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We've returned to our groovy tech-talk chill this week after the ruckus that was caused by inviting Russell Brown last week. And as promised, a winner from our martini hour visualization exercise will find his or her work featured as the lead graphic for this week's show. We'll start with Steve Newton because he paid the "I live across the Atlantic" tax and didn't get all the kitchy tradeshow castoffs that I sent to Gale solely because she lives in Canada.

Is anyone but me wondering if this picture is listing slightly? Meanwhile, here's the skinny on this week's installment of the world-famous Martini Hour. Read more » 

Has anyone else out there ever needed to get a preview image out of InDesign and into the world-at-large when the original linked files were not available? Maybe it's just me, because it doesn't seem like an easy thing to do.

Because I edit books on graphical subjects, many of my authors actually like to write and submit InDesign files (rather than go "old school" and turn in Word docs and a folder full of TIFFs.) Until the ready-for-production draft goes off to my brilliant composition team, I really don't need (or want) to have them send along the linked files. InDesign's preview images are certainly good enough for me to evaluate a manuscript— and, frankly, passing around hundreds of megabytes of photos during the draft stage would eat up time and bandwidth unnecessarily.

I have, however, found myself on occasion wishing I could create an independent file from an InDesign preview in an emergency. Once upon a time, my answer was to take a screenshot of the preview image in situ and then paste it into Photoshop. But now I have a better solution: Create a PDF and use Acrobat's ability to extract images.

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