Good day everybody.
David Dilling from Markzware.
And today we're going to ichat in, via iSight here on the Macintosh,
one of our valued customers,
his name is Glen Saville.
We are going to find out what he does
and also, most excitingly, what he thinks about a
new product he's beta tested for Markzware
called PDF2DTP
to get PDF files right back into your native
desktop publishing environment,
inside QuarkXPress
or Adobe InDesign.
Alright, so let's
give Glenn a call here.
Hi glen!
Hi, my name's Glen Saville,
I've been a
book designer
for quite a few years
and art director at Simon and Schuster UK.
I have been in books
and self employed
for the last ten years.
I primarily work
on book covers
and I do all sorts of graphic design, basically anything that comes along.
That's my background.
So, a broad background. From art director to book designer or graphic designer.
Yes, I started out
before the computers came in,
so I've experienced it really the old-fashioned,
hard way,
sticking bits of paper onto other bits of paper.
Wow, so did a founder of Markzware, Patrick Marchese. He used to do exactly the same thing over there at
Foote Koone and Belding is where he started,
which was an advertising agency and that was a big change, computers.
It is,
I mean Macs came along and it was like some pressed a magic button and said, this is
what you have been waiting for.
I love the technology and I have always thought you're
better able to meet the demand of what your customers want
if you keep an eye
on new technology
and new tools
that can help you
do the design job.
Q2ID and ID2Q
from Markzware, for example, have always been really useful
plugins. I've used
FlightCheck as well, excellent software
which saves time.
Great!
As a self-employed
graphic designer
saving my time means that I can work on more jobs.
So if it is saving me,
I'm very interested in it!
And just another point, Glen. You mentioned FlightCheck.
Did you know that FlightCheck... Well, you probably know that
FlightCheck collects and packages InDesign and Quark files,
with all fonts, images and artwork, but it also will package Photoshop and
Adobe Illustrator
files as well,
which, you know,
now-a-days in InDesign, you have a package feature, but in Illustrator and Photoshop you don't. So, if you ever
create
complex artwork where you have fonts which you don't want to convert to outlines just yet, you can
use FlightCheck to also collect or package the
fonts
and images used. Yeah, a lot of people overlook that.
So, I thought I'd mention it. FlightCheck is a very useful tool.
Right, excellent! Cool.
It works for people who need it. I am on Adobe CS6 and
on lots of the InDesign work,
a lot of clients are still on InDesign CS4.
My main sort of love is Adobe Photoshop.
So, Photoshop CS6 is the first thing that get's launched
and then the CS version of InDesign I need to
use that particular day.
Have you tried that new Content Fill Aware feature in Adobe Photoshop CS6?
Ah, yeah, fantastic, absolutely fantastic. It is almost like there is
this little man inside Photoshop,
thinking for you. [laughing erupts] Yeah, It's amazing, the technology
and great job Adobe has done here.
I like what Adobe has done with it, and it is just so much faster.
If you compare Photoshop CS6 to CS4
the speed of it is quite astonishing.
Yeah, thanks for the background information, Glen.
How did you hear about PDF2DTP in particular? Was it an email or a...
I go to the
InDesign User Group
for London.
Unfortunately, I couldn't make the last one.
On the catch-up email they sent around the
PDF2DTP for InDesign beta link and I thought, "Oh, I better have a look at this."
And, coincidentally, the very next day,
I had email from a customer that has
two design jobs that
they ONLY have PDFs for! So, wow, this was
a wonderful opportunity to test PDF2DTP for InDesign
in real-time;
because, there is nothing like having something that you need to make a deadline on,
to actually test something and see how it works. Great!
I was very, very impressed with that first beta version of PDF2DTP for InDesign!
It gave me
the option to
create style sheets from the text that was in the PDF. It gave me the option to
export graphics
I think the thing that
most amazed me was the fact that there was a lot of placed EPS
in those PDF jobs and it
converted those to InDesign objects.
Right there I thought, "I must have this (PDF2DTP for InDesign)!"
[laughs]
As the betas improved, it got even better and better
but unfortunately the beta is closed now and I have another PDF job
I needed converted into InDesign!
I really found myself missing the plugin (PDF2DTP)
Very, very exciting! I think the thing for me was that, usually with a beta
you expect a few problems here and there, but I'm very impressed with how
stable PDF2DTP was right from the outset. There were little tiny things, like spaces in URLS,
little things that happen, and you think that it is a
nightmare. It was just so impressive, right out of the box! Saved me a lot of time.
Great, the (Markzware) engineers will love to hear that!
Like I said, you know, when I worked on this other job,
I really, really found myself missing
the plugin.
It really wasn't
much fun without PDF2DTP! Wow, yeah.
I did that new job now where all I had was the PDF, but it must have taken twice as long.
Just a general question: How many PDFs do you have
on your hard drive or your back up drives? How many PDFs do you personally
think you have?
Thousands. Absolutely thousands.
Companies archive and sometimes all they have saved is the PDF.
So this is a tool
that I am very interested in.
Quite often, you're having to re-create the job
from practically nothing, other than a preview PDF.
Having PDF2DTP InDesign you have that extra ability to meet customers demands
without it taking forever to do.
Yeah, interesting. Very interested about that.
I have worked with various different publishers (book publishing companies)
and I have seen how archives get in a mess,
and this tool (PDF2DTP)
really will be a game-changer
PDF2DTP really will be a game-changer for people who understand just what
it can do for them.
It is not just the ability
to re-create the PDF job
and re-purpose it for a re-print, for instance, for a publisher.
It is also the fact that the publisher may want to create
an audio book
and all they have is a PDF of the cover.
PDF2DTP enables publishers to get at
some of the lost source material,
so that they can re-create it.
Corruptions. You only have to leave a CD
in the sunlight for a summer
and some of those files are going to be corrupted.
Yeah, they get baked.
I just think this (PDF2DTP)
will be an indispensable tool
for anyone who is dealing
day-in-day-out
with new and old files.
I would recommend that most
make sure they have
a copy of this (PDF2DTP),
because it is something that
could get them out of a sticky
corner, very, very quickly.
Yes, we think so too, but it is great
to hear this from a real user and a real beta tester. This is exactly what we
have been thinking,
so, thank you, Glen.
Well, the thing with the beta is,
that was used on a real job. It wasn't something where I was tinkering around
with something I already had.
This was real (design) work.
So, it saved me time. Yeah.
So, yeah, when you export text from it, you... I mean, the
latest version of Adobe Acrobat is better
than previous versions.
and you can export to a Word file,
rich text format, so on and so forth,
but it's still, a mess.
You know, someone's
put something in an extra box (in Quark or InDesign) to work with a run-around
and suddenly
you get this text in
the created PDF.
Via Acrobat that exported text ends up not even on the same page
as the text where the rest of
it was on (in the layout).
whereas, at least the plugin (PDF2DTP) understood
that was on the same page.
It actually knew the page it was on.
When you export text from
Acrobat, it's not much fun.
Let's face it,
most of the jobs where someone wants something
to convert from an old PDF (to InDesign),
they're not going to want to spend a fortune.
Now, if you can save time...
You know, the payment you're going to make for it (PDF2DTP) is
definitely going to be worth the money.
Just get 1 or 2 of these PDF jobs a year and it's going to pay for itself
in the time that it'll save you, not just time
you're spending
re-doing the PDFs the long way;
it's the time your losing
on other design work.
Yeah, Glen is using
PDF2DTP for InDesign, there also is a QuarkXPress version for Quark users,
as well.
OK, let's see here, Glen, you know,
you've answered a lot of my questions. You're giving great information.
have you ever had a layout, you know,
the InDesign, or even a Quark, file go corrupt
and all you had left was a PDF file?
Yes, yes I have. I was working on a catalog and the (layout) file went corrupt
and we basically had to
re-create from the
last save.
and, you know,
it would have been nice to be able to extract some of the information
because I think it would have saved us time re-creating this.
Invariably, these things go corrupt when all the other designers have gone home.
So, back then I had to re-type all of the text
and format.
So from my point of view, this (PDF2DTP) will be an indispensable tool,
because...
a lot of the work I get
is all about opening up the files the customers give me. Just having that
extra tool
to be able to even
look at how a file works,
is just going to save me a lot of time.
I mean, my experience with the beta
convinced me straight away.
I mean, on the first run,
straight away,
I wanted to get this product!
Wow! Do you ever find PDFs on the internet or whatever it might be, where you think, "Oh, wow,
I'd like to pop that (PDF) open in InDesign." Do you see a use there for
PDF2DTP?
I can see a use for it.
Well, I think, I mean,
for somebody that is a book cover designer,
when you're designing a cover,
you're given all kinds of source material
to look at and to do things
and quite often, you may be given
a PDF to look at,
and just having that, I mean,
I did some books a few years ago
on Suduko files
and I think having PDF2DTP
would be quite handy.
As you can imagine, it's quite laborious,
I found myself almost
falling asleep working on them!
(laughs)
Whatever uses, I mean, you gave a lot of real-life scenarios here, but do you
have any other ideas or uses that you could see for PDF2DTP (PDF to InDesign or PDF to QuarkXPress) being used...?
Yeah, I have a publisher,
which is kind of small
and they haven't got a huge budget,
and they asked me to do updates on their website.
They have advanced information sheets in PDF format for their books,
and they generally send me a PDF, and it's, you know, because
it's opening the PDF, selecting the text and copying pasting it, and then
putting everything into HTML.
Being able to open that
and have it straight into InDesign
means that I can copy and paste the text much
quicker, so it just saves me time on a job
that's not earning me a great deal of money, so
I can see actually uses for this.
I think it is like most of
these plugins,
you find uses for it,
as you go along.
What I found interesting was the fact the moment I installed the beta
of PDF2DTP for InDesign,
I actually had two real jobs
and then when the beta expired
I had another two jobs. So I got to experience
the difference between using the plugin and not using the plugin.
PDF2DTP does save time, so I was very, very happy.
Great. Well, Glen, it has been a pleasure meeting you
and hearing your real-life feedback,
as a graphic designer, book cover designer,
and art director and how you can see
PDF2DTP for InDesign being extremely useful.
We really appreciate your time.
OK, thanks very much indeed.
thank you for your business.
OK, thank you very much.
Thank you Glen for taking the time to answer the questions.
Very interesting workflow.
Nice (design) work you do there and great to hear you're so excited about PDF2DTP from Markzware, in this case, for InDesign
For all of you out there who would like more information on PDF2DTP,
cruise on over to Markzware.com today and check it out for yourself.
Hopefully, by the time you're viewing this, it (PDF2DTP) will be shipping.
Thank you, David Dilling from Markzware, on behalf of Markzware and Glen, wishing you a fantastic day!