print@UCL – Utility printing in the Slade building

There are now two new utility printers in the Slade building, accessed via the print@UCL network. One is on the ground floor by Studio 6 (to the left of the main staircase), the other on the 2nd floor by the lift. Print in B&W and colour, A4 and A3. Send documents to the print@UCL print queue with your username and ID, retrieve prints from any printer with your UCL ID card. All UCL cluster PCs have the print@UCL queue available, as do all stations in the Slade EMS. You can also add print@UCL to your own computer by following the instructions here.    

Utility Printing at UCL

For normal printing in A4/A3, black/white and colour, UCL have Cluster Rooms in many locations. Students are allocated a “free” printing quota each term. The cluster room in the basement of the Cruciform (opposite the main UCL entrance) is quite convenient to access from the Slade and has all printing options.

Transfer Inkjet-Printed Images to Wood with Almost No Extra Tools

The process is quite simple: use your inkjet printer to print the image on a non-porous surface, like the leftover glossy part of a used sheet of labels. From there, you can transfer the image to the wood.P Note that the wood needs to be bare to absorb the ink. After it dries, you can gloss over it to preserve the image and make the colors pop a little more. Check out the video to see it in action.P How to transfer an inkjet photo to wood | Steve Ramsey via Hack a DayP

The font editor for everyone

Glyphs’ smart and simple approach helps you draw new typefaces, modify existing fonts, and sculpt your letterforms hassle-free. http://www.glyphsapp.com/

100 Open Source programs for Audio and Video

Open source applications make it easy to create, listen to and view digital audio and video content. Animation 1. Blender Replaces: AutoDesk Maya Suitable for professional use, Blender is a 3D animation suite that offers modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, video editing and game creation capabilities. It also features a customizable interface, and it can import and export from a wide variety of file formats. Operating System: Windows, Linux, OS X. 2. Art of Illusion Replaces: AutoDesk Maya Art of Illusion isn’t quite as polished as Blender, but its developers claim the latest version (released September 2013) “is both stable Read more

Quotes & Accents

Quotes & Accents (& Dashes) We all need to use them but hardly any of us know how to type them. Here is a brief guide of how to type smart quotes and accented characters (and dashes) on a Mac. If you have the latest OS you probably discovered that you can also find accented characters by holding down a letter to reveal its spicier cousins (I discovered this myself many times when attempting to type “heeeeeyyyyy” in an iChat window.). If you’re on a Windows computer or some nerdy space machine, I’d recommend googling “keyboard commands for accented characters”. Read more

Standard book sizes

Books can be any size. Here are the standard sizes to which most books follow:   134 x 197mm (Standard) 216 x 138mm (Demy) 210 x 148mm (A5) 234 x 156mm (Royal) 249 x 177mm (Pinched Crown Quarto) 246 x 189mm (Crown Quarto) 276 x 219mm (Demy Quarto) 297 x 210mm (A4)   it is often cheaper to use one of these.

Pressbooks – make ebooks, webbooks, and printbooks

Easily create ebooks for any device, webbooks for accessibility and promotion, and PDFs for printbooks and print-on-demand. Use our distribution services to get your books into Kindle, Apple iBooks, Nook and other retailers — or do it yourself. PressBooks is built on WordPress, so it’s as easy as blogging.   Pressbooks

instructions for converting all of your DRM’d Kindle books into a non-DRM format that you can read on any number of devices.

Migrating from Kindle to iBooks I started off reading eBooks from the Amazon Kindle store. As time has progressed, I’ve found myself using my physical Kindle less and less. Partly because I forget to charge it, and partly because I can never get the lighting in my favorite reading locations quite right. And at night? Forget about it. So I’ve converted all of my Kindle purchases to ePubs for use in iBooks. I could use the Kindle app for iOS but I’ve found iBooks to be faster at syncing read position, and it feels a lot more natural to use. Read more

free seminars on web development and digital publishing

Noble Desktop has been teaching courses in web development and digital publishing since 1991. They offer comprehensive day and evening classes and certificate programs in web design, web development, digital publishing, print design and photo retouching. Check out their free seminars on web development and digital publishing. Just this month they have seminars on state of the art web design techniques, as well asresponsive web design.  

Ebook Cover Design and Optimum Size Specifications for Amazon, Kindle, B&N, Nook, iBookstore, and iPad Formats

QUICK AND HANDY GUIDE All images should be RGB and not CMYK. Lulu will reject sRGB, if you want to use them to get into the iBookstore, but other retailers accept it. Again, always go for the correct file size first, at the cost of resolution if necessary; not the other way around. EC = Embedded Cover (give to ebook formatter to embed) CC = Catalog Cover (you’ll upload separate from ebook) n/s = Not Specified Format Size in px Resolution File Size Kindle CC JPG, TIFF min 500px max 1280px 72 dpi n/s Kindle EC JPG 600 x 800 Read more

types of book cover in epublishing

COVERS   P-COVER The cover of the printed book. There may further be paperback p-covers, hardback p-covers, trade paper p-covers, etc. “Anybody can do p-covers. They’re not even interactive. BTW, what’s “ink coverage” mean?”     E-COVER PAGE The big splashy first page of an ebook; its primary visual identity. “I accidentally applied the “cover” semantic to the acknowledgments page instead of the e-cover page in Sigil, so now I get to learn TextWrangler! Yay!”     E-COVER GRAPHIC The graphic displayed on the e-cover. (eg, e-cover_graphic.jpg is displayed on e-cover.xhtml.) “Wow, lots of colors in your e-cover graphic! Yeah! Read more

Apple iBooks Author review and how-to

Apple’s much-hyped iBooks Author came out a while back, and Cupertino hopes the free app can become the iTunes for the self-publishing textbook world. Available solely through the Mac App Store at a healthy 320MB, I’ve been putting iBooks Author through its paces in the hopes that the interactive iBook will bring me some added sales of a recently self-published e-book. I wanted to get this review out sooner, but you can’t really know how well this program works unless you actually have something to publish. A bird’s-eye view of a publishing tool doesn’t do it justice—you have to use it Read more

Dealing with grids in Photoshop is a pain

With GuideGuide, it doesn’t have to be. Pixel accurate columns, rows, midpoints, and baselines can be created based on your document or marquee with the click of a button. Frequently used guide sets can be saved for repeat use. Grids can use multiple types of measurements. Best of all it’s free. Honestly, if you haven’t started downloading it by now, you’re probably a masochist. Weirdo… Grid Tab Fill in the fields and click the GG button to create your grid. Negative margin values will place the guides outside your selection. Hold the clear guides button to clear all input fields. Clicking the Read more

Enlargement software for digital images

There are a range of Photoshop plugins to assist with enlarging image files. Attached Mac User article article discussing the most recent versions of these plugins. The conclusion to draw is the type of enlargement software used, really depends on the file you start with. The plugins mentioned make a noticeable difference to enlargement of web-graphics.

Colour Laser Printing at UCL

Colour Printing Colour Printers are Located in the following cluster room areas: (Cluster Room Map) Christopher Ingold (G20, Ground floor, 20 Gordon Street) Cruciform (B12 and B.1.3, Basement, Cruciform, Gower Street) DMS Watson (Ground floor, Science Library) Foster Court (B24, Basement, Malet Place) Torrington Place (Room 113, 1-19 Torrington Place) It will cost you 25p per page to print in colour. You’ll need to choose print queue “ClusterColour”.  

eBook conversion tools

gut or txt2html for text -> html. PHP-PDB for Palm Doc. Pyrite Publisher. (might be gone – seeFreshmeat project page for some information.) Plucker. iSilo386. makedoc. rbmake for RocketBook format. makeztxt for ztxt format. htmldoc for HTML -> PDF conversion. HTMLtidy for fixing up the automatic HTML generated by “gut”. TCR. makelrf 0.3 makebook for eReader format. methods originally developed by Daniel Durisfor iPod Notes conversion. Apple’s textutil command for RTF. Desktop Connection Library for Newton Paperback format. Mobigen.exe for Mobipocket format. Wine to run mobigen.exe on OS X. Componnents of mjBook for cellphone “.jar” files HAWHAW toolkit for the WAP sitehttp://mnybks.net. Calibre for Read more

ManyBooks.net – catalogue of free eBooks

Browse through the most popular titles, recommendations, or recent reviewsfrom our visitors. Perhaps you’ll find something interesting in the special collections. There are more than 29,000 eBooks available for Kindle, Nook, iPad and most other eReaders, and they’re all free! If you still can’t decide what to read you might want to browse through some covers to see what strikes your fancy. Or try the Recent Additions to the library, with genre filter. Many of the etexts are from the November, 2003 Project Gutenberg DVD, which contains the entire Project Gutenberg archives except for the Human Genome Project and audio eBooks, due to size limitations, and the Project Gutenberg of Read more

Adobe Kuler: Explore, create and share color themes

Discover Adobe® Kuler® — the web-hosted application for generating color themes that can inspire any project. No matter what you’re creating, with Kuler you can experiment quickly with color variations and browse thousands of themes from the Kuler community. DID YOU KNOW… Adobe Kuler is now available as a tablet app The Adobe Kuler app, an extension of the full Adobe Kuler service, enables you to generate and view color themes on the go. Initially available for Android only. Kuler is available online at no charge Explore, create, and share color themes. Try Kuler now Kuler is accessible from your favorite Read more

Learn HTML and CSS – book – Jon Duckett

A NICER WAY TO LEARN ABOUT HTML & CSS A book about code that doesn’t read like a 1980’s VCR manual… It’s not just for programmers, it’s written and presented to make it easy for designers, artists, bloggers, content and e-commerce managers, marketers to learn about the code used to write web pages… Learn how to: Read and write HTML5 and CSS3 Structure and design web pages and sites Prepare images, audio and video for the web Control typography and layout You will also find lots of helpful hints and practical advice alongside the code A NICER WAY TO LEARN Read more

Photo Rag Baryta

Photo Rag Baryta 315 gsm · 100% Cotton · white high-gloss Photo Rag Baryta combines the virtues of a luxury cotton paper and a traditional baryta board. The very fine surface texture with the baryta gloss endows portraits with a particularly expressive character.   Web: http://www.hahnemuehle.com/prod/us/461/592/photo-rag-baryta-315-gsm.html PDF: http://www.hahnemuehle.com/media/photoragbaryta_rev02.pdf  

Book printers

As a rough guide, these kind of printers would take jobs of 500+ copies Aldgate Press, Gunthorpe Workshop, Gunthorpe Street, London E1 7RQ 020 7247 3015 BAS Printers, 1 Premier Way, Abbey Park, Romsey, Hampshire SO51 9DQ 01794 834 605 Kube Digital Print, 44 Paul Street, London EC2A 4LB 020 7739 9744 Lecturis, F36 Argos House Office Centre, Kilburn Park Road, London NW6 5LF 020 7644 0498 Lithosphere, London 020 7686 6111 TRL Digital Print, 25 Holywell Row, London EC2A 4XE 020 7739 3152 White Offset, 159-179 Empress Road, Southampton SO14 0JW 02380 632 111 Die Keure See also:

Epson inkjet cartridge recycling

The only way to recycle EPSON inkjet cartridges is to return them to EPSON. None of the reuse schemes accept EPSON. Slade Digital Print are part of the EPSON Recycling Scheme and have a large blue box in the Digital Print are to collect them in. All students and staff are welcome to take advantage of this box for EPSON inkjet cartridge recycling. (But, please do not use the Epson box for any other manufacturer or compatible cartridges as these will end up in landfill.)

Free alternative to Microsoft Office

The Document Foundation, which coordinates development of LibreOffice, a new, free and open office suite, has reached an important development milestone significantly ahead of schedule. LibreOffice 3.3 shipped this week; it’s the first, stable, road-ready version of the suite. A large, 100+ community of developers has been attracted to the project, and while it’s still clearly under construction, it’s an impressive showing in a short time. Website: http://www.libreoffice.org/download/

Software at UCL Clusters

There are many applications available at UCL Clusters that would be useful to Slade students, such as Photoshop It’s worth noting that some Clusters, such as those in UCL Libraries, are open 24 hours at certain times of year. Full list of software is on this webpage: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/isd/staff/purchasing/software/software_bid/applications

Hahnemühle Photo Rag

A smooth bright white 100% rag based paper specifically designed to meet the need of photographers or artists using digital photographic output. The heavier 308 gsm paper provides the weight of an art paper with a smooth calendered surface, which picks up every detail captured in the photograph. PDF: Hahnemühle Photo Rag data sheet