Maintaining this blog is a little more time consuming than I had first thought. While the inspiration to write the articles never runs out, many of the articles may only appeal to a few readers.

Recently, my work has had an influx of artwork with Metallic Inks, and while there is already a post dedicated to it, the post needs to be expanded much further and feature examples and illustrations of the issues involved. Ideally I’d like to use real-world examples but I must respect the privacy of my employer’s customers and not post their artwork as samples for the purposes of the Metallic Inks post.

Another post that I am working on in the background is getting the most out of InDesign’s built-in Data Merge feature. This is given that many basic questions on the Adobe Forums and Indesignsecrets.com websites concerning Data Merge have been asked and answered many times and rather than put the onus on the poster to perform a search of the forums first, I thought i’d create a post about getting the basiscs of Data Merge and move onto the more complicated stuff.

Similarly, I’ve seen many posts on the abovementioned forums on printing as readers spreads or preparing spreads or impositions using only InDesign. Because my work uses dedicated imposition software, receiving pre-imposed files is actually more of a headache than a favour, and i can’t help but think that many other prepress people must feel the same way that I do. Again, this post is being worked on in the interim.

Admittedly, most of the articles I wanted to populate this site with came from a list of common mistakes which i’d seen in my years of work in PrePress, but now that I have revisited the list, many of the issues in the articles have actually been solved by the Adobe Creative Suite and no longer need to be posted. For example, the problem of emboldening which was a common problem in other applications is not a problem in the Creative Suite given that it is simply not possible. The introduction of the preflight profile has the potential to eliminate many other issues which will arise… provided that it is turned on and a decent profile is actually used!

The best inspiration I actually have to write the articles is after speaking to customers and then finding out that something that I would consider as routine is something completely unknown to customers… such as the separations preview or remove unused colors function.

Sometimes, I am simply beaten to the punch by fellow bloggers and posters. An ongoing debate about converting type to outlines has definitively been answered by an Adobe employee Dov Isaacs with the resounding answer: Don’t Do It!!! The full post is available here.