Shuki Kato's book

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kareshi
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Re: Should Shuki Kato make a book?

Post by kareshi »

I'm 30 years old and you can cool it. I was just disappointed, half for selfish reasons (nothing I diagram will ever look professional.) But best of luck to Mr. Kato and I'll be following the development.
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Re: Should Shuki Kato make a book?

Post by origami-artist-galen »

mummykicks wrote:
HankSimon wrote:Is there a program that will take your Inkscape diagrams and convert them into a Freehand mx format, to help save you some time?
Don't know anything about inkscape, but if you can save as .dxf just about any CAD software in the world will be able to read it. There are some freeware versions of CAD software out there that might work as well.
Nope, didn't work, oh well.

I've been drawing each page on a 1360x1760 px page to answer another guys question (which has since disappeared) which is almost double the length and width of standard US letter paper. Anyway, I'm not worrying about that anymore. Soooo, 50 steps into this Kabutomushi.
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Re: Should Shuki Kato make a book?

Post by FlareglooM »

Shuki, did Nicolas give a more elaborate explanation than that they aren't the proper quality for professional printing. I think I know what he is aiming at, so I'll explain it a bit here.
I'll start with the regular bitmap images for some basic understanding. Vectors work different.

Pixels per inch (PPI)
For regular rasterized (bitmap) images you have a grid of pixels. Usually you have a certain amount of pixels per unit of distance, commonly Pixels Per Inch (PPI).
PPI is the resolution of an image, of a certain size, that is to be printed.
So let's assume we have a picture of 100 x 100 pixels that has a resolution of 100 PPI. If you would print it the result will be an image of 1 inch x 1 inch.
We could do now two things in changing this image regarding it's dimensions: Resize or Resample
- Resize: The amount of pixels will stay fixed. You cannot change these.
Example: if we adjust the PPI to let's say 200, the image dimensions will also change , i.e. we will have a 1/2 inch x 1/2 inch image.
- Resample: The amount of pixels is altered but your output print size will be the same.
Example: The printing size stays the same, so 1 inch x 1 inch. If we now change the PPI to 200 your picture of 100 x 100 pixels will be changed to 200 x 200 pixels.

So in short: Resizing -> Changes the output printing size, Resample -> Changes your picture.

Dots per inch
When a printer prints it drops drops of ink. Each drop can be considered as a "dot". Depending on your printer you have a certain DPI resolution. For example if you have 600 DPI, again with the picture 100 PPI and print it you will have 36 dots of inkt per pixel. (600 DPI x 600 DPI / 100 PPI x 100 PPI)
Now if you do the same with a 100 DPI printer with the picture of 100 PPI you will have 1 dot of inkt per pixel. This means you will have a less accurate color and thus a crappier print.

So that is it for bitmap/rasterized images.

Vectors images are composed of mathematical objects (lines, shapes etc). Because of this you can change their size and they will not give you those ugly big pixels if you scale up. But because of this vector images don't really have a resolution, i.e no real PPI. You can make them twice as big but they still looks as good.
So you would say Inkscape SVG's should work just fine, but I found some catches.

Inkscape
Ok now let's go to Inkscape. It's default setting is A4 and I think you might be using that to draw your diagrams in. The A4 dimensions in Inkscape are 744.09 x 1052.36 pixels. We want to print it on A4 paper which is 8.27 inch x 11.69 inch. So if we divide the pixels by the inches we get PPI and this will result in 90 PPI as a resolution for bitmaps. This resolution happens to be standard for Inkscape. If you choose to use the standard A4, letter etc, it always uses the 90 PPI resolution. This means if you import a 100x100 pixels, 180 PPI image it will be doubled in size in Inkscape (180/90=2). So you have a 200x200 pixels image. It's not that important for you because you use the vectors and not bitmap, but it is nice to know.

The second thing is the color support of Inkscape. Laptop screens and such use LED's consisting of RGB, i.e Red, Green and Blue to create the colors on your screen. Combine them and you get other colors (yellow, purple, orange for example) . Printers often use CMYK, a different set of colors (cyan, magenta, yellow, key=black). So there needs to be some sort of conversion with what you see and what you print.
When you print directly from Inkscape it flattens out the image and prints it in RGB. In other words color values change slightly. The same happens with exporting to a PDF in Inkscape. (see here)
There is a workaround for this, at least if I must believe this site I haven't really made this happen yet because I don't have the ICC-profile listed on the site. Maybe you can import your SVG in Scribus and get the needed professional quality. (I think I will be playing around with this later)

Well this was it. Just some information I searched around for and processed :D.

Good luck with making your book!

Edit: On a sidenote, why does this forum always give me a heart attack when I make a long post and I get auto logged out [-o< thank god for tabs and refreshing.
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Re: Should Shuki Kato make a book?

Post by dinogami »

origami-artist-galen wrote:Not very good news guys, I contacted Nicolas Terry for some advice (and possible help with production) and according to him Inkscape diagrams isn't quite good enough for professional published diagrams. So... I'm going to try a different (costly) program and I will have to redraw EVERYTHING. I'm just apologizing for getting getting anyone's hopes up for publication early next year. But... I'm still working on this and I will try my darnedest not to disappoint.
Well, I don't think FreeHand can import Inkscape files, but Adobe Illustrator reportedly can read Inkscape SVG files, and from Illustrator, you might be able to save it in an older format that Freehand can then open. I suspect that the resulting files won't be perfect, but might be editable and prevent you from having to start over from scratch...?
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Re: Should Shuki Kato make a book?

Post by origami-artist-galen »

dinogami wrote:
origami-artist-galen wrote:Not very good news guys, I contacted Nicolas Terry for some advice (and possible help with production) and according to him Inkscape diagrams isn't quite good enough for professional published diagrams. So... I'm going to try a different (costly) program and I will have to redraw EVERYTHING. I'm just apologizing for getting getting anyone's hopes up for publication early next year. But... I'm still working on this and I will try my darnedest not to disappoint.
Well, I don't think FreeHand can import Inkscape files, but Adobe Illustrator reportedly can read Inkscape SVG files, and from Illustrator, you might be able to save it in an older format that Freehand can then open. I suspect that the resulting files won't be perfect, but might be editable and prevent you from having to start over from scratch...?
Hmmm, I might be able to try that.

I noticed that saving the file as a .png image and then printing looks 10 times better than the pdf prints. As long as this isn't an e-book that doesn't matter right? And it's easy enough to print, just select all the pages at once and go.
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Re: Should Shuki Kato make a book?

Post by Harpseal »

That should work.
Having to start again is just silly.
Serif draw isn't costly but is very professional.
What could he mean by 'inkscape not being professional enough'? Just because it's open source doesn't make it un-professional, look at audacity and all those people with home studios.
You could copy/paste them into another program and fill them a different shade of grey?
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Re: Should Shuki Kato make a book?

Post by origami-artist-galen »

Harpseal wrote:That should work.
Having to start again is just silly.
Serif draw isn't costly but is very professional.
What could he mean by 'inkscape not being professional enough'? Just because it's open source doesn't make it un-professional, look at audacity and all those people with home studios.
You could copy/paste them into another program and fill them a different shade of grey?
Me and my silly ideas. Oh well, have fun.
1. He basically said that the pdf files and resulting prints were too grainy for a professional printer. He did like the original .png final diagram page up until I told him I used Inkscape to draw it.
2. You can copy/paste them, but trust me it only looks worse.
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Re: Should Shuki Kato make a book?

Post by phillipcurl »

The resized diagrams of your WD3 have extremely high res, I zoomed in as close as I could on my computer, which is where one black line takes up practically 2/3 the screen, and it was still sharp.
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FlareglooM
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Re: Should Shuki Kato make a book?

Post by FlareglooM »

philipcurl: that is probably because it is still a vector, you can scale them as far as you want.

Shuki do you save it as a Cairo PNG? (basically File -> Save as.., dropdown list to Cairo PNG)
If so this should increase quality even more:
1. Open your SVG diagram in Inkscape.
2. Go to File -> Export Bitmap.
3. Click on Page.
4. Under Bitmap Size, change pixels at ... PPI to 300 PPI.(common printing quality).
5. Export.

There is only one "catch" . I've read in the topic that you use 1360x1760 px document. This is almost double of the US letter paper. If you want to have a 300 PPI US letter page sized PNG you must use the size indicated in Inkscape, so 765 x 990 px before you export.
The reason for this is in my previous post but I'll state it again. Inkscape standard export is 90 PPI. So if you save it as a PNG it will have a 90 PPI resolution. (= 765 x 990 px)
A 300 PPI US letter PNG needs to have 2550 x 3300 px size. (8.5 inch * 300 PPI = 2550 pixels and 11 inch * 300 PPI = 3300 pixels).

Let's say you now export your 1360x1760 document at 300 PPI you will have a 4533 x 5867 px PNG document. This corresponds to a 15.11 x 19.56 inch print. (4533/300=15.11 and 5867/300=19.56) This is not US letter page sized.

Good luck :)
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Re: Should Shuki Kato make a book?

Post by mirek.mrajca »

Hello Friends!
I have to agree with Shuki, PDF file is the best. It works on same form like vector program. Try to look to detail on same thing in PDF and then in PNG, PNG has the very worse quallity then PDF. Please trust me, I worked with these files all summer, becouse I am editor of Czech Convention Book.

Good luck with diagramming Shuki!
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Re: Should Shuki Kato make a book?

Post by jeko »

Sorry, I don't really get the problem:

Inkscape is a vector graphics program. So per definition you should have "infinite" resolution.

I have only dealt with professional printers a long time ago and than they always preferred vector based stuff over bitmaps. But anyhow: as FlareglooM points out you can export bitmaps from Inkscape in more or less an arbitrary resolution (until you run out of memory, I suppose)...

FlareglooM's point about CMYK is valid but if the book is not going to be full color it doesn't really matter that much (and you could do the few color pages differently).

Agreed, importing to a different program always tends to screw up things. The advantage of a professional program might be that it is easy to change the style of arrows, lines, etc. globally with one click. I don't think (my version of) Inkscape supports that.
origami-artist-galen wrote:I noticed that saving the file as a .png image and then printing looks 10 times better than the pdf prints.
So you sent Nicolas PNGs and/or a PDF based on PNGs? No wonder he is complaining...

I would be careful with approach "looks better on my printer if I use PNGs, hence I'll go for that". It might look totally different on the printer used to produce the book or even if you just use a higher resolution PNG.
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Re: Should Shuki Kato make a book?

Post by origami-artist-galen »

jeko wrote:Sorry, I don't really get the problem:

Inkscape is a vector graphics program. So per definition you should have "infinite" resolution.

I have only dealt with professional printers a long time ago and than they always preferred vector based stuff over bitmaps. But anyhow: as FlareglooM points out you can export bitmaps from Inkscape in more or less an arbitrary resolution (until you run out of memory, I suppose)...

FlareglooM's point about CMYK is valid but if the book is not going to be full color it doesn't really matter that much (and you could do the few color pages differently).

Agreed, importing to a different program always tends to screw up things. The advantage of a professional program might be that it is easy to change the style of arrows, lines, etc. globally with one click. I don't think (my version of) Inkscape supports that.
origami-artist-galen wrote:I noticed that saving the file as a .png image and then printing looks 10 times better than the pdf prints.
So you sent Nicolas PNGs and/or a PDF based on PNGs? No wonder he is complaining...

I would be careful with approach "looks better on my printer if I use PNGs, hence I'll go for that". It might look totally different on the printer used to produce the book or even if you just use a higher resolution PNG.
Thanks for all of your input. I think you misunderstood me a bit near the end, the only images Nicolas saw were the ones I already uploaded (.pngs on flickr and DA) and he was happy with those. It's only when I said they were drawn with Inkscape that he had a problem with it mentioning the print quality on the pdf was not good enough, which I agree with. Again, the images converted from .svg to .png look wayyy better than the .pdf. But again, I'm worrying about this anymore and nobody else needs to either 8)
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Re: Should Shuki Kato make a book?

Post by OrigamiGeek »

what you could do is draw your inkscape diagrams but use a square as the template or what ever you call the thing you draw on the put them one by one in to scribus (a desktop publishing program) ;) I hope this helps

this is what I am doing when I make my diagrams but I am just diagramming my seconed design But I think it is worth trying B)
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Re: Should Shuki Kato make a book?

Post by origami-artist-galen »

I was wondering, what technique for the two-pronged thoracic horn you guys preferred, that of V1 or v2?

V1 (Lang Influenced)
Image
V2 (Kamiya, Mabona influenced)
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I suppose I could just diagram both versions as well. I think I might prefer that of v1, even though everything else in v2 is superior.
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Re: Should Shuki Kato make a book?

Post by kareshi »

V1 looks more natural as far as that one aspect goes. Are you sure you can't rework V2? I do like the leg spines.

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