Ideally we would like to make an electronic version of the field guide that could be put on the iPads we expect to have on the trip (and also the laptops, though the laptops will stay in trucks). This would allow for some color figures and some other unusual material, but note that we'll only have 3 or 4 iPads....
The goal then is to make a pdf version of your final annotated bibliography, your one page summary, and your illustrations.
Annotated Bibliography: This should be straightforward. This can be a Word file or a pdf (or rtf or Pages, I suppose), but please make separate files for each topic! The topic name and the presenter(s) name(s) should be at the top of the page.
One page summary: Also pretty straightforward. Same rules: Word or pdf (or rtf or Pages) but separate file for each topic (And NOT merged with the bibliography--bibliographies will be at the end of the guide). Please be sure to have the topic title and presenter names at the top.
Illustrations: This is the hardest part of doing this electronically. There are three parts to this: getting the illustrations into the computer, assembling and annotating them, and then making a single file for use in building the field guide. Note that if you are using some color figures, you might try printing them in black and white and see how horrible they might look: if they are really bad, you might want to make a separate black-and-white version, if possible.
Scanning figures: Obviously for materials unavailable as pdfs, you are stuck scanning the figures in. We have a scanner on the Mac next to my door; I will add an account to that machine for those of you that want to use it to scan materials in. There are loads of different scanning packages out there on different platforms, so I cannot give specific guidance here (but VueScan is cross-platform and very nice). But there are some general rules. First, scan in either color (if your figure is color) or grayscale; do not scan in black and white unless there is no gray anywhere, and I wouldn't bother with 8-bit color these days (24 or 32 bit color is fine). 8-bit grayscale is usually adequate for black-and-white or grayscale images, if that option is available. A lot of times there are presets for various output destinations; these can be misleading, I'm afraid, and I tend to kick on advanced options to see what I am really doing. I tend to work backwards from what I want on the page: if I am thinking of a figure for a full page, I want it to be no less than 300 dpi (dots per inch), which on the printable part of a page is about 2100 x 3000 or so pixels. When I select the area to scan, I then look to see what the final image size will be and will change the scan resolution to get what I want (some packages allow you to work backwards and specify the output size). If you decide to scan in black-and-white, I suggest no less than 600 dpi (the file sizes are not bad as there is only 1 bit per pixel). Generally you will want to save as a JPEG with a quality setting in the medium to high area (70-90). Once you have scanned your image, preview it to see that the image will work for you (zoom in enough to be sure that you got the resolution you need). The two most common mistakes made in scanning old artwork are to use too low a resolution and to use an inappropriate scan type (e.g., black and white on a grayscale image).
Special scanning notes: If you are scanning color or a printed grayscale image, you will often find that it is made up of lots of little dots of color. Many scanning packages will have a descreening option that tries to deal with this so your scanned image is more like the original than the screened image on the page. These are usually set to 75 dpi (and are often set by default if there is a magazine or newspaper option), but some images are printed at a higher screen density and so will lose resolution when being scanned. If you can adjust the screen setting, you might examine how this affects your scan if you are having troubles with a particular image. Another control than can influence color images is color balance. Fortunately for most of what we would scan, this hardly matters, but there can be instances where you can improve the visibility of the scanned image through these tools. In making a grayscale image from color images, it can be quite helpful sometimes to greatly alter the color balance (for instance, many landscape photos are very blue; reducing the blue channel or changing the contrast within blue can improve the visibility of features when rendered in grayscale).
Extracting images from pdfs: This can be pretty trivial or exceedingly painful, and sometimes it depends on the pdf source. Tools I use tend to be Apple's Preview and Adobe's Acrobat Professional (Acrobat Reader is much more limited but can do some useful things in this regard). You may learn that many of the images scanned in pdfs are low quality for much magnification. Sometimes there are higher resolution versions of the images that can be downloaded from the original publication.
Preview can be very quick: if you use the Select tool to outline the figure you want, and then copy it and then select "New from Clipboard" from the File menu, Preview makes a new pdf with the full resolution of the original. Saving this as a pdf will give you your image (though it is a bit of a cheat: in fact, what Preview saves is that full page with a crop box that you have made). You can also save as a jpeg or other format, specifying the resolution. Either is usually better than pasting the selection into another program (though it depends on the program; I have had terrible luck with Word but done OK with Pages).
Acrobat should be more powerful but the program is laden with challenges. The temptation is to use the Snapshot tool; this will make a TIFF image at the current screen resolution. So to use this, you will want to zoom in to probably 400% or maybe more before using this tool so that your image will have a good enough resolution for use elsewhere. The regular text selection tool will also allow you to select images if they are embedded image files; right-clicking (command-click for Macs) will allow you to save the image as a file. This is not a useful tool if the image is a constructed pdf (you'll notice you are selecting pieces of text within the figure). An alternative is to extract the page with the figure (in the Document menu) and then crop the page to the figure and save as a pdf. Note that exporting as a jpeg from Acrobat is usually unsatisfactory: it often sets the dpi to 72 at the original scale of the figure, which is far too low for reproduction. Acrobat also has an Export Images command that will apply to embedded jpegs (but doesn't work well for other images)
Other options: Adobe Illustrator can read pdfs and in some instances you can manipulate things there more completely than in Acrobat; the same can apply to Photoshop. Neither is particularly quick or easy for this work. Canvas similarly can open and deal with pdfs; it is more flexible in many ways but less common.
Building your illustration page(s): The usual tack is to use Word for this. In my experience, this is not the ideal option, although the improvement in page layout tools in Word of late has made it less painful. The problem is that often Word will move images from page to page or overlap things or do other insensitive things as you struggle to get the pieces organized; it is also not so wonderful about dealing with pdf files. If you do use Word, I suggest trying the Publishing Layout option in the more recent versions of Word. If you want to actually make a really nice layout, Adobe's InDesign works very well, especially if you have saved images as pdfs. Apple's Pages works very well too in its page layout mode.
You should label each figure with, at minimum, your own figure number and the source of the figure (using a proper citation, e.g., Smith et al., 1990). If you wish to provide a caption, be sure it is located rather obviously in association with the figure in question. I would suggest putting the title of your topic at the top of the page for easy reference. As before, do not combine materials from multiple topics.
Exporting and submitting your illustration page(s). Please save the final product as a pdf if at all possible. On a Mac, the most reliable way is often to use the Print command but then select Save as PDF from the PDF button at the lower left of the Print dialog. On Windows machines, this can be more difficult, depending on what tools have been installed on the machine. If you are stuck saving the illustrations for a single topic as separate files, please indicate the relative page numbers in the file names (e.g., TopicNameFigs1.pdf, TopicNameFigs2.pdf, etc.).
I intend to combine the pdfs within Acrobat, where I can also generate page numbers. So don't make the pages reach too near the top or bottom margins so we have room to add the page numbers.
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Please send mail to cjones@cires.colorado.edu if you encounter any problems or have suggestions.
C. H. Jones | CIRES | Dept. of Geological Sciences | Univ. of Colorado at Boulder
Last modified at March 1, 2011 4:37 PM