Rorohiko Ltd.

The Lightning Brain Sudoku Generator has been updated to version 1.1.0 – this latest version adds support for 6×6 sudoku, with 3×2 (HxV) subcells. 6×6 sudoku puzzles are smaller, and less intensive to solve than their 9×9 brethern – I estimate they would take the average puzzler about a minute or less to solve. Good fun when you only have a minute to spare! Click here for more info.

Here’s one to try – the clues in this puzzle are arranged in a visually symmetrical pattern: more pleasing to the eye, but that makes the puzzle also a bit easier to solve. If you want slightly more difficult 6×6 puzzles, you should not use the visual symmetry-options that our generator offers.

I thought I’d share some failures with the world – this might save someone some headache and hassle, who knows.

Here’s the deal: I had Windows Vista installed on a BootCamp partition on my MacBook Pro. I am pretty religous about backups, and I had made a number of consecutive backups – some recent ones made with Acronis True Image Home, which I purchased recently, and some with Image For Windows, which I had been using before that.

For the Mac side of things, I use Carbon Copy Cloner – Carbon Copy Cloner and SuperDuper! are two ‘imaging’ softwares for Mac, and to me the single most important feature they have is their ‘restore’ functionality – there is none!

You don’t need restore – the backups you make with those two programs are ‘good to go’: they are bootable, as-is, so they slot right in as a replacement of the broken drive.

Most backup softwares, especially on PC, are good at making backups, but in my experience, they stink at restoring: it’s an endless hassle of fiddling with boot disks, partition tables, formats and so on. If a PC drive dies on me, I know from experience that it’ll take me 2-3 days to rebuild the system back to usability. If a Mac drive dies on me, I can be back in business in an hour or so.

The reason why I switched to Acronis True Image Home is that I was hoping it would give me some functionality somewhat close to what Carbon Copy Cloner does – i.e. in case of disaster, I was hoping to reboot off some CD, put in the backup, and have it restore the hard drive to its original self.

So, disaster struck, and the 500GB hard drive in my trusty MacBook Pro gave up – click-click-click… forever, just the day before I had to leave overseas. The drive was partitioned into one 320GB partition for Mac, and then the remainder used as a BootCamp with Vista.

Not to worry – I simply opened the machine, and replaced the internal hard drive with the backup drive I made with Carbon Copy Cloner. Within the hour I was back in business with all my Mac stuff back where it was supposed to go, except for the changes of the last few days. Those remaining files I got off my Time Machine. Saved!

However, the BootCamp partition was a different story; I did not look into it immediately, as I had no immediate need for it. A few months go by, and a few days ago, I decided to try and rebuild my BootCamp setup – easy peasy, I had backups aplenty, right?

Wrong, it turned out. The backup drive had an empty, unused Mac partition the same size as my BootCamp setup – the idea being that when ‘restore time’ came around I would repurpose that partition as ‘BootCamp’ and tell Acronis to put the BootCamp stuff there.

But it turned out I could find no easy way to tell the Mac that I wanted to ‘convert’ the Mac partition for use by BootCamp/Windows. The BootCamp utility insists on starting from one big Mac-only partition, and then shrinking it down to allow room for a BootCamp partition.

The way I got around that was by Carbon Copy cloning all my stuff off the Mac, repartition the drive as a single, large partition, then Carbon Copy cloning all my stuff back onto the Mac. Total time needed for this little back-and-forth escapade: about 12 hours. Great.

Morale: don’t ’save’ room for a BootCamp partition on your clone-to backup drive. Instead, make your backup drive one big Mac partition.

Ok, that was one hard lesson. I now told the BootCamp utility to get me going with BootCamp. Booted into Windows, installed a basic copy of Vista. Installed the BootCamp drivers. Didn’t work. Grmm. After some head-scratching I realized I’d used the BootCamp drivers from a generic Mac OS X install disk – instead, I should have used the Mac OS X install disk that came with the MacBook Pro.

Morale: use your Mac’s install disk to install the BootCamp drivers on Windows.

Onwards, ever onwards. I now installed Acronis into Vista, and got to a point where I was ready to restore my BootCamp partition: I made an Acronis boot disk on a CD, rebooted the Mac off the Acronis boot disk, and… no way to do the restore: the Acronis software simply has no idea how to read the partition tables on my Mac’s drive, and it simply told me to go away. Bummer.

Not to be deterred – I rebooted my Mac under Mac OS X, started VMware Fusion, and ‘grabbed’ the BootCamp partition as a virtual machine.

A VMware-fusion-ed BootCamp has a lot of emulated hardware and so, so I reckoned Acronis might work this time around. I plunked in the Acronis boot disk, fired up BootCamp under VMware Fusion, and hit the F2 key as soon as the screen flickered (so I could get into the virtual machine’s BIOS settings). In the BIOS screen I changed the boot order to boot off CD instead of from the internal hard disk.

Ok – we’re booting off the Acronis CD – great! It recognizes the hard drive – great! It recognizes my backups – great!

Oh, wait – that is way too much success in one go – so I was punished, in a cruel and painful way.

Turns out the Acronis boot disk has its own mouse driver software, and it’s almost impossible to use in a VMware Fusion virtual machine – you can only move the big yellow mouse cursor a wee bit left or right, and then it jumps somewhere else. The mouse cursor had a mind of its own, and I had very little control over its movement.

To make matters even more frustrating, the Acronis software does have some keyboard navigation – but it is not consistent. Some things can only be clicked with the mouse – no keyboard shortcut to it. With persistence, luck, pounding of the keyboard, and lots of frantic mouse skating, I managed to occasionally get the mouse cursor positioned over a button I needed to click.

So, I slowly, slowly waded through the selection screens until I came to a point where I needed to tell it what partition to restore to – and there things locked up. Any further keystroke or mouse click would make the virtual PC emit beeps. Nothing could make it budge. Beep beeperdebeep beep. Grrr.

So, I redid the whole procedure – rebooted, spent another hour flapping my mouse around to get to the same point. Same phenomenon: no way to get past that screen. Total time lost: at least 4 hours. I gave up; Acronis was not going to do it. It’s probably great for ‘real’ PC’s but it is useless with BootCamp.

Morale: don’t bet your life on Acronis True Image Home when you use BootCamp.

All was not lost – I still had some older backups made with Image For Windows. Image For Windows is not good-looking, and it is downright clunky at times – but this thing has a lot of knowledge and experience packed into it. The procedure was similar to Acronis: make a boot CD, boot VMware Fusion off it, connect backup drive.

This time around, it was smooth sailing: the software picked up the NTFS-formatted USB backup drive, and so on, and the restore was underway! … still underway … still underway. About 24 hours!! later, the restore was finally complete – man, that was incredibly s-l-o-w. But it worked! Or did it?

I rebooted BootCamp in VMware fusion – it thought about it long, and hard, and eventually booted right up. We’re in business, we’re in business!

Then I tried rebooting straight off the BootCamp drive. Shattered dreams – some message like ‘a bootable drive cannot be found’. Tried rebooting off a Vista boot disk and doing all kinds of repairs – to no avail; it never saw the hard disk partition. Tried rebooting Bootcamp in VMware Fusion: nope. Dead as a dodo.

I gave up there – I’d been at it for days!

Later on, when the frustration has worn off a bit, I’ll reinstall BootCamp from scratch and forget about the backups – it might be possible to restore them, but it’s just too hard!

Morale: backup just the data stored under BootCamp and be prepared to reinstall Windows under BootCamp from scratch after a disaster, and then pour the data back in after rebuilding the PC side.

So, that’s my sorry tale – I hope this helps someone else avoid the mistakes I’ve made!

Cheers,

Kris

Lightning Brain Soxy for Macintosh has some new features.

The latest version knows how to handle InDesign .jsx script files. Instead of stashing your .jsx files into the InDesign Scripts Panel folder, you can now simply tell the Mac Finder to assign the .jsx file name extension to be opened with Soxy.

Soxy then looks inside the .jsx file for any comments that indicate the version of InDesign the script is destined for, and it then runs the .jsx file with that version.

This means that InDesign .jsx files become almost like little stand-alone applications: you can store them wherever you like on your hard disk, and simply double-clicking them will make the script run inside the proper copy of InDesign.

Soxy must be able to guess what version of InDesign needs to be launched – it will scan the beginning of the .jsx script file for comment lines like

// InDesign CS4

or

// InDesign 6.0

or entries like

#target indesign-6

and use these to decide what version of InDesign this script ‘belongs to’. Most script .jsx files have such a comment – and if they don’t you can always open them in a text editor and add such a line at the beginning of the script.

Make way for double-clickable .jsx files!

For more info click here.

A test version of Lightning Brain StoryTweaker can be downloaded here:

http://storytweaker.com

In this tutorial, we’ll be looking at a scenario where StoryTweaker is used to make text corrections to a few articles in a newspaper. In case you’re more interested in using StoryTweaker for translations, you want to check out this post instead:

http://www.rorohiko.com/wordpress/?p=59

In this story you’ll encounter the following actors and entities:

- NewsBlatt – a small regional newspaper, published weekly.
- Newt, who is a graphics designer working for NewsBlatt, and who used InDesign CS3 on Macintosh to prepare the edition for next week.
- Bobbie, who will proofread the weekly wine taster’s column.
- Robbie, who writes articles with juicy, gossippy stuff.

Ingredients for this recipe:

Adobe® InDesign® CS4 (Mac or Windows)
Lightning Brain StoryTweaker
A partially finished copy of next week’s edition of NewsBlatt
People proofreading and/or providing editorial content

StoryTweaker will need to ‘match up’ the updated texts with the layout, and to make sure that is possible, it needs to make sure there is a ‘base’ version of the paper whose layout won’t be modified while Robbie and Bobbie are working on their bits. To achieve that, StoryTweaker will ‘freeze’ the paper.

Newt saves his latest version of the paper to disk, and then closes the document.

As it is the first time Newt uses StoryTweaker, he checks the preferences after launching the program. StoryTweaker version 1.0 defaults to using InDesign CS3, but Newt is using InDesign CS4, so he needs to change the preferences first.

On the preferences screen, under the second tab, Newt changes the popup to CS4.

Next, Newt tells StoryTweaker to make a tweak set from the saved and closed document – he selects File – Create Tweak Set from Document… in the StoryTweaker menu.

He then points StoryTweaker to the newspaper document:

StoryTweaker then asks him where it should save the Tweak Set – Newt decides to put the Tweak Set on the desktop.

StoryTweaker and InDesign now start munching on the file – they become unresponsive for a while, but with some patience and good coffee, Newt ends up with a tweak set on his desktop:

A tweak set is a folder that groups together a number of related files. StoryTweaker will manage the contents of the tweak set folder for you – you won’t normally open it, or manipulate the folder contents directly. Instead you’ll use StoryTweaker to access the tweak set folder contents.

One of the functions of the tweak set is to store away a copy of the InDesign document – a snapshot, safe from any further accidental changes.

A second function of the tweak set is to keep track of the document’s text and the updates to be made – while creating the tweak set, StoryTweaker will extract the original text out of the InDesign document and stash it away inside the tweak set.

The main StoryTweaker window now shows us the contents of the tweak set that Newt just created – as he has not yet created any assignments yet, the window is still pretty empty.

Newt now creates two assignments – one for Robbie, one for Bobbie. To create an assignment, he clicks the green ‘plus’ button at the bottom of the StoryTweaker window.

He types in a name and some comment for each of the two assignments. The Language column is left blank – we’re using StoryTweaker for text updates, not for translations, so the Language is irrelevant.

After some window- and column-resizing this is what Newt ends up with:

At this point in time, the assignments are still tucked away inside the tweak set – the next step is to export the assignments and send them to Robbie and Bobbie.

Newt selects both assignments, and clicks the Export Assignment… button.

StoryTweaker will ask Newt where it should save the two assignments. He tells it to save them to the Desktop and as a result, he ends up with two extra folders there – one for each assignment. The StoryTweaker window also changes – the names of Robbie and Bobbie now appear in bold italic, which means that these assignments are currently ‘out’ of the tweak set, and the tweak set awaits the return of the assignments.

Newt now compresses the two assignments and e-mails one to Robbie and the other to Bobbie.

Newt can now delete all assignment folders and .zip-ped copies from his computer – the assignments are now ‘owned’ by Robbie and Bobbie, until they e-mail them back to Newt.

Let’s now go and have a look at Bobby’s computer. Bobby is on a Macintosh, and he receives Newt’s e-mail with a .zip-ped attachment. Bobby puts the .zip file on his computer and then decompresses it with the Mac OS X built-in Archive Utility.

After decompressing, Bobby can throw the .zip file away, and he can now navigate into the Assignment folder. In the assignment folder, he finds a few more .zip files – these contain the software Bobby needs to use to make the text changes. There is also a .PDF preview of the InDesign file.

Because Bobby is on a Mac, he double-clicks AssignmentTweaker-Mac.zip to decompress it. Once the .zip file has decompressed, he can navigate into the decompressed folder and double-click the AssignmentTweaker software where he finds it – there is no need to move the application icon around.

After Bobby double-clicks the AssignmentTweaker application icon, he’s presented with this window:

The currently selected text frame has a blue border, and as Bobby hovers over various areas of the window, purple borders show where the other frames are located. Bobby knows he needs to proofread the wine story, so he double-clicks it. That brings up the Tweaking Window for this chunk of text:

Bobby now reviews the text paragraph by paragraph by clicking the Next Paragraph button. The two big text areas Original Text and Tweaked Text are both ‘read only’ – Bobby cannot make any changes there.

Instead, the changes are made on a per-paragraph basis in the Paragraph being edited zone. The third paragraph has some typos:

Bobby corrects ‘tawels’ and ‘ciment’, and once he’s done he clicks the Apply button:

He then clicks Next Paragraph again to correct the next typo – ’stoff’. This time, he corrects the typo, and clicks Next Paragraph without hitting Apply first – and AssignmentTweaker asks him what to do…

He clicks Yes to apply his changes. Finally, he cleans up ‘cretes’, clicks Apply, and then marks the story as complete by clicking the corresponding checkbox.

As you can see, the original text is still visible in the leftmost text zone; the corrected text can be seen in the Tweaked Text area. Bobby’s job is finished, so he closes the Tweaking Window. The preview window now shows a green border around the wine story, in addition to the blue ’selected’ border, to indicate that this bit of text has been proofread and is ready for the next step.

Note that the preview window will not show the updated text – AssignmentTweaker is not capable of duplicating the text reflow features of InDesign, and hence is unable to recalculate how the updated text would look. The only way for Bobby to see the updated text is to double-click the green-bordered text area and read the updated text in the Tweaking Window.

Bobby is now finished with his assigned task, so he quits out of AssignmentTweaker,  right-clicks the assignment folder, re-compresses the assignment folder and e-mails it back to Newt.

Let’s now have a quick peek over Robby’s shoulder. Robby is on a Windows PC, but he handles his assignment in pretty much the same fashion as Bobby did on his Mac – first extract the proper AssignmentTweaker:

Then he uses the extracted AssignmentTweaker to work on the gossip story.

As StoryTweaker is not very strong as a text editor, Robbie first writes his gossip story in another text editor. He then uses the Tweaking Window to copy-paste his gossip story into the assignment.

Let’s now go back to Newt, a little later. He’s just received both assignments back via e-mail. He’s decompressed them and put them on his desktop.

He uses the import button to import both returned assignments back into the tweak set.

After both assignments have been imported, the names of Robbie and Bobbie revert back from bold italic to regular:

Finally, Newt can merge the changes made by Robbie and Bobbie with the original layout to create a new, updated document – he selects both assignments in the StoryTweaker window, and then clicks the button to generate a merged InDesign document:

He gives the new document a different name (he decides to add ‘updated’ to the name), and saves it next to the original document (so it can easily find its linked images when it will be opened in InDesign).

Finally, he opens the updated InDesign file:

Both Robbie and Bobbie’s changes have been applied into the new document!

Let’s conclude with a rough diagram of the steps in this story:

Lightning Brain FrameReporter is a US$29.00 plug-in for Adobe InDesign CS, CS2, CS3 or CS4.

In this recipe, we’ll highlight each of the individual LB FrameReporter tidbits, and explain what they could be useful for.

If you want to follow along, you might want to first download and install a demo version of Lightning Brain FrameReporter – click here for more info and download links.

Overset text warning

InDesign is quite laid back when it comes to text that is overset. The only visual indication you get is that the last text frame of the story shows a red plus sign in the out port.

Enter LB FrameReporter. For stories with overset text it will add a visual indicator to any frame of the story – whether that frame is at the beginning or at the end of the text story.

That’s very handy if you’re trying to fix overset text by removing some words from the text: you can be editing frame 1 of a 100-frame story, and you’d immediately know that the overset has been fixed when the indicator disappears.

An example: imagine that the four text frames you see are actually spread out over four pages (instead of sitting on a single page – I’ve done that to make it easier to explain things).

There’s overset text, and I am going to clean up the text in the second frame of the four-frame story.

I selected the second text frame. The little [+] on top of that selected text frame indicates that the story has overset text:

I now select some words that I want to delete from the frame:

Hit ‘Delete’ to shorten the text – and the overset warning disappears. No need to go check the last frame of the story!

Show Frame and Story Wordcounts

This option of LB FrameReporter is handy when you’re aiming for a particular word count. As you’re editing the story, you are continuously informed about the total number of words in the story, as well as the number of words in the current text frame.

In the sample screen capture, I have 79 words in the current frame, out of a total of 242 words in the whole story.

These word counts are dynamic. As we all know ;-^ , ‘nseque’ is preferrably spelled as two words, so let’s split up ‘nseque’ into ‘nse que’ by adding a space character:

Note that the word counts have automatically updated to 80 and 243!

Show Number of Frames Per Story

With this option, it becomes easy to know your position along a story – it helps you navigate the story.

In this example, the complete story runs through four frames, and the currently selected frame is the third of these four.

Show Which Pages Contain Parts Of A Story

This is a slightly more complex information – it is essentially a roadmap for the current story. Check the following screen shot:

I can tell that the currently selected frame is part of a multi-frame story.

Let’s first ignore the (3), the number between parenthesis; we’ll get to that later.

Before passing through the current selected frame, the story appears in text frames that live on page 1 and  2 (Pgs. before: 1,2)

After passing through the selected frame, the story appears in a text frame on page 6 (Pgs. after: 6).

Furthermore, on page 1, I can also see that the story goes through three text frames – 1(3) means: on page 1 occurring 3 times. That’s what numbers between parenthesis are about: they show you when there are multiple linked text frames for the same story on a single page.

As you can see, this LB FrameReporter option allows me to see a whole roadmap for the story in the blink of an eye!

Overridden Master Page Items

Another thing that’s hard to see in InDesign are overridden master page items.

Master page items showing through on a document’s pages are easily recognizable because their frame is drawn with a dotted line.

But once a master page item is overridden, there is no simple way to tell that the item is a master page item. Still, overridden master page items behave slightly different to normal page items.

Check the following screen shot:

The bottommost, cyan page item is an overridden version of the cyan item on master A. I’ve repositioned it to make it clear it’s overridden, but it still retains some relation to the original item that sits on master A.

If I change the color of the cyan item on master A to green, this is what happens:

Now, let’s switch on LB FrameReporter and select both frames:

Now it is easy to see that the green item is actually an overridden master page item.

Show Image Effective (Scaled) Resolution

This information is identical to the resolution info that is provided on the Info palette. The main advantage of this feature becomes apparent when you want to check the effective resolution of a whole lot of images.

Instead of selecting them one by one and looking at the info palette, I can simply select all of them, and see their resolutions all at the same time.

In this example screen shot I have selected two placed images. You can see that the Info palette does not show any resolution info – it cannot handle multiple selections.

Squareness

This feature gives you an idea of how far from or how close to square a particular frame is.

A value of 100% is completely square, anything less than 100% is a rectangle – it does not matter whether the rectangle is in portrait or landscape orientation.

Check the following screen shot:

You can see that the two ’squares’ are not completely square because they have a squareness below 100%.

The two rectangles are both ‘golden ratio’ rectangles – which are considered the most ‘balanced’ and visually pleasing kind of rectangle by many – 62% is the squareness of a ‘golden ratio’ rectangle.

Configuration

All of the options shown above can be activated or deactivated as desired through the API – FrameReporter – Current Document Preferences… menu item.

You can select multiple options – all the selected options will be shown concurrently by LB FrameReporter.

Changing these options will only affect the current document – each document carries its own LB FrameReporter settings.

There is also the FrameReporter – Default Preferences… menu item which allows you to set up the default preferences to use when no preferences have been chosen for a particular document.

Conclusion

LB FrameReporter is work in progress.

If you have any ideas for similar information that we should/could be displaying for selected frames, please let us know at pluginsupport@rorohiko.com- if the request can be implemented without too much effort, we’ll try to roll it into a future version of LB FrameReporter.

InDesignProxy v1.0.7

Download

See further below.

What it does

There’s a common problem on Mac OS X when there are multiple versions of Adobe® InDesign® or Adobe® InCopy® installed on the same computer. Double-clicking an .indd file’s icon will often cause the wrong application to launch.

To work around this problem, I’ve created a little application that alleviates the issue a fair bit – it’s called Lightning Brain InDesignProxy.

We also have a US$ 19.00 commercial product – Lightning Brain Soxy, which is like InDesignProxy on steroids. Where InDesignProxy only supports InDesign and InCopy, Soxy supports InDesign, Illustrator, Acrobat, and QuarkXPress, and the list is still growing. The web page you’re currently on is about InDesignProxy – click here for more info on Lightning Brain Soxy.

LB InDesignProxy fixes the problem by working as a ’stand-in’ for InDesign and InCopy.

You can drag/drop any of a number of InDesign-related files onto the LB InDesignProxy application, and LB InDesignProxy will analyze the dropped document and will then forward it to the appropriate version of InDesign or InCopy.

You can also use the features of the Finder to have these files automatically opened by LB InDesignProxy instead of by Adobe InDesign – so your InDesign documents start behaving themselves even when you double-click them.

Currently, LB InDesignProxy supports .indd, .indt, .incd, .incx, or .icml files. Any InDesign-related files that carry a different file name extension are not supported.

If you’d like to show your appreciation, encourage us, and support us in our continued efforts to provide the designer and prepress communities with helpful tools, you can do a US$4 donation – roughly the price of a cup of coffee – by clicking the button below. You need to know that software development is not cheap and giving away freebies does not come easy for a small company like Rorohiko.

We use PayPal as our payment processor, but all you need is a credit card – you can send us a cup of coffee without need for a PayPal account.

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A test version of Lightning Brain StoryTweaker can be downloaded here:

http://storytweaker.com

An easy way to get some good understanding of how LB StoryTweaker ‘thinks’ is to follow along as someone puts the program through its paces.

StoryTweaker can be used in a number of different scenarios. For example, one scenario is about text corrections to documents. A different scenario is about translating a document to a different language.

In this tutorial, we’ll be looking at a scenario where StoryTweaker is used to translate a small product flyer from English to German and French.

In case you’re more interested in using StoryTweaker for text edits, you want to check out this post instead:

http://www.rorohiko.com/wordpress/?p=1060

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(Added note 6-Nov-2008: Please check the added notes at the end of the article. Yes, FM 8.x works too, and I’ve also added a way to do the patching much faster)

Recently, I was testing some ideas with various versions of FileMaker, and I found out that Instant Web Publishing with FileMaker 7 Developer on Mac OS X Leopard did not work.

I reinstalled FileMaker 7 Developer, upgraded to 7.0v3, installed the fm_70v3_osx_iwp update from the FileMaker website – and things seemed to work fine.

That is – until I quit and restarted FileMaker

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Ingredients

- Adobe® InDesign® CS or higher (the APIDToolAssistant plug-in is available for InDesign CS, CS2, CS3, CS4, Mac and Windows).

- A licensed copy or a demo version of APIDToolAssistant 1.0.46 or higher. It also works with unlicensed versions, but then the word ‘DEMO’ will be prefixed to or superimposed on all page adornments. Download it from from http://www.rorohiko.com/downloads/APIDToolAssistant.1.0.46.zip

More info about APIDToolAssistant can be found at http://www.rorohiko.com/apidtoolassistant.html. Essentially, it’ll cost you US$25 to unlock the potential of APIDToolAssistant.

- One or more PNG files if you want graphical adornments. Higher-resolution PNG files will result in ’smoother’ adornments when the InDesign layout window is zoomed in.

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