Adam
Visitor
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File Size blowout in school magazine - 2008/12/01 09:35
We recently did a 100 page school magazine in Comic Life. The kids did the pages (1 or 2 for each event over the year) and we then saved the 50 or so .comic files as tiffs then pdfs to send to the printers. The result has been a great success and the students have learnt a lot about the process and work involved in creating the document.
Some things I would like to mention that could be improved in comic life and would make the product so much better.
1. File size is a big issue when using many photos. It would be great to have the option to automatically decrease file size when dragging from iPhoto or even better have the option to crop photos based on the frame when saving (we had to save as a tiff and then pdf to reduce the file sizes as saving as a 300dpi pdf seems to save the entire photo, not just the cropped area in the frame). The printers had problems with this process and we were told that tiff is not a good format to use when offset printing
2. Page numbering is good but we could not use it as we had many separate documents and there is no option to start the page at a particular number.
3. when dragging an image around, the automatic guidelines are great but they don't snap (even with the snap setting set to 1) so things don't line up perfectly. This is annoying and makes page layout difficult and time consuming.
4. It would be nice to be able to merge or import a page from another .comic file. We could have then merge all the pages into one document and used the page numbering.
Overall the final result was very positive and the kids love using comic life. Also we used our existing software (3 labs of macs with Comic Life and iLife) and managed to avoid buying any expensive DTP software. Well done on a great application - I would love to see some of these improvements in the future.
Thanks
Adam van Raad
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