InDesignSecrets Podcast 188
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- News: PEPCON, IDUG site and our forum
- All about the “Forbidden Formats” in InDesign: JPEG, GIF, and PNG
- Bonus! We get sidetracked and rant about Adobe Digital Editions
- Obscure InDesign Feature of the Week: Letter V
News and special offers from our sponsors:
>> Em Software is the developer of DocsFlow and WordsFlow, two plug-ins for Adobe InDesign that dynamically link your text frames to online Google Docs (DocsFlow) or placed Word files (WordsFlow). These products enable a breakthrough publishing workflow, one where your authors and editors can keep changing the source document, and you can merge in their changes automatically and painlessly, even after you’ve made changes to the InDesign story (without losing your changes or formatting!). Special offer just for InDesignSecrets listeners: Use the coupon code ids0213 (if that doesn’t work, try ids2013) in the EmSoftware.com store when buying either of these plug-ins and get 20% off! This code is only good until March 31, 2013, so grab them both!
>> Rorohiko offers many free scripts for InDesign (their commercial ones and their custom jobs allow them to do this), and one that’s very cool is called TextStitch. This script lets you easily thread multiple text frames together, manually or automatically. It’s just the ticket for managing the order of content when you’re exporting stories to RTF, EPUB, or HTML. To see how it works, Keith Gilbert wrote a great blog post extolling its wonderfulness. Download TextStitch for free, but tell Rorohiko where you heard about it, please!
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INDESIGN “PRODUCTION NIGHTMARES FROM THE TRENCHES” STORIES: We want to hear your stories! Send us a short (less than 3 minutes) “InDesign doc/client/user/coworker Horror Story” that we can play on the air (you’ll be anonymous) in an upcoming episode: leave us a voice message at +1-801-459-4477 to record it, or send in your own voice recording. Please follow-up with an e-mail, which we will keep private, including any additional information that you’d like us to know. You’ll get a nifty gifty from us if we play it in a podcast!
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> Fritz, David, and Anne-Marie will be presenting seminars and labs at Adobe MAX, May 4–8, 2013 (right after PEPCON!)
> Come to PEPCON! Our annual Print + ePublishing Conference, this year April 28–May 1 in Austin, Texas
> Neat new script for exporting InDesign pages to JPEGs with custom filenames
> Never watched Sesame Street? Here’s the “brought to you by the Letter V” reference
> Other forbidden formats we’ve ranted about
> The file format that goes “Ping” Monty Python reference
> Letter V and other View Pages commands in CS6
So, guys, I feel like a discussion of these formats is incomplete without some explanation of what they are and are not appropriate for.
You say that the main difference between PNG and JPEG is PNG’s transparency support. I think that’s dangerously misleading:
The big gotcha with JPEGs is that they cannot represent sharp edges and should only be used for continuous-tone imagery. So JPEGs are great for photographs, but they are horrible for text, for line art, or even large solid objects. They are mathematically incapable of accurately reproducing those effects. No matter how high up you crank the resolution, you’re still going to have problems with fine details in a JPEG. And these things degrade rapidly when you’re at anything other than the highest quality levels. You’re much better off with a PNG.
I find it kinda weird to suggest GIF and PNG might not be appropriate for print…they’re fine as long as they are of adequate resolution and color space, which is entirely file-format independent. (Of course, you can’t have CMYK GIFs and shouldn’t have CMYK PNG files, so if you’re working in color, they might not be appropriate).
And to say JPEG is a web format, well. Most cameras produce JPEG images (when they’re not producing raw formats)…
So I guess it all depends on how you look at it.
@John: Thanks for the comment. We linked to this blog post about file formats above, but you’re right that it is crucial to understand what each of these formats is about: http://indesignsecrets.com/tiff-vs-psd-vs-eps-vs-pdf-vs.php
@John, good thought but I don’t see this as that big of a gotcha. If the intent is sharp text or line art, we’d likely be working with a 1-bit image, which does not save to JPG in Adobe apps anyway. If we do not limit ourselves to 1-bit artwork (working in 8-bit or more), we’re still going to get mushy text and lineart in TIF/PNG/etc… So this is not as much of an issue with the JPG file format.
Another concern with these file formats is if they support color profiles.
@Anne, JPG does support 1-bit transparency clipping in InDesign. You just need to find your path to enlightenment.
Jim: I see non-1bpp text in images all the time, not just in RGB or CMYK images, but also greyscale images. I pretty much never see 1bpp images…