# Features

Subtitle:
Digital Technology Reveals and Preserves the Human Record

Introduction:
Like any other extensive project in its early stages, digital preservation still has a lot of problems to solve.

Story:
The world's recorded knowledge is diminishing. Centuries old scientific texts, first editions of important literary works, government records, personal letters, Civil War muster rolls, glass-plate negatives from the early days of photography--millions of historical documents are succumbing to mildew, insects, human handling, the elements, and acidic paper. Some books are in advanced states of decay, too brittle to be handled at all. Others in better condition--particularly the rare volumes--lie in the darkness of library vaults, seen only by serious scholars and forgotten by everyone else. Even when libraries do present such works to the public, the books typically sit under glass, with just two pages showing. In either case, from deterioration or protection, knowledge remains unavailable.

But a burgeoning worldwide effort by libraries, institutions, and commercial enterprises is attempting to solve the problem by copying selected documents in digital form, such as tiff images and pdf (portable document format) files. Though not intended as replacements for the originals, the digital versions--created with scanners or digital cameras1--serve three important purposes: they capture the original documents at a given moment in time; they help conserve the originals by giving scholars alternative (and often fully adequate) versions for study; and they can provide worldwide access on the Web or on cd-rom to works that would not otherwise be seen.

Like any other extensive project in its early stages, digital preservation still has a lot of problems to solve. Numerous panels, forums, and conferences have not yet established any standards for resolution, file format, scanning hardware, or display. Commercial firms, trying to prove they can turn a profit in the archive business, don’t want to divulge proprietary techniques. But perhaps the biggest concern is the inevitable push of technology: today's most popular hardware, medium, or file format might become obsolete in another few years. (Who can extract data from reel-to-reel magnetic tapes anymore?) Ensuring the migration of digital books to the latest format will require vast amounts of disk space to store uncompressed files or multiple formats, not to mention the constant vigilance of archivists. Then there's the matter of what to preserve. With so many historic books, manuscripts, and photographs around the world, how do you choose what to copy? Today, individual preferences and "demonstration projects" (typically government funded efforts to test certain methods) account for most digital preservation, though more wide-ranging programs are starting to appear, such as the American Memory project at the Library of Congress (lcweb2.loc.gov/amhome.html), a collection of Americana; and the Valley of the Shadow, a comparison of two communities during the Civil War, as depicted through various documents (jefferson.village.virginia.edu/vshadow2).


Subtitle:
Your favorite layout tool's secret life as an office worker

Introduction:
It's 6:30 p.m. at a small office, and the staff has already shut down the computers and gone home for the night.

Story:
It's 6:30 p.m. at a small office, and the staff has already shut down the computers and gone home for the night. The sun's dying rays stagger wearily down the hall like an exhausted art director who's just survived a major deadline, and the lonely cry of a phone left ringing, unanswered, echoes in the distance.

But wait-there's another sound. It's the cheerful hum of a printer. Someone is still working away in a cubicle, oblivious to the flickering fluorescent light and the coffee cooling at the edge of the desk. After a long day of professional design work, this employee is putting in some extra hours to get an important mailing ready by morning. The worker is PageMaker, and it's cranking out a few hundred form letters, each with a different address and addressee, that it generated automatically with a clever "mail merge" trick.

Mail merge?  In PageMaker?

That's right. PageMaker may not be able to balance your books or prepare your tax return, but it's a versatile office worker nonetheless. In the following pages, we’ll show you some of its business talents and throw in a few industrial strength tips, too. We hope that professional designers will find this information handy (after all, everyone needs to create form letters and labels from time to time), but you definitely don't need to be a design pro to use these techniques. You should, however, have more than a passing acquaintance with PageMaker (for example, you'll need to know what a paragraph style is).


Subtitle:
Break Out of the Cell. Using tables to
format text and graphics in FrameMaker

Introduction:
The grid of a table can feel like a prison sometimes--too confining, dreary, and dull.

Story:
The grid of a table can feel like a prison sometimes--too confining, dreary, and dull. Important information often just mopes inside the cells, with no hope of parole. But with a little guidance and a few tricks, you can quickly rehabilitate your text and graphics. In fact, not only can you create better-looking tables, you can also use their properties to format your pages in ways that you might have thought were far too cumbersome, or even impossible, in Adobe FrameMaker. So here are a few surefire ways to give your characters a chance at a new life.

A gap in the wall

Table titles are often overlooked as formatting devices.  We’ve all been conditioned by too many dense textbooks into assuming that table titles must be boring and unattractive.  But a little experimenting can achieve something fancier.

Have you ever wanted to place text right at the top of a table?  You can’t do this with body text, but you can with a table title—by specifying a negative gap for the title position.  In fact, if you use a single-cell table, the formatting doesn’t have to look like a table at all.

The invisible borders

An easy way to align graphics or small amounts of text in different spots on your page is to place them in a table and then turn off borders so that the table becomes invisible.  For example, you can use a borderless table to switch to a multicolumn layout in the middle of a single column.  The steps are simple.


Insert a table, placing graphics or text in the appropriate cells.
In the Ruling section of the Table Designer, specify None for all ruling styles.
Adjust cell indents and margins to modify the positions of your elements on the page.


Introduction:
It's a colorful, wired world.  Adobe PostScript 3 offers better, faster, Web-savvy printing.

Story:
Quick.  When you think of the word printer, what other terms pop into your head?  Color, paper, and similar words probably top your list.  Internet and Web probably don’t.  But in the months to come, as various Adobe PostScript 3 printing systems come to market, that’s likely to change.

Adobe PostScript 3 is the latest version of the printing system that helped give birth to desktop publishing and is the industry standard for high-quality, reliable printing.  Perhaps its most intriguing new set of features has to do with its ability to take advantage of the World Wide Web’s capabilities.  But it also offers a variety of other features, including more sophisticated, high-quality handling of color and graphics; faster printing; and greater ease of use and maintenance.

In our last issue, we gave you a brief overview of what Adobe PostScript 3 is all about (see “Adobe PostScript 3 Printing Systems Debut” in our Summer 1997 issue).  But in this column, we’ll explain in greater detail some of PostScript 3’s new features and how this technology is likely to affect you, especially if you work with high-end graphics applications such as Photoshop, PageMaker, Illustrator, Acrobat, and GoLive.


