|
|
|
|
||||
© 2001 by Rick Altman. All Rights Reserved.
|
|
It’s amazing when you think of it. It was almost 12 years ago that a seminar by this name was first presented. We barely knew what we meant by “paragraphics,” but it sounded kind of cool.
Now, it’s my religion. I practice it with unfailing diligence. And we still get e-mail from veteran VENTURA users who remember those early presentations about placing as many elements as possible into the stream of the text.
What does this say about a program when advice given 12 years ago still holds? Boring? Out of step? Outdated? Too big and slow to change?
How about so fundamentally sound and well-conceived that it could hardly be improved upon? As far as I am concerned, that is not far from the truth.
Here is what I said about this topic back in 1988: “The most important element of any document is the text itself, not the presentation of it. When I make the text the primary focus of a document, I usually become more efficient with my production. From this experience, I have developed a Prime Directive: In a long document, attach all elements to the text, whenever humanly possible.
“In a long document, the flow of the text is your document’s lifeline. Graphics are linked to critical parts of the text; pagination is based on changes in content; bullets, big first characters, underlines, italics, and bold are all attached to critical parts of the copy. These critical parts shift as the text shifts; they don’t stay in one place. With some tasks this is obvious—you don’t italicize a certain portion of the page with the hope that the desired text falls there, you italicize the text itself. And very few users would choose to underline text by drawing a fixed line in Graphics mode [that’s what it was called then].
“These decisions are easy, but many are not so obvious. How would you attach a vertical line to a paragraph? How would you create a big first character with a gray shade around it? How would you place a rule at the top of each section or a row of dots underneath a headline? Many might think to create a secondary frame to accommodate unusual text handling, but that would violate the prime directive: A frame is a fixed object in your river of text. The first thing you should look for is a method of attaching the element to the text flow.
“Whenever VENTURA presents you with many options for a given task, try to narrow down the possible answers by looking for ways to attach graphic elements to the flow of the text. Sometimes the answer is hiding deep in a dialog box, but patience pays—the time spent developing the technique will pay off in time saved not having to readjust and reformat elements every time your text file shifts.”
Twelve years later, very little has changed, except the degree to which you can accomplish this. My No. 1 piece of advice remains precisely the same as the first day I gave it, back in 1988: Whenever possible, use paragraph formatting to solve your pagination and layout challenges.
There are plenty of examples of this, and Figure 1 shows the traditional (and simplistic) example that I like to use. New and occasional users would likely study this page and see many independent elements, requiring manual preparation. Headlines that cross columns…three blocks of text along the left column…two square bullets flanking the byline…a large capital letter reversed out of a solid bar—this page has “manual creation” written all over it.
Indeed, many users would create frames to hold the headlines, draw a frame down the left side, and use a small frame to house the large first character. And that’s not necessarily a bad strategy—it all depends upon the project. If your sole objective is to complete this one page and then not have to bother with it, or one like it, ever again, then the only thing that matters is how it looks.
But if this page represents a recurring project, or if it is coming back from review, you won’t appreciate having to create and adjust all of those frames. You’ll wish for a more automatic approach, and perhaps you’ll even blame VENTURA for not being better suited for these types of projects.
In fact, the entire thing can be created with paragraph formatting. You do not need to create a single frame or graphic object. Everything is part of the flow of the paragraphs, and that has potentially dramatic implications for you:
It’s efficient: Paragraph tags are compact commodities—one stylesheet and one line of code in a text file.
It’s production friendly: For objects that need to stay with a passage of text, what could be cleaner than having them live inside the paragraph?
It’s easy to duplicate: This might be the most important point of all. VENTURA is all about automation, and when you use paragraph formatting for page layout, you create automation at a very high level.
Back to Figure 1, where a single text file governs this page’s every move:
Open flow.vp and you’ll see the page shown in Figure 1, next to an identical-looking page created with frames. Give yourself a simple task, like changing the subhead to three decks instead of two, and you’ll immediately see the value of paragraphics: It would take all of three seconds to change the page if it is set with paragraph formatting; several minutes with the frame-based page.
I have trotted out this old page mostly for the sake of nostalgia, and to show how good form in VENTURA is really quite ageless. Chances are that most of your work is more complicated and challenging than this, so keep reading.
During production, I like to identify all elements with respect to their relationship to the text. If they are to flow with the text, then they are like fish. If they are designed to stay in one place on a page, then they are like rocks in the river. And if you go with the following rule of thumb, you’ll be right 95% of the time:
Figure 2 represents two pages from an actual book project, and is replete with elements that could either be rocks or fish, depending upon the context. For instance, the design spec for this book might call for all figures to be placed at the top or bottom of a page. If that were the case, then the image entitled Figure 1 would most decidedly be a rock, and would therefore be placed in a floating frame. That frame would sit top or bottom, and all of the text would flow around it.
But if the image is supposed to attach itself to the text, then you need to treat it like a fish. Obviously, it is still in a frame, but the way you handle that frame becomes critical to your strategy. Anchored frames have been a well-worn production aid since version 2, and we used one here to keep the figure moving with the text. In the presentation, we’ll address several good strategies for handling the caption.
The margin icon on the left page of Figure 2 is another opportunity to ask the question: rock or fish? If it’s a rock, it’s easy: throw it in a frame and move it to the right place. If it’s a fish, it’s a bit more challenging, but oh-so worth it to meet the challenge. Imagine how often you would need to move an icon like this if it were treated like a rock instead of a fish.
The right-hand page has another graphic designed to flow in the river, and then there is the question of the tip. Handling this was not so obvious to me, and I’m burning with curiosity about how others would format it.
That is now my war cry with structured projects (which is all I use VENTURA for; if it is not structured, I use CorelDRAW). If it takes me an hour to figure it out, so be it—I’ll save that and more in the long run. One of the most common issues in document production is handling margin notes, icons, and other graphic elements tied to specific passages of text. How would you go about attaching them to the text, and more intriguing of a question, could you do it with just paragraph tags? It might cost me 30 minutes to figure it out, but it will most certainly be time well spent: In a recent project, we had to place about 200 of them, but we dispatched them all with a simple, scriptable, maneuver of two keystrokes.
Figure 3 shows the outline pages for this year’s conference guide, and we succeeded in placing each of the text elements in a single text file, all as paragraphic elements. Figure 4 (below) confirms this by showing the same text in Copy Editor view.
After a while it becomes a game. Can I do this without extra frames or extraneous graphic elements? Sometimes, I go overboard and get obsessive about it; sometimes I spend more time on the solution than I hope to save when using it. I accept this. In the long run, I am far ahead of the game for my use of paragraph formatting.
If you take nothing else away from CorelWORLD this week, think about the river, the rocks, and the fish.
Copyright 2001, All rights reserved. Have an opinion? Share it with the Corel community at the CorelWORLD Forum. There is already quite a bit of discussion about this story. Join in.
May 2007: As simple as possible, but not simpler... · April 2007: Killer Keystrokes · March 2007: Resolution Confusion · January 2007: Fearless Forecasts for 2007 · November 2006: Epiphanies at PowerPoint Live 2006 · August 2006: Escaping Death by PowerPoint · July 2006: Notes from the Floor of InfoComm · June 2006: Beyond PowerPoint--Making Movies for Business and Pleasure, Part II · May 2006: Beyond PowerPoint--From Photos to DVDs · April 2006: It’s Your Music!--Overcoming the oppressive restrictions of iTunes · March 2006: CorelDraw X3—A few must-haves and a few missed opportunities, all in all, a credible upgrade · February 2006: Making Windows Inhabitable · January 2006: Fearless Forecasts for 2006 · September 2005: Just What is a Background Anyway? · August 2005: Meet David Dobson, Corel's New CEO · July 2005: Community, Blind Dates. and Albert Einstein: An Interview with the PowerPoint Live Conference Host · June 2005: CorelWorld 2005: Image Editors, Executive Appearances, and Krispy Kremes · May 2005: As Adobe's Shadow Grows, Is Corel Better off or Worse? · March 2005: Delivering Your Presentation: How Close to the Source Can You Get? · February 2005: Digital Photography: The Killer App of this Generation Part II · January 2005: Digital Photography: The Killer App of this Generation · November 2004: A Killer Deal for Corel Or Another Distraction? · September 2004: The Scourge that is Kazaa and AOL Instant Messenger · August 2004: The Golden Triangle: Presenter, Audience, and Slides · July 2004: A Blast from the Past: How Fast is Fast Enough? · June 2004: Guilty Pleasures · May 2004: A Personal Wish List for PowerPoint 12 · April 2004: Eyedropping: Version 12 makes a good tool even better... · March 2004: Deadly Sins Of Modern PowerPoint Usage · February 2004: Is the even-numbered curse finally over? · January 2004: Another take on Achieving Absence of Ugliness · November 2003: What can we do it again??--Debut of PowerPoint Live Leaves Unquenchable Thirst with the Host · September 2003: Corel Corp. Has a New Custodian · July 2003: Candor and Contrition at CorelWORLD · June 2003: What a Long, Great Trip It’s Been! · May 2003: The Boat that Corel is Missing · April 2003: No Fooling...Is Corel Breaking Up? · March 2003: The Annual Design-a-Brochure Contest · February 2003: Symbolism is Everything · January 2003: Mania, Our Semi-Annual Pilgrimage to Holland · October 2002: On Creativity, Problem-Solving, and Paper Bags · July 2002: CorelDRAW 11: Surprise, Surprise... · May 2002: The Sound of Silence: What does it mean when a company plays its cards so close to its chest? · April 2002: The Art and Science of Presentation Graphics--Creating for the Screen Has its own Challenges · March 2002: CorelDRAW 11: What kind of personality and attitude should a software program have today? · February 2002: Oy, my aching fingers... · December 2001: Digital Photography · November 2001: Can we say goodbye to the Rolls Royce Mentality? · October 2001: An Unforgettable Week: The drama that unfolded around CorelWORLD · August-September 2001: The Art of Paragraphics: New-age ingredients for success with Corel VENTURA · July 2001: Your Very Own Interface: How to make Corel applications read your mind · June 2001: Fighting the Font Wars: How to stay sane with your sans · May 2001--Turning the Key at Nicholas-Applegate · April 2001--A Modest Proposal for Reviving VENTURA Publisher
Copyright © 1995–2013 Unleashed Productions, Inc., All Rights Reserved.
