Archive for August, 2010

Getting a local version of Cufon running on a Mac

Posted by admin in Web design & development on August 3, 2010

The easiest route to web fonts, Cufon, is suffering a couple of issues at the moment – somebody may be trying to give the service a hard time with a nasty font.

If you ever have this trouble getting a local version on your MAMP server is no problem…

First you’ll need to get the open source fontforge package. If you have MacPorts installed that makes it a breeze… (installing MacPorts is also a breeze). As instructed at the fontforge site; just type this into Terminal: sudo port install fontforge. It’s not particularly quick – took  about 15 minutes – but that ain’t too bad. No.

Then go to cufon’s github repo and download the source files. Get these files into your Sites folder (e.g. to ~/Sites/cufon/)and all that’s left to do is edit ~/Sites/cufon/generate/settings.ini so that it points to the MacPorts install of font forge: fontforge=/opt/local/bin/fontforge. (If I remember rightly all MacPorts binaries go there.)

Now your local copy of Cufon should be working just go to ~/Sites/cufon/generate/convert.php and all should be hunky dory.

No Comments

How to tile a print using Adobe’s Creative Suite (CS5)

Posted by admin in Graphic arts on August 2, 2010

Do you need to print an oversized graphic document onto multiple sheets of paper (that your printer can handle) so you can then assemble/[Sello]tape/mount an accurate large format version?

This is a very simple task but strangely difficult to find an answer for. It’s not readily possible with any of the main Adobe CS5 (design premium) apps but Adobe Acrobat Pro can do it without breaking a sweat. Just print the document: if it’s too big for your printer then you’ll be able to select “Tile all Pages” in the Page Scaling pop-up menu. The options are quite limted but at least you can have crop marks and page information printed on each sheet (a definite plus).

To get decent trim/bleed settings I’d go to Illustrator and set up multiple accurately aligned artboards (multiple artboards a feature of Illustrator since CS4) and print them.

Anyway now I can get on with printing large format [proofs and "art" prints] without having to go to the next town…

No Comments