I am currently working with The Tower Magazine having just taken over their website. We have some great plans but I thought I would share with you two facilities we plan to use. The first is Yudu.com, this is an electronic publishing website which allows us to post electronic copies of the magazine on line and put a link from the website. if you go to www.sbs-tower-magazines.co.uk and click on the magazine cover you will see what I mean. All this needs is a PDF file to upload, which we get from the printer as the proof document. Yudu have a range of offerings for selling stuff as well but the basic facilities are free (with a small bit of advertising).
However..... the proof from the printer comes with all the crop and centre marks on - not quite what we want to show the readers. And this is where another brilliant product comes in A-PDF Page Crop. This super tool reads the pdf from the publisher, loads in a mask (they call it a rule) and then saves a new version with every page cropped to the mask. As a monthly task this is just so easy that I raise my hat to A-PDF. The rule that we used was created by us - having loaded the first copy we clicked on a tool to draw a crop box, easy because the printer had provided crop marks, then a tool to Apply that box to all pages then Crop and Save As... The program then asked if we wanted to save the "rule" for future use . Well -- duh -- Yes! This is all made easy by A-Pdf because the tool bar is labelled 1, 2, 3, 4. 4 easy steps to follow. Next time we open the new pdf, import the rule (that bit could be easier if it remembered previous rules) then crop and save - viola!
A-PDF Page Crop has a load of other ways to define the crop, e.g. automatically crop white space but for the magazine we were working on this was just so easy. Now while Yudu have a free service A-PDF Page Crop only has a free trial version, however the full version comes in at only US$27 - how much time do you have to save to make it worth it?
The rest of the A-PDF site is worth a walk round too, there are some real goodies there, One I like the look of is the Restrictions Remover. How often do you get forms that you can fill in but not save? The UK Government is great at doing that to us, so they make us fill the form in, print it, send it off, then ask us to change something -- on an unsaved form. Maybe no longer - I thought PDF Typewriter was good but this looks like it will tick a few boxes really well.
Happy publishing and remember that if you want an affordable website call in at www.SME-Web.net
Best Wishes
Adrian
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