Now, I get to drive to Chicago, for Anime Central. I enjoy anime conventions, but acen has a special place in my heart – it was my first con. It’s also, so far, one of the best-run. The Artist’s Alley director is active and competent; these are both rare traits in an Artist’s Alley director. We’re looking forward to it.
On the down side, our new comic isn’t gonna be available, because I can’t make FrameMaker stop “fixing” graphics. The comic has a lot of high-contrast black and white graphics. When I do test prints, they look great. If I try to make a PDF file from the original FrameMaker document, though, they become grungy grey. As in, the bright-white backgrounds, perfect 0xffffff white, suddenly come out about 20% grey. No idea why. I think we had this problem come and go with the previous one (target down), although we finally did come up with a greyscale PDF of it which can be printed reasonably.
This seems to correlate to attempts to get the document scaled down enough to fit at least a page or two in the 36MB of printer memory available to us… But I don’t see why. Most graphics programs, if they were to scale down a white image, would come up with a smaller white image, not a grey one.
Frame is full of behaviors which probably made sense to someone, but that someone isn’t me. Say you’ve got a picture you loaded into your document. You can’t enter numeric sizes and have it preserve the aspect ratio; you have to hand-calculate the corresponding height for your width. Also, when you import a graphic, you get an “anchored frame”, which is a document object, containing the graphic, which is another object. You can’t just import the graphic as an object. Also, in my sample document, the newly imported graphic tended to show up on another page. I think this had to do with page breaks. If I could just import the image without anchoring it to the text, that’d be fine, but so far as I can tell, that can’t be done.
Nightmarish program. There’s things it does well, but frankly, I’m more productive hand-coding DocBook. In fact, I may just go ahead and do this project in DocBook when I get back from Con. Another reason to loathe Adobe, if you were running low.
Comments [archived]
From: ravenscape
Date: 2005-05-17 00:54:18 -0500
Enjoy your con! Sounds like a lot of fun!
Will you be driving to Chicago via Lake Michigan?