One second here. I'm going to
start recording. Okay, everybody.
Well, everybody, very pleased today to have Claudia McCue on the line,
over in Atlanta, Georgia, or just outside Atlanta. Did I say your name correctly,
Claudia? Yes, you did.
I did? Yes.
Great, and here, you can see Claudia's web page and
we'll go over what Claudia does in a moment here, but the reason
we, you know, tried to skype her here, or did skype her here, is that last week
sometime, you'll see over here on our Twitter account, she had a
nice exchange, somewhere in here.
And here it is. It says "PDF2DTP from @Markzware saved my digital bacon today!
(They make such great stuff)". And really, we really like to hear that stuff, as would
any software developer,
so I thought we'd reach out to her and try to learn and understand more exactly
what happened. So, Claudia maybe you can first give us a little background about
what you do and how you earn your digital bacon, so to speak.
My digital bacon, yeah. Well, my background is
in prepress. I'm not a designer and so
I've spent the last however many years taking
files apart and fixing them, so that they would print. And, over the years,
when we were back using QuarkXPress,
you'd open up a QuarkXPress file and suddenly you would get that dreaded EOF,
End of File, and you could hear the music from Jaws and you knew your life was over.
(laughs) And then, I discovered MarkzTools and
I was a hero in the department, because, look, I can fix your
Quark file, because the people I work for were too cheap to buy software, so
I bought utilities and stuff, and took them with me when I left,
but, over the years, eventually, I just got tired
fixing, well, actually I like fixing bad files, to tell you the truth,
But I thought, well, I'll go out there and find designers and I'll train them
to build their files right, because the way I learned software was by taking
apart things that didn't work,
and so, I became a trainer about fourteen years ago. And so, now I work as a trainer
and technical writer,
and I have a book called Real World Print Production that's used as a text book
in some schools, the idea being that if I could teach them to do it right, maybe
printers wouldn't want to slap someone. Yeah, it's great. I saw here on your...
I think it was up here on your Twitter
profile, "Author of 'Real World Print Production.'"
and "Class Clown and Science Student of the Year."
Yes, odd combination, but..." And motorcyclist, so that's really
a really great, diverse life. Yes.
And how did you start
in the graphics industry? (laughs) Well, it's a funny story.
I was a chemistry major. Oh.
And took printmaking, but I was artistic,
I just thought it was impractical, and took a printmaking class. And my printmaking
teacher in college said, gee, why aren't you doing this, instead of Science. And
I realize, in retrospect, that I insulted him when I said, well, I don't think it's a
practical way to make a living.
And he and his wife were going off to Europe
to find themselves, and to India to find themselves.
And I tried out for her job at the folding carton plant. I thought I'll do this for a
while, yeah, get a little money, finish my degree. And then I spent, we won't talk
about how many, years
in printing, because I fell in love with printing. I like printing.
It was the combination of precision
and art together, so. Right.
So, how do we exactly...
Well, first of all, just for people who don't know, Markzware's PDF2DTP is a
PDF to InDesign conversion filter and it will
basically, with a click or two, convert your PDF files into InDesign.
It doesn't really matter where the PDF comes from.
And what was happening in your case, exactly?
This was a rework of an old,
old file that a client had done, and there was one page with this
big chart on it and
it was not part of the file, but they wanted to incorporate it.
So, I said, "Okay, send me the
InDesign file." And they couldn't find it, but they could find a PDF.
And it was a rather complex table.
And I thought, Well I could send it over, but I'm so far behind now,
and then it hit me. I thought well I could take it into Acrobat and
wait a minute! I've got the Markzware plugin. I'm an idiot.
This is what happens when you don't sleep enough.
And I thought, well, I'll see how well it does because I've used it before on fairly simple
things and it does a fabulous job.
I thought, well, if it can get me any part of this, it's going to save me
some complete re-creation of it and
it was almost perfect. I very nearly wept with joy, frankly. (laughs)
Wow! Great, great to hear. Yeah, it's a good... It...
you guys make fabulous stuff. You always have, but it's
that "take a thorn out of somebody's paw" when they're
really in a jam. You know, it kind of wins their heart.
Yeah, thanks. Yeah, that's kind of the philosophy of the Markzware owners
Patrick and Ron, Ronald Crandall, the original developer,
who still develops to this day,
is helping people get out of jams, get out of problems, you know.
Yeah, it's a... That's got to feel good.
Yeah, it does. It feels good working for Markzware.
And they, you know, that's the philosophy they instill.
But do you have something to show us how
or what you were doing, or how it happened or where it worked out?
So, are you seeing my... are you seeing the PDF with
the chart on it? Oh, one second. I need to switch to...
You'll have to switch to GoToMeeting.
Go in, yeah. Now, we're in GoToMeeting.
We have all kind of technology going on here today.
Yeah, we have every bit of software
we own right at the moment. (laughs)
That's the goal. Yeah.
Okay, there we go. I see a Schedule of Events and I guess that's your
PDF, right? Right? So, it has this ghosted picture behind it
and this big table that I did not have to retype.
So, once I had my moment of lucidity,
then I thought I'll replicate by going into InDesign and
show you just how how painless this is.
See? Every software I own.
So, it's just PDF2DTP and then Convert PDF.
And then I cleaned up...
I cleaned up my desktop for you. (laughs)
It's good we had this meeting.
It is. Oh, it's all still there. It's just in a folder. And look at that!
The image and everything. And I thought, well, I'm probably going to lose the image,
but there's this, you can see what it does is it actually pulls out the image
and makes a TIFF,
which I just find astounding,
but the only thing I had to change was
it lost the black background here, so I just had to come
up here and change my fill to black. Oh, sure, so when we're doing show and tell,
(laughs) It's not going to work.
Here we go. It just took it a minute to catch up.
Right. It's Friday. It is Friday.
For me, it doesn't matter. It all runs together. And then, the other little thing
I had to fix,
I had to go over here into Effects and
back off on the opacity of the fill.
And I think part of what's happening is that, because we have
every bit of software we own going, it's kind of slowing things down.
Right. Wow.
Come one. I didn't have to type it over and, look, and it's the table.
Yeah.
I inherited another file, a totally different subject, but
inherited a file from someone this week that had a table in it.
I thought she had made a single text frame for
every single cell and then drawn lines in.
Oh, no. Yeah. I just say, well,
I live in the South, where we say, "Bless your little heart", when we mean
"Are you insane?" Well, you know.
But that was it, I mean, this looks too easy.
You kind of don't get the emotional impact that it was for me, like uh oh.
Well, yeah, you understand the complexity, like you said, of creating these tables
and to redo them is a timely process.
And, mind you, Ron Crandall also had to work many extra hours
to get these tables to work and they don't always come over perfectly.
You'll have to do some touching up. But still...
It's an amazing job, you know.
It is fantastic. Wow, wonderful! Well...
If I ever meet him, I'll hug him. (laughs) He'll appreciate that.
Well, he'll see the video. He'll get a virtual hug.
Okay.
So, yeah, we really appreciate you sharing
this. Maybe you can give us your own,
you know, closing here on, yeah, what, anything you're... any,
yeah, upcoming trainings, or anything you're working on, or where can people get more
information about you.
Well, I've just recorded two titles for Lynda.com
and one is well, I think we're not supposed to tell, I mean, it's not top secret stuff, but
all the stuff I do is print related and they're fabulous to work with,
to work for. And then I finished the third edition of
Real World Print Production,
and I guess that's going to go to press here shortly.
So, hopefully, that will be well received.
I'm all about trying to make the world safe for print, and I've got to say
you guys have really helped me do it. Great. Thank you and, you know,
thanks to people like you in taking the time to show this is how we all can
succeed and become better at what we do. So,
I really appreciate your time and I'm sure the...
Oh, my pleasure. YouTube viewers will, as well.
Well, thanks for having me. Thank you very much.
Thanks for making good stuff. Oh, you're welcome.
Thank you for your time, Claudia.
Well, that was fantastic that Claudia took the time to talk with us there.
A very interesting person to talk with. Look, I think her license plate says InDesign.
Well, that's... that's pretty serious, but I noticed something else here on Twitter,
which is interesting.
Someone asked in reply to "PDF2DTP saved my digital bacon".
Mr. Ulrich in Germany asked,
Is it "Better than recosoft?"
That's somewhat of a competitor, that also does PDF
to InDesign, and they said...
Claudia said, "I actually do like PDF2DTP better than the Recosoft solution."
So, thank you. Very, very nice to hear.
Now, Recosoft, they come more from the office side. They make a lot
of office conversion stuff and,
of course, we at Markzware come from the desktop publishing side, so,
you know, that's kind of, in our eyes, obvious, but in any event, good to hear it from
from a real life professional. And, once again, Claudia,
thank you very much for taking the time. Claudiamccue.com
is her webpage. I put a link down in the description, as well.
If you need more information on Markzware's
PDF2DTP, cruise on over to markzware.com . Under Products, you'll see
PDF2DTP. On this page, you'll get all the information you'll need to
understand more about PDF2DTP. It's real simple to use, as you saw
Claudia demonstrate in a real-life situation.
Some touching up may be required, but it's mostly minimal and you saw how
amazing the conversion is,
even with tables!
Here's another sample conversion.
Look at that!. Wish you a fantastic day. David Dilling for now,
signing off.