Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with DTP

Freelance magazine design costing

spyke23 — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 14:05:17 -0800

Freelance magazine layout costing in the UK: A publication company is looking to outsource the layout for a journal, 64 pages, full colour, using existing layout, not from new. It is possible but not probable that I will have existing layouts to work from electronically. I has been told this publication is produced monthly, takes the existing designer a week and a half, and am being offered a flat fee for doing the job for each issue. How much would one expect to be paid for that sort of job, if of average/medium weight experience?

DTP Training in Bay Area

clarkie666 — Tue, 08 Aug 2006 11:05:47 -0800

Can anyone reccomend evening or weekend Desktop Publishing Training in the Bay Area (bonus for weekend in San Francisco), general courses would be preferred, but specfic would be good too, e.g. InDesign, Quark, etc. Otherwise if there is self-led online courses that are good - this may work also. I am looking for basic courses that I can offer to employees, simple as that! Thanks!

Um, how do I make the text baselines even in our magazine?

anonpeon — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 08:42:50 -0800

How do you set type in DTP software so that a story with multiple sections has even lines across a four column grid? Ok, you know how a magazine or newspaper story might have several sub-sections, like so:

Jugis regula exerci blandit, autem, premo causa plaga ut appellatio gemino fere. Feugiat typicus facilisis quidem reprobo ut.

SECTION HEADER
Foras opto ex mos in opto capto tum metuo secundum te macto. Quis comis reprobo eros secundum.

...where the section header indiciates a subsection of the story.

In general and in Indesign CS2, how does a magazine/newspaper do their style sheets so that if a story has section header with multiple lines, the baseline of the copy is all the same? Yeah, we can do lock to baseline, but that seems to create really strange white space.

I tried calculating the space, using the space before and space after options (i.e. if the leading is 10pt, make the section header 16pt with 2pt of space before and 2pt of space after), so that it would all add up to two lines of text, so that the bodycopy would fall easily on the same baseline, but if the section headers are more than one line, which is possible in a 4 column grid, then everything gets outta wack.

Is there something simple that I'm missing? These seems really complex, but it doesn't seem like it should be.

Grid layout book recommendations

spyke23 — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 17:16:02 -0800

Any recommendations for books on grid layout systems for print?

What new and revolutionary DTP/pagelayout features would you like to see?

Brandon Blatcher — Sun, 11 Sep 2005 06:25:54 -0800

Graphicdesignerfilter: With the rise of Indesign and to a smaller extent, Scribus as major page layout applications, is anyone else underwhelmed by new, revolutionary features? What features would you like to see in page layout apps that currently don't exist? I'm not talking about improvements to current applications, but something totally new that will make the practical and/or creative end of page layout better. Me, I'd like to see the ability to individually control the sides of boxes ala CSS, ala making the right side 5pt solid and blue while the left side would be 1 point dotted and grey. It would be nice to be able to apply this to circles and rounded boxes also.

Having an easy way to make tapered ends (i.e. being able to draw a single line that was thick at one end and think at another) would be nice.

Newsletter layout editing responsibilities

achmorrison — Fri, 21 Jan 2005 13:25:50 -0800

I have been hired to layout a newsletter for print and for publication online. There is an editor who compiles the articles, edits for length, and etc. In this situation, who should be responsible for the copy editor duties? I find that it is a pain to finish the layout and then hear back from the editor that there are several spelling, punctuation, and line break mistakes that need to be corrected (which is generally hard to do in DTP software). Is it unreasonable of me to expect that the copy-editing should be done by the editor and not the layout person?

Sites with design ideas and tips at a medium-to-advanced level?

bonaldi — Wed, 10 Mar 2004 13:34:00 -0800

Design sites: Does anyone have any good links to sites with design ideas and tips at a medium-to-advanced level? I'm talking dead-tree here, no CSS thanks. There are plenty of sites about fonts and online design, but I want to do cool things with a nice piece of A4. I should point out I'm talking aesthetics here. I'm fine with the technology, it's the stuff you can demonstrate with nothing more than pencil and paper I'm after.

How can I get Adobe InDesign to wrap this text the way I want it to?

meikel — Wed, 25 Feb 2004 02:35:55 -0800

InDesign text-wrapping problem: In two column text, a rectangular object, that spans 1.5 columns sometimes results in bad text wrapping (more inside, with screenshots). Using Adobe InDesign (Version 2 and CS, Mac and Windows) I run into the following problem with text wrapping: Screenshot 1. This is obviously not the wrap I want. Even with different settings for leading (I tried in increments of 0.1mm) this won't go away. If the rectangle has a different position on the page the problem does not appear: Screenshot 2, Screenshot 3.
Is this a bug in InDesign or am I missing something here. As a workaround I made three separate textboxes that are linked, but that's no good in the long run.