Tutorial Tuesday: Website Magazine

Instead of telling you about a single tutorial today, I'm going to tell you about a magazine that you can get for free that will provide you a regular source of information.

Website Magazine caters to those in the business of running a Web site. I've been receiving it since its inception and there are always a few articles of interest to me. Many of you have probably created a graphic for a Web site and it is quite possible that you run the site for your business. Now you have a free resource that can help you get the most out of your site.

The free subscriptions offered are what is called a "qualified subscription". This means you'll need to answer a few questions about your business and your involvement in purchasing. Basically they want to be able to tell their advertisers that the readers are interested in what the advertisers are selling. Go ahead and request your free subscription today!

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CorelDRAW Unleashed Font Substitution Update

If you read the Letters to the Editor in the April/May issue of CorelDRAW Unleashed magazine, you know that some readers are having a problem seeing the correct font when reading the magazine. Thanks to the letter appearing in the magazine, several readers have written me with suggestions. We still don't have a complete answer for the problem, but we've certainly discovered why it happens for some users.

The main font used for body text of the magazine is Georgia. It is a font supplied with most all recent versions of Windows, Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer and more. So, it is a font that most users should have on their systems.

Where things get strange is when users don't have Georgia on their systems. Those are the users who are having the weird font substitution problems. This shouldn't matter as the Georgia font is supposed to be embedded into the magazine. I had a long talk with the fine folks at Ascender Corporation, who created the Georgia font, and we discovered that a weird conversion problem was causing only the regular weight of Georgia to not embed into the PDF properly.

We will create a new PDF of the April issue that solves this problem, though it may be a few days before it is available for download. In the meantime, there are several ways to read the magazine without having this problem. First, make sure you have the Georgia font installed and that Advanced | Use Local Fonts is checked in Adobe Reader. Second, use FoxIt Reader to read the magazine as it substitutes a font that is much more readable for Georgia.

Now for the solution that we'll have to implement when we re-publish the issue. It seems the problem is a fairly obscure setting in Corel products. No, Corel didn't do anything wrong, it is just a setting that needs to be changed to avoid this issue. On the Objects tab of the Publish to PDF Settings dialog box, the default setting is to Convert TrueType to Type 1 fonts. Georgia is a TrueType font. When this setting is unchecked, the problem goes away.

You can't believe how glad I am to discover the solution to this problem. It took discussions with experts in a wide variety of software to stumble upon the problem. While many users would have called this a bug, it was truly user error all along.

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New Server Powering the Unleashed Sites

If you've read the last few posts, I've announced a few changes that have been made recently. Now I have one more and if all went well, you'll never know anything changed. Earlier this week we migrated the Graphics Unleashed and CorelDRAW Unleashed sites to a new dedicated server. Our old dedicated server was still working fine, but it was starting to show its age. We wanted to make sure that we had a server that could handle the increase of traffic that the CorelDRAW Unleashed magazine and CorelDRAW Unleashed User Conference would bring.

At the same time we installed our own mail server. Like everyone, all that unwanted spam is bombarding our inboxes. The new mail server gives us additional filtering options so we can make sure the bad stuff is blocked and the good stuff gets through.

Hopefully this is the last of the big changes for a while. I'm ready to get back to creating CorelDRAW content and this stuff has been very time consuming for me.

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CorelDRAW Unleashed Discussion on Video

I sat down with Gérard Metrailler (Director, Product Management, Graphics at Corel Corporation) at the CorelWorld Conference in San Diego in late June and we discussed my CorelDRAW Unleashed books and the big CorelDRAW Unleashed announcements. Since this video (see below) was recorded, we've gotten very close to the release of the premier CorelDRAW Unleashed Magazine which is due to be sent on October 16th. If you haven't already subscribed, it is completely free so there is no excuse not to get a subscription. All of the details of the upcoming CorelDRAW Unleashed User Conference are also available. Make sure to get your registration in early before the event is completely sold out.

Enjoy the video of the discussion! We're sorry for the poor sound quality.

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