Ease your design chores: a few tips that will simplify your DTP work and save you time - desktop publishing

Home Office Computing, July, 1995 by Steve Morgenstern

WHAT WE CALL DESKTOP PUBLISHING ISN'T REALLY A single job. It's a series of individual tasks performed over and over again until everything looks and reads just right. If we shave even a few seconds off such repetitive tasks as changing type specifications, printing draft copies, and placing the insertion point at the right spot on a page, those seconds can add up to hours over the course of a complex job.

Design for Minimum Maintenance

One of the most time-consuming and nitpicky jobs in desktop publishing is checking for mishyphenations and overly letterspaced words. The major source of these bothersome problems is justifying text in nice, neat columns. By telling the computer to make everything line up flush against both the left and right margins, you invite frequent hyphenation and excessive spacing to horizontally fill out those columns (especially narrow widths).

The timesaving answer: Set your type with a ragged right edge whenever possible. Although in formal documents, usually books, this is stylistically unacceptable, for newsletters, brochures, fliers, and a host of other business materials, ragged right is not only acceptable, it's desirable. It frees you from manually correcting the inevitable type uglification brought on by justification and adds welcome white space between text columns. If you go with a ragged right margin and decide that the page is too free-form, you can give it a more disciplined, rectangular look by adding vertical hairline rules between ragged-right text columns.

Don't Print Complex Graphics in Each

Draft Printing pages with complicated graphics (illustrations with elaborate fills, for example) takes forever compared with printing an all-text page. Displaying those graphics also slows down screen redraw every time you move around the page. There are several ways to streamline the process.

First, save image placement for last, after all the text is ready. Second, if your page layout software allows it, turn off graphics printing for drafts when you don't need to see the pictures. Some programs allow you to turn the printing of individual images on and off, others give you an all-or-nothing choice, and still others won't let you suppress image printing at all. The same holds true for the option of displaying graphic images on the screen.

Finally, if you want to see scanned images while you're working, you can save time by creating a low-resolution scan to be used during the design phase, then replacing it with a high-resolution version for final printing. Either scan the original twice, or load the high-resolution scan into an image editing program and save a second copy at a lower resolution.

Use a Font Management Package A growing font collection can bog down the page layout process. Your software takes longer to load with a bloated font list, and it takes you longer to find the font you need when scanning a seemingly endless menu. To keep the number of installed fonts down while ensuring that your entire collection is readily accessible, try a font management utility.

A program such as FontMinder (Win; Ares, 800-783-2737; $49 estimated street) makes it easy to install and uninstall fonts through simple menu choices. You can even create groups of fonts appropriate for a specific project or client and make the whole batch available with a single command.

Buy a Full-Page Monitor The ability to see a full page onscreen at a workable size is a tremendous time-saver. Scrolling around to move from here to there quickly becomes second nature, but that doesn't make it efficient. With a full-page monitor, you click where you like, so you don't waste time scrolling.

Large monitors come in two varieties: tall, vertically oriented, one-page displays, and wide screens that provide a full view of two-page spreads. You can find single-page color displays in the $700 range, such as the Nokia Valuegraph 447L (Nokia, 800-296-6542; $699; see "Monitoring Business Needs," February, page 96, for a full roundup of 17-inch monitors). And if you'll settle for black and white, a single-page display can run about $300, with a two-page model going for around $700.

Contributing editor STEVE MORGENSTERN is the author of the forthcoming book, Win New Clients and Grow Your Business With Desktop Marketing (Random House), due out this summer.