Interesting OpenType statistics

Ran across this chart today on FontShop's 20 year anniversary page:

I found it interesting that it wasn't until recently that OpenType font sales surpassed the sales of PostScript fonts. The OpenType format was announced in 1996 and major applications and operating systems have supported it for a number of years now. Makes me wonder who is still buying PostScript (or TrueType) fonts and why?

OpenType fonts have several big advantages over PostScript or TrueType fonts, including:

• A single file per font: makes distribution and installation easier more trouble-free
• Cross platform: the same font file works on Macintosh or Windows
• Support for large character sets: wonderful for multilingual projects
• Special extended features in some fonts and applications: support for alternate characters, fractions, oldstyle numerals and more

There's no reason that I can think of for most designers to be purchasing PostScript or TrueType versions of fonts any longer. So the next time you buy a font, think OpenType!

Also of interest: A pie chart on FontShop's 20 year anniversary page claims that 25% of the Fontshop.com support requests are about fonts on the Macintosh platform, and 75% are about the Windows platform. No surprise there!

Workspaces added to Acrobat.com

Acrobat.com is Adobe's solution for "cloud-based" file sharing and collaboration. Today Adobe added the ability to create online "workspaces" where you can share files with designated groups of people. Specifically, the free version of Acrobat.com gives you the following capabilities:

• Create and maintain one workspace at a time, and share that workspace with as many people as you like
  
  
• Store up to 2 gigabytes of files, and keep them private, or share individual files with a workspace, with individuals or the general public. A single file can't exceed 100 megabytes.
  
  
• Convert up to 5 files to PDF format
  
  
• Host online meetings and screen-share with up to 2 other participants besides yourself
  
  
• Use the online applications Buzzword (word processing), Presentations, and Tables (spreadsheet)

A monthly fee based "Basic" or "Plus" subscription increases these limits.

I frequently use Acrobat.com for file sharing. The Acrobat.com AIR application makes it easy to drag and drop files from your computer to Acrobat.com.

Adobe CS5 tease

Adobe has "announced" that Creative Suite 5 will be announced on April 12, 2010. You can sign up for the on-line launch event here.

See also the Adobe Creative Suite Buzz Hub.

19 days, hour, 5 minutes and 29 seconds until launch as I write this. I can't wait!

InDesign's Edit Original command

Did you know that you can quickly edit placed artwork and images in Photoshop, Illustrator and other programs from within InDesign? Here's how:

Select a placed bitmap image (something you can edit in Photoshop) or placed vector artwork (something you can edit in Illustrator). Right click or ctrl-click on the image, and choose Edit Original from the context menu. If everything is configured properly on your computer, the program that created the image or artwork should launch, and the image will open. From there, you can edit the image to your heart's content. When you're finished, close the image, save your changes, and click back on your InDesign page. Your changes will be immediately visible on the InDesign page.

But what if this doesn't work? A common Macintosh problem is that you might choose the Edit Original command with an EPS file selected, and Preview will launch instead of Illustrator. Or you might have a JPEG selected and Edit Original will launch your Web Browser instead of Photoshop. If this happens, it's because InDesign defers to the operating system for the mapping between the file type (JPEG, PSD, TIF, EPS, etc.) and what program should be used to open that file type. This mapping can get messed up for any number of reasons. If so, it will be messed up in InDesign also.

Fixing this on the operating system level is a topic for another post. But InDesign CS4 offers an easy workaround. Instead of choosing Edit Original, choose Edit With, and choose the application you want to use to edit the file.

There are three alternatives to choosingEdit Original in the context menu:

1. You can option double-click (Mac) or alt double-click (Windows) on the image

2. You can click on the pencil icon at the bottom of the Links panel

3. You can choose Edit Original from the Links panel menu.

Free t-shirt mockups

So you've designed the next killer t-shirt design (like the one below!), but you want to preview what it will look like on an actual shirt? A new web site lets you do this in a couple of clicks...free!

ShirtMockup.com lets you choose from a variety of t-shirt styles, upload your artwork, position it on the shirt, change the shirt color, and download a jpeg of the results.

Other options for mocking up t-shirts include Photoshop templates from Arsenal, or some of these free resources at SpoonGraphics.