our graphics quality is excellent

Wed Dec 28 15:44:29 UTC 2011

SignWriting List
December 28, 2011

Hello Everyone, and happy holidays again -

Thank you, Stefan and Bill, for your input…

And yes, Stefan, I too have been making PDFs of the SVG Refinement Font in SignPuddle  (that Adam Frost and Steve Slevinski gave us - thank you, guys!) and you are right - it makes a gorgeous PDF. On the Mac, creating a PDF is built into the printer driver, so it is really easy to create a PDF, and I am glad you found a way to do it on Windows too...

So SVG can be opened with SVG programs, or it can be saved as a PDF file…

And Bill, regarding GhostScript - it is funny you bring that up - I remember we used GhostScript years ago, here on this List, back before SignPuddle…but I don't think it is needed in this case, since saving the SVG Refinement as a .SVG or .PDF file seems to be working for high-end graphics. There may be other solutions though, other than GhostScript, for people who are not doing book publishing -

For those who are not familiar with all this, the SVG format is vector graphics, which is good quality graphics similar to TrueType fonts - Stefan and others have developed lovely TrueType fonts for SignWriting as well, but TrueType is harder to work with on the web so installing the SVG Refinement font was our way of handling vector graphics on the web -

What are the programs that can open SVG?

1. Inkscape
2. Adobe Illustrator
3. Adobe Fireworks
4. Web Browsers

But better yet…here is a web page that explains programs that can open SVG:

http://www.fileinfo.com/extension/svg

With the proper plug-in, Adobe IN-Design, a program used for book publishing, can import .SVG, and I am guessing that is what happened with Ingvild Roald's group before - the people Ingvild worked with, requested SVG and they were possibly working with Adobe InDesign - so this is a book-publishing need...

Anyway - I love making PDFs too, of the SVG, and yes, PDF can be brought into Photoshop with no problems looking great - 

I hope you all are enjoying your holiday week -

I noticed a lot of our List members are on FaceBook. Some of the Christmas cards this year, written in SignWriting, were posted on Facebook and not on this List -

Thank you for your cards everyone!

Val ;-)

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On Dec 26, 2011, at 11:49 PM, Stefan Wöhrmann wrote:

> Well Bill,
>  
> it is not only that .. There is another problem as well ...  symbols of the right hand show up as symbols for the left hand.
>  
> Stefan
>  
> Von: SignWriting List: Read and Write Sign Languages [mailto:SW-L at LISTSERV.VALENCIACOLLEGE.EDU] Im Auftrag von Bill Reese
> Gesendet: Dienstag, 27. Dezember 2011 07:34
> An: SW-L at LISTSERV.VALENCIACOLLEGE.EDU
> Betreff: Re: AW: our graphics quality is excellent
>  
> You're right, in a way Stefan.  I didn't edit out the symbols enough to remove extra black portions.  I think those may be the white areas of symbols that get converted to black somehow.   They can be deleted easy enough in Inkscape but the person editing needs to know enough to do so. 
> 
> Apparently, the extraction of the SVG from the PDF didn't handle the white areas correctly.
> 
> Bill
> 
> 
> On 12/26/2011 6:04 PM, Stefan Wöhrmann wrote:
> Hi Bill,
>  
> I could open the attachment.
> This is so funny – well there is a dramatic change within the symbols. Obviously this method does not work. ;-(
>  
> Stefan
>  
> Von: SignWriting List: Read and Write Sign Languages [mailto:SW-L at LISTSERV.VALENCIACOLLEGE.EDU] Im Auftrag von Bill Reese
> Gesendet: Montag, 26. Dezember 2011 20:39
> An: SW-L at LISTSERV.VALENCIACOLLEGE.EDU
> Betreff: Re: our graphics quality is excellent
>  
> Although ... still can't seem to post svg in the body of an email ...
> 
> Let's see if an attachment works ...
> 
> Bill
> 
> 
> On 12/26/2011 1:32 PM, Bill Reese wrote:
> Some people don't have Photoshop so I looked for a another way to work with Stepan's PDF files.
> 
> I opened his PDF file of the column in GSview, which runs Ghostscript.  I then chose Edit->convert to vector format->magick driver.  This driver uses GraphicsMagick or ImageMagick to do conversions.  I have GraphicsMagick installed on the Windows XP system I was doing this on.   When naming the output file, I gave it an ".svg" extension, which tells the driver what format I want to convert to.  After conversion, I opened the file in Inkscape and deleted a couple of black boxes obscuring the images and also a black curve in the arrow of the the fourth sign.   Then, like Stefan, I did a little different layout, grouping into signs first, then moving the signs around.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Bill
> 
> 
> On 12/25/2011 1:01 PM, Stefan Wöhrmann wrote:
> Hi Ingvild, Valerie, Jonathan, Steve and friends, ...
>  
> First of all ...
> 
>  
> Second:
> I spent some time to understand the postings about Ingvild’s problem with the quality of the graphics for publishing.
> Finally I found a neat work around and I hope it works...
>  
> Once you have finished the graphics with  SignPuddle  Column-Maker  (SVG Refinement)  right click on the given column and look for  “Print actual frame”
> I installed a program called  PDF24  - and voila I get a perfect PDF of this column as you can see in the attached Merry Christmas file ;-)
> If you want to, you can open the PDF in Photoshop in order to continue your work. In this case a wrote the same text from left to right..
>  
> I feel so happy that this procedure is working. Wow – Adam – and Steve and Valerie your cooperation allowed us to print materials with excellent graphics quality. Congratulations!!
> I do not know yet what the publisher for literature would say – but to me it looks good.
> Hope all of you are doing fine!
> Stefan
>  
>  
>  
>  
>  
>  
>  
>  
> SignWriting List
> December 20, 2011
>  
> I am glad to know this too, Ingvild - To finally have publishers and printers stating that our graphics quality is excellent is a big step forward, because before SVG, we had bitmaps with staircased-circles, so this is great news they could use svg for publishing printed materials -
>  
> Not everyone knows how to use .svg - it is great on the web, but to use it inside book-layout-software is another story - I hope to learn how to do this myself later - 
>  
> what would really help, Steve, is to be able to print to PDF from ColumnMaker once the svg format is refreshed and ready to go - svg to pdf is needed - 
>  
> Val ;-)
>  
>  
>  
>  
>  

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