that is one of only two choices I have in my printer. Hence, I checked the Convert button in Document Setup. This makes certain that any image which was not already in Adobe RGB will be converted into Adobe RGB. It was this image that was printed twice; the same image printed from the same Publisher document. So, fast answer to your question, Yes. Since my first post on this, I created an ICC profile using my DataColor SpyderPrint and repeated the test with that profile. I got the same results. The print made with Publisher doing the color management was more saturated. Thanks, Robin

I did a test, printing a gamut test image two ways from Publisher. For one, I had the App do the color management (and made sure that I switched off the color management in the printer) and for the other I did the color management in the printer. I am on Windows 10. I had used X-Rite i1 Studio to create an ICC profile and I used this profile in both cases. I used Perceptual rendering intent in both cases. The color Format in my document was RGB/16 and I selected Adobe RGB (1998) as the Color Profile and selected Convert. When having the printer do the color management, I had the choice of "Standard" or "Adobe RGB (1998) so I chose the Adobe RGB one. My printer is a Canon PRO-100 and I use the latest Canon XPS driver for this printer. I expected the two prints to be identical. They were not. While both were "good" - VERY close to what I saw on my monitor (A NEC SpectraView II monitor that had been recently calibrated) and both had very smooth shading with no banding, there was a difference in saturation. The print that had been produced having the App do the color management was more saturated. My feeling is that, since I used the same ICC profile and the same rendering intent in both cases, both printed from Publisher on the same printer and (obviously) the same paper, that the prints should have been identical. Can anyone tell me what I am missing? With thanks, Robin

Thank you all for your comments. To Old Bruce: I tried the TrimBox idea. Brilliant! (I'm only beginning with my pdf software and had not got to that stage. I had hoped that Publisher would do all I needed.) To MikeW: I'm on my third book and, like you, don't want to do a fourth. I thought about creep but decided that I had enough to worry about. If I end up being crazy enough to try a fourth book, I would take your advice and try to deal with creep. On the sewing and binding, I discovered that the recommended sewing techniques were not good enough when using (heavy) photo-quality paper for the signatures tended to separate from each other when the book opened. I fixed this by doing a second, cross-sewing of the text block; more work. What a pain. To thomaso: I wrote to Serif on this issue several years ago and was told that they had no intention of fixing this. To pbasdf: I add my own guides, when designing the cover, so that I get the spine printing in the correct place. This made me wonder about creating my own crop marks but I could never think through how to do that. You have shown me how. Thanks. Once more, to all, thanks. This means a lot to me. The first book was for our first grandchild. Then the parents had a second child and I could hardly do a book for one and not the other. After over five years of work, I delivered the second book a few months ago. Then the parents said "This has taken you so long and you have had so many trials and tribulations, we would like you to make a book outlining that, multi-year journey." Gulp! This third book I call "The Story of the Stories". None of these books could have been done without the help of you all. Robin

Yes, I am doing the binding myself, so I need the imposition. I am currently doing the following and it seems to be working well. I don't get crop marks but can live without that. You may or may not recall that I have a special, additional, problem in that, with MY Canon printer, I get a white line down the middle whenever I try to print two pages side by side. (It puts in a tiny, but very annoying, gap (hence white) between the two pages.) So, I can only print one page on a sheet. Here's how I manage it: 1) I export to pdf as pages (not spreads), with bleed but no crop marks. This provides single pages. 2) I then select the required number of pages for one signature and save that as a separate file. 3) I then, using my pdf software, "print" to another pdf file AS A BOOKLET. This provides the imposition for that signature. The key thing here is that the two normal sized pages now become A SINGLE double-wide page. 4) I now print that in the usual way and, since the signature spread is now a single page (to my Canon printer) it all works fine. Life would be so easy if: 1)Publisher could print a page range as a booklet, and 2) There was not a bug in my Canon printer driver, and 3) Publisher could export pages of a spread with crop marks only in the right places, But, in the meantime, I plod ahead. With luck, this will be the last book I will ever make. What I thought might be a six-month project has turned out to be about six years. Along the way I have had much help from so many people in the Forum. I could not have done it (not quite finished yet!) without people like you. I will investigate the suggestions given. Thanks, Robin

Yes and no! The ultimate, most important, critical issue is that I am trying to make a book that is bound in signatures (just like an ordinary book). Hence, I absolutely MUST have imposition. This, in turn, implies that the spreads MUST be split into separate pages and then imposed into signatures (each signature is, essentially, a "booklet") So YES if I export spreads than I get the correct number of crop marks but, NO, exporting as spreads is of no use to me. It would be great to have this bug fixed, and also to have a page range printed as a booklet. In the meantime, I am using a bizarrely complicated workaround. I export pages from Publisher as pdfs with bleed but no crop marks. Then, in my pdf software I do imposition and create another pdf which now has spreads, but with the pages in the correct order. Finally, I print these spreads. This is a great pain and opens up the possibility for additional problems, for example, my pdf software can change the size of documents in this process unless great care is taken. It would be so nice if Publisher could handle "Print pages 1-36 as a booklet, with bleed and crop marks" correctly. Thanks for your efforts. Robin

Dear EmT, There might be a question of terminology. I posted comments on further investigations (I made in the middle of the night) yesterday. (I simply could not sleep for worrying about this.) What I discovered was that IF I did NOT ask for crop marks, then there was NO extra bleed added. The "terminology" question arises in the following way. My Publisher document uses facing pages to produce a spread. Hence bleed goes round the outside and there is NO bleed in the gutter. Furthermore, and most importantly, there are only FOUR crop marks, one at each corner of the spread. The problem now is, how do I create a book from this? When I came to this stage, originally in PagePlus, I simply could not believe that the software would NOT let me give a range of pages and have it do the imposition to create the appropriate signature. (It's called desktop publishing so why does it stop me doing the actual publishing?!) Since my pdf software can do the imposition, it seems reasonable to export the PAGES to a pdf and print from my pdf software, using the crop marks to guide my trimming of the text block. Ahha! What should happen is that, since Publisher knows that my pages are part of a spread (facing pages) it should put TWO crop marks on the Left-Hand side of the LEFT page and TWO crop marks on the Right-Hand side of the right page. But that is NOT what it does. It puts four crops marks on EACH page. WRONG!! Now when these pages are put back together via imposition, there is a big gap between them. Whether one calls this extra bleed or just a big gap is of no concern. The issue is, that gap should not be there. If I do not ask for crop marks then this does not happen. So I may have used the wrong word. I was always wanting the bleed AND the crop marks. I have discovered that, if I don't ask for crop marks, I can still get the bleed. This lets me move ahead. I simply have to use some other method for deciding where to trim. This is not a big problem. But why can't I simply give a page range and have that printed as a booklet from Publisher?! I asked that question years ago and was told that Serif had no intention of providing that capability but no explanation of why was given. It is infuriating that I can print the entire document as a booklet but not part of it. I hope this is a clear enough explanation and that you can reproduce it. If not I can easily create a file for you. With thanks, Robin

Hello, I was experimenting again, and I think things work out if I do NOT ask for crop marks. That is, if I export to pdf, ask for bleed but do not ask for crop marks, then I do not get extra bleed down the gutter. I can live with that. I'll try it again in the light of day. (I could not sleep for thinking about this problem and got up in the middle of the night to try it.) I think I can use it as it is without any of the workarounds and wanted to let you know as soon as possible.) Being able to print a page range as a booklet would, of course, be great and save me creating a pdf in the first place. Cheers, Robin McLeod

Thank you for the speedy response. No, this is a different issue. Indeed, the previous issue seemed to be related to the Canon printer. It dawned on me that interaction with printers is highly specific to each printer, but PDFs are a bit more "standard". Hence, I may get better luck exporting to a PDF and printing from there. That seems to be true BUT,... But there are then the problems of Publisher introducing Bleed that should not be there. In the previous case I did the following workaround. I increased my page size to the original plus Bleed and then set Bleed to zero. This was NOT ideal as I then could not use crop marks to guide my trimming of the text block. An alternative fudge I have used, but ONLY before Publisher started to put the white line down the page on my Canon printer, was to use 2-up and explicitly list the pages of the signature in order (for example, for pages 1 through 16 as a signature I would list 16,1,14,3,12,5,10,3 for one side then turn over the paper and print 2,15,4,13,6,11,8,9 for the other side.) This is a great pain AND I continually made mistakes in the page order resulting in a massive waste of photo-quality paper! The algorithm is trivial AND is already used by Publisher BUT, for some weird reason, it is applied ONLY to the entire number of pages in the file, not to a user-entered page range. That is, if I have 100 pages in the file but want pages 1 through 24 as a signature, while I can enter 1-24 and select Booklet, Publisher actually uses ALL 100 pages so the first sheet has pages 100 and 1 NOT 24 and 1 as it should. Another problem I have had is color management. This was nothing to do with Publisher but did impact my use of PDFs as I could never get good color if I exported to a PDF. Thankfully, I think I now have learned how to get better control of color when I export to PDF. Hence, I now feel that exporting to a PDF and printing from there SHOULD be the more reliable way to go. My PDF software does impositon very nicely and also does Manual Duplex, which makes printing the entire signature easier. This approach, however, is not open to me if I use bleed because of Publisher adding bleed down the gutter. I hope this explains the issue. Publisher is a fantastic application, but it seems that, when you use the word "printer" you are referring to some professional print company and NOT some inkjet printer that an amateur like me might have on their desk. That is, you have not addressed the needs of someone like me who writes the stories, takes their own photos, designs the book (using Photo, Designer and Publisher) prints it out, sews all the signatures, makes the cover and binds the book myself. It's only when I come to the printing stage that I have problems with Publisher. Any help you can give will be greatly appreciated. Kind regards, Robin McLeod

It's quite a while since I last posted anything, and my notes indicate that I had thought this problem had been fixed. In my document, I use facing pages and have bleed round the outer, top and bottom but NO BLEED in the inner. However, when I export pages to PDF and ask for bleed, Publisher ADDS bleed in the inner (gutter). Obviously, this is a disaster when I come to print out signatures as there is a big white stripe (that was NOT there in the original) stuck in between the left-hand page and the right-hand page. Does anyone know how I can avoid this? I had also hoped that printing, say pages 1 through 36, as a Booklet would give me the signature I wanted but, even though I can enter that in the Publisher dialog, Publisher ignores the page range and attempts to print the entire file as a Booklet. I have a 324 page book that I am trying to print in nine signatures. There seems to be two sensible options but problems with both. If Publisher could print a page range as a Booklet, I'd be home and dry. Alternatively, if Publisher could export without adding Bleed that is NOT there then (since my PDF software can do imposition) I'd be home and dry. I've struggled with this problem for almost five years and not yet found a solution. Ideas welcome. Thanks, Robin