Two things I looked up today

Power Tool Drag Race

  1. How to remove all hyperlinks in a Word document:
    Select all, then hit shift-command-F9 on the Mac (or shift-control-F9 on Windows).
  2. Which fonts can be safely deleted in OS X:
    Download the document “Best Practices for Managing Fonts in Mac OS X” from Extensis.com.

These are both things I’ve had to look up a dozen times before. Perhaps you have, too.

Looked anything up lately? Share!

Photo: Power Tool Drag Races by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid; some rights reserved.

Open-source bitmap-to-vector converter

Hand with a quill pen

For those of you who don’t have Illustrator CS2 (or an ancient copy of Adobe Streamline), Cathi Stevenson points out that there’s an open-source program that will convert your bitmaps to vector art: Inkscape. It’s available for Linux, Windows 2000/2003/XP, and OS X (with X11 installed—this is on the Tiger disk somewhere).

I could have used this often at my last job, where I was stuck with Illustrator CS. Instead, I either e-mailed files to my personal account so I could convert them at home (if I had time) or traced them by hand (if I didn’t).

Has anybody tried Inkscape besides Cathi? I’ve downloaded it but haven’t got X11 set up yet.

Photo: Hand with a quill pen by Barbara Smith; some rights reserved.

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The rock I've been under

view from under a rock

In case you’re wondering where in tarnation I’ve been, the answer is “chained to my desk.” Man, this whole “job” thing is really cutting into my blogging time.

For a while there, I was cranking out a shocking quantity of ads and posters and booklets and thumbnails and Quicktime clips. Now our two “festivals of ideas” are behind us, and the website redesign has finally gone live, and I’ve been settling down to trying to make reasonably attractive images for the new home page—they’re much larger than they used to be, which makes my job simultaneously easier and more difficult. (I can’t work around totally crap images as easily, but I also don’t have to crop good images in painful ways to fit a cramped horizontal slot.)

Some tools I’ve been leaning on lately:

I’m sure there are more gadgets I’ve forgotten, but these are the first that come to mind.

Also: bless ye, all Flickr users who not only offer Creative Commons licenses allowing others to share and remix, but who also tag your photos. There is some great stuff on Flickr, and my job would be absolutely impossible if it weren’t for youse guys.

Photo: Pinnacles-30 by Ken Conley; some rights reserved.

Coda

green leaves

Has anyone been playing with Panic’s Coda yet? I just downloaded it yesterday, and I like it, so far, though I’m still feeling my way around. The CSS editor, in particular, makes sense to me. The tag autocompletion has been driving me a bit crazy, but not so crazy that I’ve turned it all the way off yet.

Thoughts?

Photo: green leaves by Friedemann Wulff-Woesten; some rights reserved.

Free & Cheap File Transfer

Pack Mule

A client just asked me, so now I’m asking youse:

[We] are looking for a free way to get an ftp site so we can get some huge images sent to us over the Internet. . . . do you have any recommendations? When I do a Google search, of course many options come up, but we thought maybe you’d know of a particularly reliable or reputable service.

What I said:

I don’t know of any free FTP services, but I do use web-based file transfer sites pretty often: yousendit.com, senduit.com, dropload.com. Most of those are good for up to 1 GB for free; you can transfer bigger files for a monthly fee.

You’ve probably got some FTP space included with [your] website hosting package or e-mail account, but check the size and bandwidth limits—it may be too expensive to use for anything other than web stuff.

There’s also a service called BoxCloud that I haven’t tried; I think it’s basically peer-to-peer file sharing.

What do you recommend?

Photo: cp 2533-2, “Pack mule carrying medical and surgical chests (side view). Contributed by San Francisco Hospital Corps, 1902. Selected by Scott.” Posted by staff of the Otis Historical Archives National Museum of Health & Medicine. Some rights reserved.

Excuse me—which way is the art at?

And speaking of directing art, tell me your trade secrets!

  • Where do you go to find free or nonspendy photographs?
  • How do you get ideas for photographs to illustrate stories that are, let’s say, totally and completely nonvisual? Are there tricks you use when you’re wholly uninspired?
  • How do you find that photo that you know exists but that’s just refusing to come up, no matter what keywords you use to search for it?
  • Where do you go to find illustrators?
  • How much guidance do you give to illustrators—to what extent do you just let them do their arty thing?
  • Do you generally deal with agencies or go directly to the artists?

We’ve mostly been using Creative Commons–licensed Flickr images, Associated Press photos, Photofest, Mary Evans Picture Library (which doesn’t seem to work with Firefox on the Mac—grrr), cheap stock places like iStockPhoto, behemoths such as Corbis and Getty, and specialty archives such as USHMM. I’ve recently started trawling through the listings at PhotoServe, but I haven’t yet used anything from any of the agencies I found there. I’d also somehow never heard of the mega-agency Jupiter until last week.

We haven’t hired any illustrators yet, but we’d love to. Some illustration agencies I’ve been looking at are CIA and Riley. Also, the DrawMo! del.icio.us dump. Any advice or recommendations are welcome (the only illustrations I’ve ever commissioned in the past are maps for fantasy books; I’m not sure that’s the look we want).

Heeeeelp meeeeeee!

Integrate Firefox with your text editor

I use Firefox as my main Web browser because I am totally hooked on its extensibility. It may not be the greatest browser in the whole, entire universe straight out of the box (though it’s a damn good one), but once you’ve tricked it out with extensions and Greasemonkey scripts specific to what you use your browser for, nothing else will do. I simply can’t use Safari or Opera, no matter how many people tell me it’s faster or better integrated with other Mac applications or better at rendering certain websites, because . . . where’s the Greasemonkey? How am I going to add Convo and GMail Manager and save my browsing sessions and, and, I can’t even describe to you what modifications I’ve got on this application, because I don’t ever think about them unless I have to use someone else’s computer, and then that person’s browser—even if it’s Firefox, too, but without the exact same array of extensions and preference settings—is just broken. Continue reading “Integrate Firefox with your text editor”

Mac-based Webheads: What tools do you use?

Bridget got me rambling about Web development tools on another thread, and now I’m wondering what the kids are using to write their Web sites these days. Over there, we mentioned Nvu, Dreamweaver, GoLive, BBEdit, and TextMate.

I use BBEdit myself, but it’s kind of pricey and I’m not a big fan of the user interface (though I haven’t upgraded to the latest version, on which the interface may finally be better; I’m just sick of paying for upgrades all the time). I’d probably prefer a dedicated Web editor, but nothing that offers only WYSIWYG. (I have never met a WYSIWYG editor that generated code I would use on my dog’s site. If I had a dog.) Suggestions?

Also, for those of you who use Firefox and have tricked it out with Web development–related extensions, bookmarklets, and Greasemonkey scripts, what accoutrements are you sporting? Continue reading “Mac-based Webheads: What tools do you use?”

Thank you, Microsoft!

Now I will never have to buy any of your products again!

The latest issue of Editorium Update has arrived, and Jack Lyon reports the following:

Word 2008, for Macintosh, isn’t out yet but will be later this year:

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2007/jan07/01-09MacworldPR.mspx

Like Word 2007 for Windows, it will feature the Ribbon interface, with all of the drawbacks I discussed in the previous newsletter:

http://lists.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1720752173

But there’s one more drawback that will be utterly devastating: No more recording, programming, or even running of macros.

(hysterical emphasis mine)

No macros.

No. Macros. At all.

According to this Macworld article, you’ll be able to do macro-type-things using Applescript and Automator and whatever—I confess that I have not tried to wrap my head around that stuff at all yet; go ahead; suspend my Geek license—but if I have to write my own scripts, why the fuck would I write them to control Word? If I’m going to put that kind of effort into something, obviously it would make more sense to trick out a free word processor than a piece of overpriced bloatware from a company that has demonstrated time and time again that it doesn’t want my business.

Duh.