I was in London for a week and decided to take the opportunity to do a very unscientific study into the value of a newspaper.

London is the perfect setting for this because there are so many papers to choose from including tabloids, broadsheets, conservative, splashy, free and paid.

So the goal of the study was simple: is a newspaper that costs 50p: A) better than a free paper and B) better enough to be worth 50p.

My study did not take into account fluctuation in currency exchange, but keep in mind that not long ago that 50p was worth $1USD. As I type this it’s worth 70.2¢ USD. So I’m sure statisticians would add a curve or something important onto the results…I didn’t.

So my study began on The Tube (Underground) by picking up the free papers and reading them along my way. The two free papers in the study were The Metro, where you pick them up off a stand, and thelondonpaper, which is handed to you by people wearing purple hats as you pass on the street.

While riding along the rails, I was able to consume both papers in entirety (two different times, one paper each). They are both full of fluff that may mildly amuse and interest. Now I’m not a news snob. I personally don’t like reading politics, economics, etc., but living in such times, I think it’s important to have at least a conversational knowledge of both. Instead, from both papers I found out how the credit crunch is making us fatter, Ray Parker, Jr. is afraid of the dark and Britney Spears did something stupid…again.

Of the two, I’ll give The Metro credit for have much more content and trying harder to be more than Entertainment Tonight in print. The issues I picked up had a wide range of stories, although not in-depth, and gave a lot of information in a tight package.

Now to part two of the study, paying for a paper.

Keep in mind I’m really too lazy to be much of a scientist, so my study only went as far as what was convenient for me. Therefore, I only studied papers I could pick up in the course of my normal walk…on the street.

The two paid papers in the study were The Evening Standard and The Independent. Both are tabloid sized, just like the free papers reviewed, but obviously a little more traditional in design and content.

As I read The Evening Standard, it really struck me how much better the writing was. Not just in style, but also depth. I also found the editorials to be very balanced, informed and enjoyable to read. In the end, when I turned over the last page, I found it to be a good read and well worth my money, whether $1 or 70.2¢.

I grabbed The Independent on my last afternoon in London. I have to admit that the only reason I picked it up over a different title is that I was on Whitechapel Street trying to see where Jack the Ripper did his dirty deeds and I figured the guy selling the newspaper on the corner would know. As I wandered over to his stand, I fumbled about for my 50p, handed it over and asked “which way to find the area of the Whitechapel Murders.”

He handed me the paper and pointed across the corner, explaining that most of the murders were over there, but one was back the other way. “Head that way and turn left….”

With The Independent under my arm, my first priority was wandering around until I could say, for sure, I had been where Saucy Jack had been. After a couple of hours of aimless meandering, I headed back to Liverpool St. Station to catch the train to the airport. It was only then that I sat down at a Costa Coffee and opened the paper.

What a great read…really. There were so many stories that interested me that I actually brought the paper home. Now you may think this is a triviality…it’s not. I was flying Ryanair home, and if you know anything about this airline, you’ll know they are considering charging a Pound to use the onboard bathrooms. Really. These are the people that charge you 1€ for the ticket, then make it up on luggage and overweight carry-ons. I knew I was at risk of paying a lot more than 50p for this paper when all was said and done.

Luckily, no extra charges were incurred, I successfully brought the paper home and finished reading it this morning. There were a few well-written stories about Police Constable Stephen Carroll who was murdered in Ireland by IRA wannabes. There were stories about hard topics as well as human-interest stories like the computer software company that has released software that allows you to recreate the exact sound of The Beatles while recording at Abbey Road Studios. As the story goes, this company painstakingly recorded the exact instruments they used, and recreated the technology of the day so you can create music the same way the Fab Four did. Cool.

I enjoyed it so much that if I lived in London, this would have to be a regular pick-up for me…The Independent every day.

In the end, I don’t think my study has enough heft to be a published work…merely a short blog article. But the results are clear:

A) The papers that charged were better papers, in content, quality of writing, originality and design than the free ones.

B) The papers that charged were well worth the 50p paid and I would do it again.

So as you seek out news in your community, remember that quality journalism comes with a price tag. It costs money to have investigative reporters uncovering Watergate and finding Chandra Levy’s killer. It costs money for good writing and good photographs.

In conclusion I ask a question of all publishers who might read this article: Is every issue of your newspaper worth 50p (or your local equivelant)?

I was in Nizhny Novgorod awhile back speaking at an event for Adobe and I was joking with my good buddy Roman Menyakin about the instructions in the elevator and how they just didn’t translate as I’m sure they had intended.

We exchange a few stories of things we had seen and heard over the years, like the Russian friend of his who would say “this is sh** of bull” all the time.

Anyway, a week or so later we were in Kiev together and he was in a restaurant with a great sign that, again, was poorly translated. He shot a picture of it with his cell phone and emailed it to me. It read “For the things left without a supervision, administration of responsibility does not carry.” I took the liberty of adding the comma and correctly spelling one for the words to make it more clear.

So as I travel, I like to read the way things are translated and, sometimes, I get a nice little chuckle out of it.

Once in Peru I was eating at a restaurant that offered “Pig Sandwich” on the menu and in Switzerland an inn offered “Plate of Dry Meat.”

My wife’s good friend from Peru tells the embarrassing story of how, when she was VERY pregnant, she traveled to the US on business. She was lost in the airport and needed help so she approached the most official looking man she could and, in her best English said, she was “looking for an intercourse.” Confused, the man corrected her saying that’s probably not what she meant to say and she demanded “Yes, I need an intercourse RIGHT NOW!” The nice man figured out what she REALLY needed was the concourse.

While in Nice, France with another friend of mine the conversation turned to these bad translations. He told me he “collects” them and has an entire list of them that he has seen with his own eyes over the years.

So I share them with you now, with a thanks to Jim Petrucci.

In a Bucharest hotel lobby: The lift is being fixed for the next day.  During that time we regret that you will be unbearable.

In a Leipzig elevator: Do not enter the lift backwards and only when lit up.

In a Belgrade hotel elevator: to move the cabin, push button for wishing floor.  If the cabin should enter more persons, each one should press a number for wishing floor.  Driving is then going alphabetically by national order.

In a Paris hotel elevator: please leave your values at the front desk.

In a hotel in Athens: visitors are expected to complain at the office between the hours of 9 and 11 daily.

On the menu of a Swiss restaurant: our wines leave you nothing to hope for.

In a Hong Kong supermarket: for your convenience we recommend corteous, efficient self service.

Detour sign in Kyushi, Japan: stop:  drive sideways

In a Swiss mountain inn: special today no ice cream.

In a Copenhagen airline ticket office: we take your bags and send them in all directions.

At a Budapest zoo: please do not feed the animals.  If you have any suitable food, give it to the guard on duty.

Two signs in a Majorcan shop entrance: (1) English well talking. (2) Here speeching American.

In a Bangkok dry cleaner’s: drop your trousers here for best results.

Outside a Paris dress shop: Dresses for street walking

Outside a Hong Kong dress shop: ladies have fits upstairs.

In a Rome laundry: ladies, leave your clothes here and spend the afternoon having a good time.

In a Tokyo bar: special cocktail for the ladies with nuts.

In a Norwegian cocktail lounge: Ladies are requested not to have children in the bar.

In the office of a roman doctor: specialist in women and other diseases.

Extracts from translations into English found in European travel brochures

the bus to the hotel runs along the lake shore; soon you will feel the pleasure in passing water.

You will know you are getting near the hotel, because you will go around the bend.

The manager will await you in the entrance hall.  He always tries to have intercourse with all new guests.

This is a family hotel, so children are very welcome.  Of course we are always pleased to accept adultery.

Highly skilled nurses are available in the evening to put down your children.

Guests are invited to conjugate in the bar and expose themselves to others.

But please note that ladies are not allowed to have babies in the bar.

We organize social games, so no guest is left alone to play with himself.

At dinner our quartet will circulate from table to table and fiddle with you.

Every room has excellent facilities for your private parts.

In winter every room is in heat.

Each room has a balcony offering views of outstanding obscenity.

You will not be disturbed by traffic noise, since the road between the hotel and the lake is used only by pederasts.

Your bed has been made in accordance with local tradition.  If you have any other ideas please ring for the chambermaid.  Please take advantage of her; she will be very pleased to squash your shirts, blouses and underwear.  If asked, she will also squeeze your trousers.

When you leave us at the end of your holiday, you will have no hope.  You will struggle to forget it.

As I look out the window of my hotel here in St. Petersburg, Russia, I see kids playing, trying to make snowballs out of the one centimeter deep powder that has fallen this morning. This could be anywhere, were it not for the clearly Russian letters on the signs.
Sometimes as I travel I marvel at how alike humans so often are, as if our behavior is because we are the same species, not because of race, country or creed. Take graffiti, for example…looks the same wherever I go.
But…
I share with you now a couple of things one should keep in mind when traveling to Eastern Europe, as I have recently learned.

Don’t assume the Russian babushka will be as excited about you taking photos of her building as you are.

I discovered this helpful tip this morning as I wandered the neighborhood around my hotel taking photos. As I neared her building, she began yelling at me in Russian, or so I would assume, and wanted me to get the hell away from her building with my camera.
Since I don’t speak Russian, there wasn’t a lot I could say to her to smooth the situation over, except “nyet problem.”
To which she replied, very sternly “nyet problem DA!!”

Just to show I wasn’t about to be pushed around, I snapped this photo defiantly, then went on my way.

While in Ukraine, don’t stick your arm between closing elevator doors just because you want to help the guy running to catch it.

As an American I have this inherent faith in elevators, airplanes and amusement park rides…it’s just part of our social make-up.

Yesterday, while entering an elevator in Kiev, I saw a guy running towards me carrying his briefcase, obviously anxious to catch it, knowing that if he missed it he could possibly wait a bit before the next opportunity. Because of my natural reflex, I stuck my arm between the doors just before they closed.

I could feel them slam against my wrist, deciding whether to take my arm up the the ninth floor, or not. There was enough pressure on my arm that I must admit, I was a bit worried…and relieved when I heard the clang of the doors changing motion and open, leaving me with the ability to type this article with both hands.

The man thanked me for risking my limb for him and then told me how lucky I was. I explained that it’s just habit for me at which point he gave me some very good advice: “Always remember where you are.”

While demonstrating software to a group of women in England, don’t assume their meaning of “period” is the same as yours.

While presenting in Winchester, showing how to use InDesign, I was explaining how to use a nifty little shortcut to enlarge text while holding down the shift key and “your period.”

There was a look of confusion all around. They call the period a “full stop”, I was told and quickly informed that “the only period in England is what a women gets once a month.”

I stand corrected…end of story…full stop.

I was showing the publishing power of InDesign at a newspaper in Warsaw a couple of weeks ago and I starting showing one of my favorites: how to build pages faster by adding cutlines to the description field of a photo’s metadata in Bridge then pulling it out in InDesign and pasting it under the photo. All of a sudden it didn’t work. I wasn’t sure if it was a bug or I was having a small stroke right there in front of everyone.

All was going as planned. I clicked on a photo in Bridge and selected the Metadata pane to enter information into the Description field. I typed like the wind and everything was going fine. I placed the photo in InDesign CS4 and was telling the audience how you can access this information from the Info Panel Menu and proceeded to demonstrate.

There it was, right in front of everyone as I had promised…the Description field with the cutline I had just typed moments before. This is where things starting falling apart. I told them you can select the contents and copy it, then paste it onto the…uh…you can select the…uh…hmmmmm.

Well I didn’t really feel like trouble-shooting the problem in front of everyone so I told them there was also a script that would automatically pull that info out and place it under the photo.

Back in my hotel, I started trying to figure out what I had done wrong. Keep in mind I’ve done this literally a thousand times since Adobe added the Info Panel back in version, like, version CS1 or something. But on this day I had a small malfunction.

As I was banging away on it, I realized it wasn’t me or my computer…InDesign CS4 just wouldn’t allow you to have access to the fields anymore. You can see them…you can read them…but you can’t select and copy them.

So I emailed my good buddy Michael Ninnes who is in the know on these things, since he is the product manager. I just wanted me see if there was something I was missing…a preference or a shortcut key or something. He informed me that, in fact, during the re-architecture of that part of InDesign it was inadvertently changed (broken).

He has also assured me this has already been fixed for any future releases, say, if there’s a CS5, for example.

That’s good to know, but what about today?

In CS4 Adobe gave us some scripts in the Scripts Panel that are pretty handy. One of them addresses this very problem and is actually better workflow than the copy/paste thing we’ve done, so ultimately, this is not going to be a problem.

Go to File> Automation> Scripts and you’ll see two folders listed there, Application and User. Expand Application and you’ll see Samples…expand that and then expand the JavaScript folder (I’m worn out).

Toward the bottom is two scripts we can use: LabelGraphicMenu.jsx and LabelGraphics.jsx.

If you select a photo or photos on your InDesign page then double-click on LabelGraphics.jsx, you will get a menu that gives you the choice of a few of the XMP metadata fields to choose (I recommend just sticking with the description field) and you can apply a Paragraph Style to it and InDesign will automatically stick it, formatted, under your photo for you.

You can even have it put the text on a specific layer if you build your document with graphics on one layer and text on another.

Cool.

The LabelGraphicMenu.jsx ultimately does the same thing as the LabelGraphics.jsx except it puts a menu item at the bottom of your contextual menu in InDesign so you can right-click on a graphic and select this option instead of going to the Scripts Panel each time. Keep in mind that this menu item will only be available until the next time you restart InDesign and then you’ll have to use the script again to reapply this functionality.

So in the end, our workflow is unchanged: Photographers take photos, download photos, add cutline (caption) information into the description field of the Metadata in Bridge, Paginator places photo, Paginator uses script to add captions automatically under all the photos on a page at one time.

Simple.

Well I give Quark credit for finally admitting the software they’ve been peddling for the past decade was garbage. They may not have used those words, but the new behavior of Quark, which is more like InDesign now, says it all.

As a Quark survivor, in full remission, I can tell you that my first launch of Quark 8 raised the question: “Will I be sucked back into this dark world in which I used to live to create my documents.” Well the answer is “no” but I can say that as an InDesign user, it’s easier to use Quark now than ever before.

From the beginning, on of my favorite things about InDesign was the liberation from Quark’s text box/picture box structure. As a user, I was forced to create a box before I could put anything on a page. And worse, I had to decide in advance whether it was going to be a Text Box or Picture Box.

No more. Now you can place text or pictures directly on the page and Quark creates the box for you. Just go to File> Import and choose what goes on the page. Better.

Notice I didn’t say “Just like InDesign does….”

Nope, it’s a ways away from being like InDesign. First off, you’ll notice Quark doesn’t offer the loaded cursor, which means that when you import text into XPress it just fits the page or column pargin…boom. Now I have to resize it. If I import a photo, it fits the page width. Yep…and I have to resize it, too. I much prefer InDesign’s approach which give me the loaded cursor and I have the option to click on a page, click over a frame or drag a frame the size I want my soon-to-be-placed photo.

And another thing Quark trails InDesign on is the multi-place functionality. Yep, being able to select multiple items, even mixed format like a couple of text files, a few jpegs and a psd, allows me to build an entire page very quickly.

Nope…Quark doesn’t have it.

Another improvement in QX8 is that you don’t have to have your cursor in the text box to place text. That ALWAYS annoyed me. I’ve got a text box selected with my item tool, hit Cmmd. + E to Get Text and it barks at me. “C’mon” I used to scream at my screen. “Put the text in the box, already!”

Now in the Ocho, you can select a text frame with the item tool, select File> Import (or your favorite shortcut) and boom…you can place your text in there.

So even though XPress 8 has a long way to go to catch up with InDesign, I’ll accept Quark’s apology and be glad they are making strides to fix the product…although not enough for me to go back.

Okay, here I am loading yet another version of Quark XPress I may never use except for testing and evaluation. But I’m keeping an open mind.
Here’s my plan: If Quark is saying this is new and exciting and the best software they’ve ever released, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. I’ll install it and give it a fair shot.
My main objective here, of course, is to compare it’s functionality to that of InDesign and Creative Suite.
Like so many users, I bailed from Quark a long time ago. I think I did it earlier than most — I converted the day InDesign was released in 1999.
The question isn’t just “is this good software” when evaluating Quark…the question has to be “is this software good enough for me to switch back to Quark?”
If you have yet to convert to InDesign and Creative Suite, maybe you have to ask yourself a different question: “Am I better upgrading to Quark 8 or converting to Creative Suite?”
So we’ll see.
In this article, I want to share my experience so far…and so far I’ve almost installed the software. We’ll talk about functionality in future articles.
My phone experience with Quark customer service was delightful. Bobbie spoke English, knew all the answers to every question and took my order as I would expect. I ordered the Quark 8 upgrade and gave her my credit card information which is: 422…wait…maybe this isn’t a good idea. Just trust that I gave her my credit card information.
The software arrived as promised and I eagerly opened the package. I must say, I like the new look of Quark, but then I’m partial to greens. It IS exciting and new and I think it looks good. Right off the bat it says “this is not your father’s Quark.”
I was disappointed there wasn’t a manual this time. When I ordered Quark 7, I got a rather heavy box and was pleasantly surprised by a one inch thick manual in there, ready to answer my every question.
What’s funny about it, though, is that I never opened it. Nope. Just like 90 percent of software buyers out there, the sight of it was a great relief, like a safety net under my dangerous work, there just in case.
But I never looked at it.
I guess, then, I have no reason to be disappointed that Quark 8 ships with a PDF of the manual I won’t read on the disk instead of a printed version — saves trees, shipping costs and shelf space, I guess.
Now here is where it gets tricky. I purchased the software while in the U.S. this summer and didn’t want to carry anything more than what I absolutely need back, so I opened the box and exhumed only what I needed to take with me, which was a card with a disk attached and a sticker on the back. On the front of the card it read “See back of card for information required at installation.”
Okay, that’s pretty clear…let me turn it over…it reads US68…wait…maybe this isn’t a good idea. Just trust that there is a long number on the back.
After several attempts as entering various numbers, I decide to go to the Quark website, quark.com, and see if I need to download a NEW validation code. I only wonder because when I installed Quark 7, I was able to use old serial numbers and it worked fine. Times change.
Keep in mind that we’re not talking about small numbers here. We’re talking about 47 digit codes that are straight from the CIA code book. I did the math: if every human on earth (based on an estimated world population of six billion) owned 492,534,069,091,280,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 copies of Quark, they would finally use all the combinations.
Except, and this is too much math for my brain, add the combination of a unique serial number that goes with the with validation code and you can have even more computers.
Wow…Quark is really planning on selling LOTS of copies…good for them.
Back to my install…
So I enter the number on the back of my card, which is all I’m going to need for installation, so they say, and I enter my arm’s length validation code and it begins the install…good.
Now I’m cookin’.
I watch it do its thing while I think of other things to do. When its done, it asks me to Activate it. No worries, let’s activate using the internet, which is the recommended method.
No luck. I’m rejected. My serial number is no good.
What does this mean? There is only one number in my possession. How can it be wrong. I check it again and, yes, I entered it correctly. What am I missing?
Let’s go through it again: I entered the number on the card on the website and it gave me a validation code, I entered the number on the card and the validation code and it installed…but it won’t activate because I have the wrong serial number. Shouldn’t it have told me that when I entered it on the site instead of giving me a validation code?
I think Bobbie misses me and just wants a reason for me to call her back. I hope my wife doesn’t find out.
I am now running the software for 30 days in demo mode until I can get this resolved.