Images in PDF documents

Colin plaintively asks

As an example of what I mean, the section on images tells you what formats InDesign will accept. It tells you how to move them, put them in frames, link them, wrap text around them and all sorts of other things. It even illustrates the import options for various file types. But what it doesn’t do is suggest which ones to use. Or whether it is best to standardise file specifications (colour space, bit depth etc) outside of InDesign or not. Or whether it is best to place images that are sized perfectly, or oversized. Or output sharpened. Or what the consequences might be of using compressed or uncompressed files. Nor does it give any clues as to where you might find out the answers to these questions.

I have no deep insight here, except for this one observation: if I want something to look good on a screen, I size it to the exact size it will be on screen, then sharpen it at that size so that it looks good on screen. If you import oversized images into InDesign, then if you’ve done any sharpening on them, it was done on this oversized version, and if you then let InDesign resample them, you will end up with something not quite as good as if you had made the image exactly the right size and sharpened it.

Now, this is a rotten deal. For one thing, it pretty much means that you can’t put oversize images into the files so that viewers can zoom in to see more detail. It means that when 300 dpi screens are commonplace (next August, say) you’ll need to redo your PDF portfolios and books. And it means that if you embed 100dpi sharpened images in the online version, you can’t use the same image files for your Blurb print version.

Rotten all around. I’d observe one little out, which is that approximately zero people will view your PDF file at whatever the heck their PDF viewer calls ‘life size’ – basically pixel per pixel. So that viewer is going to resample whatever you put in your PDF file anyway. This is rotten, because no matter what, your images are not sharpened at whatever resolution the PDF viewer is displaying them at. Rotten, rotten. On the other hand, if you know that the viewer is going to display your images without sharpening, perhaps the right thing to do is embed oversized sharpened versions, so that when people zoom in all the way, they get some positive impression of your work.

Until we resolve this little conundrum with better control over how images are displayed in PDFs, I see no way out of this box. Yes, it’s rotten. Rotten is the word of the day.

Without Spreads

Because so many folks said ‘ditch the spreads’, here’s the same portfolio with spreads turned off. Note that many PDF readers allow you to pair pages.

Side note: I did not spend any time arranging images into pairs to exploit the spread, I just plunked them in the portfolio in chronological order. Interestingly, some people though the arrangement was bad, and some liked it.

I know some people don’t like the page numbers. Page numbers are important because I don’t title images (or caption them) and without some reference number there’s no way to specify a particular image. There are other reasons for page numbers, too – basically all the reasons books have numbered pages.

Comments, as before, welcome.

Online Portfolio Progress

So I have a sort of draft version of an online portfolio/very small book.

This is the result of considerable messing about with various alternatives. In the end, I always seem to come back to something along these lines. Compared to what I’ve got for an actual printed book, this has abbreviated front matter. Pages are symmetric; that is, there’s no gutter. The PDF is generated as spreads. I remain uncertain about that particular decision.

You can take a look, here. Comments and suggestions, or even questions – all welcome and positively encouraged. If you’d like a copy of the template from which this was generated, drop me an email; I’m nearly to the stage where I’m ready to share with a small number of people.

Next up – similar PDF portfolios for the other work in this project, along with portfolios for the work I’ve currently got on my static website.

Left Hand/Right Hand, and Print/Online

As always, learning by doing certainly beats sitting and theorizing.

I have figured out my problems with margins, gutter, spreads, and left hand and right hand pages. The answer, it turns out, lies in InDesign’s somewhat nonintuitive way of handling left hand and right hand pages.

Let me expound. Suppose you have an empty document, and then create a whole bunch of pages in it all at once. The first page created will be a ‘right hand’ page, and InDesign indicates this by displaying the icon for that page in the ‘pages’ pane set over to the right. The second page will be a left hand page, and the third will be a right hand page, fourth a left hand page, and fifth a right hand page, and so on. All this makes perfect sense.

Now, let’s suppose you insert a page into the document, BETWEEN two pages that currently form a spread. This new page forces all of the subsequent pages to change partners. However, the ‘left page’ or ‘right page’ property of a page is FIXED AT THE TIME THE PAGE IS CREATED, so now you have a bunch of left hand pages which fall on the right hand side of spreads, and also a bunch of right hand pages that fall on the left side of spreads. And, as you expect, this produces chaos.

The moral of the story that you never want to do anything that will make a left hand page move to the right hand side of a spread, or right hand page move to the left hand side. This means you should NEVER drag pages around, only spreads. If you need to move content from one side of a spread to the other, move the content, not the page.

Figuring this out was another few hours of my life down a rat hole. Of course, once I’d figured it out, it was EASY and FAST to look in my books on InDesign and confirm it.

In other news, having puzzled this out, I am engaged in building version 2 of my template, being careful of left hand and right hand, and building the master pages as spreads. This has both complicated the template and made it simpler, as you would expect.

And as I’m approaching the finish line, the issues I’ve been punting down the road (“I’ll hand that when I know more about it…”) are now confronting me.

Most of these are print versus online issues:

• In the print world, you have a ‘gutter’ on the spine side of a page, to compensate for the fact that because the book is bound, you can’t lay the spread flat, and so you need to lay out the page with a bit more space on the inside of the page than the outside, so that it looks balanced. Online, you do not need to do this. Do I build one template, and include a gutter, and just let it look slightly weird online? Or do I try to figure out a way to have one template, but I adjust it according to whether the target is print or online?

• The copyright page for a print document (portfolio or book) should really have the ISBN, the Library of Congress Catalog card number, and specify where the book was printed. All that info is either irrelevant or silly for an online publication, I THINK. Or maybe not.

• Typically, a printed book will have a bastard title page, either a blank page or a frontispiece, a full title page, the copyright page, and then a half title page. Having three title pages seems excessive for a print document, where the reasons for the multiple title pages have vanished. So it seems you end up with different front matter for printed books and the online versions of books, or at least portfolios and books which are targeted exclusively for online viewing.

I’ve got no clarity on those issues. If you have insights, please share!

Progress

Today I finally got my template thing in a state where I could give it a test drive.

I started from the template, with the goal of creating a portfolio from 22 images I’d made in one particular theatre. As a bit of a test, I timed the process. From the time I opened the template to the time I had generated a PDF and saved the InDesign file for the portfolio, it took me about 10 minutes.

In the process, I managed to find two different problems with the template itself – one with the way I was handling vertical images, and one problem I haven’t quite figured out with margins, the gutter, and left and right hand versions of master pages. I will have to go back and fiddle with that some.

The margin problem is forcing my hand, and I guess I will have to make some decisions about whether portfolios intended solely for web viewing should have spreads, or just single pages. I am leaning very slightly toward spreads, but it’s awfully close. Part of my reason for this slight leaning is that in terms of presenting images, it’s useful to have spreads. You can put text on one side and an image on the other, or two related images side by side. Thoughts on this?

The bottom line, here is that although I might not be able to get as much book/portfolio or print/online fusion as I had hoped, the process of having a template all set and ready for you to drop images into it to set up a publication can really, really cut the time it takes to go from a set of images in a directory all the way to the final PDF.

More on books, portfolios, and the web

Today I got a little bit further along on my quest to have a template that will help me generate paper books and online PDF portfolios/books.

This afternoon, I used to template to crank out a 24 image portfolio. That’s about as big as I’d want to go without giving more thought to structure than it currently has – right now it’s just a test job, with 24 photos from this years SoFoBoMo effort thrown in to see how it worked.

The differences between print and online versions, and between portfolios and books are slowly starting to become more clear as I go through the process of making things and am forced to actually confront actual problems and make concrete choices.

For instance, it seems to me that a portfolio is a much simpler structure – you don’t need quite as much front matter to a portfolio as you do for a book. Some of that structure – bastard title page, frontispiece, and half title page – might make sense only for books, and not so much for a portfolio. I can see a preface or forward for both books and portfolios, I guess.

The paper version/online version differences are growing more clear, too. If you’re generating a PDF for online viewing, you have different resolution needs, and you probably optimize the PDF differently. Those are hidden technical PDFy things. Beyond those, the on the ground experience of viewing a PDF online means that you’ll probably treat things like blank pages and spreads differently in online and print versions. Beyond that there are a host of issues which are basically traditions in the print world which might make no sense in the online world – the practice of having bastard title pages at the front (which was used to make it easy to identify unbound books) is a good example. Another example would be the idea of combining the frontispiece and title page to fill both functions (display an image, provide title, subtitle, author, publisher info) with just one page that also serves as a sort of cover for the portfolio as well. So an online version might have the cover, frontispiece, and title page collapsed into the first page, the second page would be the copyright page (or maybe move that to the end), followed by a preface/foreward/dedication/acknowledgements and then the body and back matter

I’ve also been going through my books on book design again. When I first went through all that study for SoFoboM 2008, I got headaches trying to learn book design. This time around it seems to all be making sense. The challenge is in taking hundreds of years of tradition and figuring out which bits are useful in an online context, and which are not. It isn’t always clear up front what parts the baby and what parts are the bathwater. As a general thing, I’m finding that if I’m not sure, better to leave it in until I figure out why publishers have been putting it in books for hundreds of years. My working presumption is that the people making books in the past were smart clever folk and not clueless idiots.

headaches

For the past couple of days I’ve been fiddling with InDesign.

What I want to have is something I can use to produce books (by cranking out a PDF which I then upload to Blurb or some other service), and PDF files which I can distribute online. I’ve been thinking a lot about the spectrum of things I want, which ranges from what I’ll call a ‘portfolio’ all the way through to what I’ll call a ‘book’. The distinction is not clear, except that in my mind a portfolio might have half a dozen to perhaps two dozen images, and books have more images. These started out as two entirely separate concepts in my head, but over the past few days, things have gotten more blurry.

I want this thing to simplify the book process, and I had the suspicion going in to this effort that the secret answer was going to be these mysterious things called ‘templates’ in InDesign. It turns out that’s sort of true but not completely true.

An InDesign template is a file which you open the way you’d open a regular InDesign file. It has all the usual stuff in it, and you replace the usual stuff with the stuff you’re interested in, and the result is something you can use to crank out a PDF file. In my mind, I’d open this template, change a few things, and then just drop my photos into the right places, plop, plop, plop, and I’d be done. Magic, right?

As these things are, it’s a bit more complex than that. What I’ve ended up with is a template, all right, but there’s no starting document (or at least very little starting document). The template has some important stuff defined, like text styles for the title, the subtitle, the author, the publisher, and plain text. (I assume more styles will get added as the template gets refined). The template also has what are called ‘master pages’, which you can use to generate new pages in the document. Right now I’ve got four different title pages: with and without images on, and a sort of minimal title page variant and a much more complete variant. I’ve got master pages for pages with page numbers, and pages without. I’ve got a master page for the copyright page, with the boilerplate text on it.

All of these master pages are driven by a handful of text variables. So what you do is open up the template, set the value of these text variables, and then drag the master pages you want into the document one by one. The actual title, subtitle, author, publisher, publication date – they all get filled in in each page, automatically. If I change my mind about the title, I just go and redefine the ‘title’ text variable, and bingo, the title changes everywhere in the document. After I’ve dragged the pages that form the front matter of the book into the document, I just repeatedly drag ‘photo’ pages into the document and plop the photos onto the pages. When I’m done, I’m done. I’ll have one export preset for the web, another for sending off to POD publishers, and I’m done.

The trick with text variables lets you adjust all the occurrences of the title, or author, or whatever, all at once. I’m doing that both for my convenience (to make the next book easier) and to make it easy for someone to take my template and alter it to suit themselves.

The trick with the master pages is this: you can make the masters depend on each other in a hierarchical way, so that if I change where the page number goes, it automatically moves on ALL the pages. And so on.

I will say that InDesign is not intuitive to me. I spent about an hour and a half trying to align things using the align tool, which seemed to have stopped working. It took me the full hour and a half to discover that somehow I’d managed to accidentally switch the alignment tools from aligning to the page margins to aligning to the selection. And that when you’ve only got one object selected, aligning it to itself is the same as not doing anything. That was a headbanger, and I’m sure to an outside it would have been comic.

But all it did was give me a headache.

Words to Remember

I was just enjoying Doug Plummer’s excellent book At the Fill, and was struck by this particular passage, which I offer up here:

The camera is my portal to connection, both to the place and to myself. I begin from beneath my awareness. I lose the composing photographer’s eyes, and begin responding from elsewhere in my body. I start taking pictures, maybe one or two, maybe dozens. The act of firing off a shutter seems to deepen my trance. I’m not of the Ansel Adams, big view camera spend-hours-composing-one-frame school of photography. My process is profigate, intentionally wasteful. I have no idea what I’m looking for, and besides, these brushy places I like so much are too dense to consciously compose an image in. By diving into this complex terrain I deliberately overload my circuits. My unconscious is in charge of the camera controls. The Fill is where I do my deepest work.

There’s a lot there. Part of it, for me, is that it shows Doug’s tremendous generosity in sharing so openly how his process works – both the parts he understands and the parts where, as Doug puts it, his unconscious is in charge of the camera controls. I feel a certain affinity for Doug’s process, although I’d certainly use different wording and it’s hard to know how much my ‘flow’ experience is similar to what Doug describes.

And I’m not saying that everyone ought to work this way. I expect that process is highly individualistic, and everyone’s is different in ways both important and unimportant. I need to work the way I need to work, and you need to work the way you need to work, and there’s no law, either codified or implied, that says the two need to even remotely resemble one another.

What I do know is that I became comfortable with what Doug describes as profligate waste very slowly and hesitantly. It felt weird to head out with a view camera and burn through film like mad, because everyone else with a view camera was still working in the “spend-hours-composing-one-frame” school. I would have made more rapid progress if I’d read Doug’s words years before.

There’s a lot of writing about photography out on the web, and on the shelves at your bookstore. Some of it is actually writing about cameras, which is closely related to photography but not quite the same thing. And then there’s some writing about the technical details of making photographs – lenses, shutter speed, aperture, calculating exposure, developing film and working with photoshop and so on. There’s quite a lot of writing about photographs – which ones are good, and which ones are bad, and why. If you look in popular photos magazines, you’ll see a lot of articles with titles along the lines of “How to Add Pizzaz to Your Landscape Photographs”.

But there’s not very much written about that bit where it’s you, the subject, and the camera, and something happens in your brain and the process ends with your releasing the shutter. Part of it, I suspect, is that it can be darn hard to do much introspection; you get to a certain point and then, as Doug does, you get to the point where there’s nothing to say but “My unconscious is in charge of the camera controls”.

I just wish there more more folks like who managed to share what they can figure out the way Doug does.

And another thing: Doug Plummer is to the Union Bay Natural Area as Ed Weston is to Point Lobos.

Changing My Mind

Way back in 2004, I wrote:

The WWW is not a book

In a book, the author and editor contrive to make the best possible decisions about every variable. Not only is content subject to great editorial scrutiny, but every aspect of the graphic design is controlled by the folks publishing the book – graphic design, the exact layout, type style, type size, how the type is set, what paper the book is printed upon – the list is endless. The WWW is not like this, because not only is it not possible for the author/publisher to control many of these variables, the web is a place where many of those variables are explicitly under the control of the viewer.

Some (many, maybe even most) web sites try to set the absolute font size. Generally, they set it to be reasonable (or maybe a bit small) for a lower resolution monitor, with the result that the web site is unreadable on a high resolution monitor. Setting absolute font size is a Very Bad Idea, because it conflicts with the idea behind the WWW – “The publisher provides the content and make suggestions about presentation. The viewer controls how things are displayed.”

On the web, all of the technologies for ensuring that the viewer sees exactly what you want her to see are obnoxious and bad. A good example is PDF – Adobe’s answer to ensuring that something looks the same no matter what. In the beginning, PDF was bad because search engines couldn’t index PDF content. Now they can, but PDF is still bad because it’s slow, requires a plug-in to work, and the plug-in is obnoxious and slow. If you want to provide PDF versions of documents that can easily be printed, fine. Just don’t think people will like it when your entire website is done in PDF files, because they won’t.

I might be in the process of eating those words.

Here’s the deal: I’ve been looking at a lot of PDF files lately. Nearly all of them are ‘photo books’ but some of them are PDF photo ‘portfolios’. Don’t ask me to distinguish between a ‘book’ and a ‘portfolio’, because I can’t except in a very vague way.

And at the same time, the urge to redo my static website (did you know I have a static website?) remains. I’ve started the revamping several times, and each time it comes down to not being quite sure I want to invest a lot of effort in material I consider dead, or outdated. And I’m more and more convinced that the static photo pages I have suck because of their very staticness, and at the same time I hate the web gallery thing where you get a little slideshow or you click and it goes through fancy transitions a la Powerpoint. And I’m doing these book things, and it occurs to me that maybe what I want is for the photos on my website to be in PDF portfolios. Maybe the PDF portfolios for some of the work would be display resolution/more easily downloaded versions of the book/portfolio, and you’d be able to buy a copy of the book off Blurb.

I’m thinking out loud, here, not stating conclusions. But much has changed since 2004, and part of it is how much PDF has become a standardized thing that most people have either built right into their browsers, or plugins that most people have installed.

At the same time I thinking PDF as the display mechanism for these portfolios, I’m wondering about all that static text – old reviews of obsolete equipment, essays, etc. Don’t know what to do about all that dreck. I get emailed questions about it regularly, so clearly people are reading it. Beyond that, though, it feels like dead weight.

Got thoughts on this? Share’em with me, please.

Canon EF 90mm f/2.8 TS-E

Again, not intended to be representative of the capabilities, just what I happened to make with the lens.