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It's an (almost) FREE world! - part 10 of 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

by Mike McNamee Published

Kuler

We reviewed Kuler in May 2007. Hosted (for free) by Adobe it enables the user to set up a set of swatches according to the chosen rules of colour harmony. The five swatches may then be saved as .ASE (Adobe Swatch Exchange) files for moving around within the Adobe creative Suite or sending to your friends, colleagues, workgroup, etc. We use it all the time to develop colour themes when designing the pages of Professional Imagemaker. It is a particularly enticing product for people who have to design wedding albums or wedding stationery. It is absolutely free, but you need to be connected to the web.

We use Kuler regularly at Professional Imagemaker. Here the colour scheme for the Dubai feature in the last issue is shown, being created from another designer's swatch set called 'Dubai at Night'.

www.kuler.adobe.com

UTILITIES

PDF Creator

Portable Document Files are an industry standard for exchanging files with recipients who do not have the supplier's software. For example, there is little point in our sending an InDesign file to an SWPP member who does not have Adobe InDesign, they will not be able to open the file. Even if they have InDesign, their troubles are not yet over, they also have to have all the fonts that you have used (exact copies too!) and all the linked files of any graphics. We overcome this problem by making a PDF file which can be read by anybody who has installed the free Acrobat Reader (currently version 8 from www.adobe.com). PDF files have other useful properties such as the ability to apply security so that they cannot be printed, changed or copied (or combinations thereof). Normally you need Acrobat Professional software to make PDFs (it costs hundreds of pounds). However, PDFWriter is shareware (you are invited to make a donation) from sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/. When installed, it acts like Adobe PDF Writer, which Adobe have seen fit to disable in Vista, unless you upgrade to version CS3.

Neither Adobe PDF Writer or PDFCreator are perfect and large pdf files often cause trouble - as the computer file approaches 2GB everything stops and the system crashes. However, PDFCreator is written by experts which means it is multi-threaded (it used all eight processors on our workstation) and also recovered itself after a crash (pdf builds often crash but with Adobe products you usually have to reboot the computer to get started again, a process that can go on for hours on end, particularly when Windows knows you are in a rush!)).

Once installed PDFCreator appears as a 'virtual printer' in the usual printer's dialogue pane of Windows

sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator

Skype

There are still some people around who have not heard of Skype orused it. Providing you have a Broadband connection, you can install Skype for free and then it acts like a private 'phone line' to your chosen (selected) chums only. You can communicate by typing, speech or by talking and web cam. You can also pass files across the Skype network to each other and even hold conference calls. It is a free service which enables you to talk to anybody in the world. At Professional Imagemaker, for example, we often talk to Malcolm Mathieson in Australia. You can also buy Skype phones which are free, Skype-to-Skype and, for a very small fee, phone to ordinary phones via the Skype network. The only thing that you should not do is rely on Skype for business-critical communications, it can and has failed on rare occasions. It does not have emergency capabilitiey such as 999 calls.
www.skype.com

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Contact Mike McNamee

1st Published
last update 09/12/2022 14:54:28

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