Paul Howson’s Website tdgq.com.au

Design and Publishing Notebook

All Posts for This Blog (newest first)

Starting the Gradual Move to Affinity

When Adobe decided to go the subscription route for their “Creative Cloud” applications in 2013 they fractured their loyal user base. Six years later this seems like a good time to move to the Affinity apps.

Nine Months with Hugo — The Experience So Far

Nine months in, how’s Hugo travelling? Surprisingly well in fact. Lots to learn along the way. But no roadblocks so far. That’s a big plus and somewhat unusual for a CMS. Hugo is proving a remarkably flexible and deep piece of work.

Is Glyph Scaling a Good Idea in Book Typesetting?

On a recent book project I decided to use Glyph Scaling as a justification parameter in addition to my long-standing practice of allowing subtle letter-spacing adjustments, and of course basic word-spacing adjustment. The results were not quite what I expected.

Using TEX for Scripted Generation of Beautiful Documents

Given the task of creating a system for generating beautifully designed reports I knew there was one outstanding candidate for this task — the venerable TEX typesetting system, designed in the late 1970s by Donald E. Knuth of Stanford University.

The Need for Competition to Adobe

The lack of practical alternatives to the key Adobe apps has allowed Adobe take control of the customer relationship by attempting to enforce a subscription-only scheme.

Learning to Typeset and Layout Books in the 1970s

My first direct exposure to the world of design and publishing was being handed the task of typesetting and laying out a 300-page book. I had no prior experience of typesetting and laying out a book.

Light at the End of the Tunnel

After a year of near silence since the Business Catalyst merger with Adobe we at last had a chance to see the faces and hear the voices of the team behind BC.

Limitations of Templates and Content Holders

One of the puzzling things about Business Catalyst is why tried and tested software designs successfully used in open source content management systems (and hence readily available to mimic) have been completely ignored.

Blog Templates Not Quite Right Yet

The recent addition of separate templates in Business Catalyst for blog posts in list and detail views is a small but useful improvement. At last we have a way to distinguish the context in which a blog post is being presented.

Hierarchical Attributes in Website Structure — Part 1

There were many ground-breaking ideas within the Frontier Web Site Framework. One of them was the concept of a web site as a tree of nodes in a hierarchical object database, to which arbitrary objects could be attached.

Blogging in BC Needs an Overhaul

The Blog module in Business Catalyst, like most of the system, is adequate for basics. However it is nowhere near as flexible as dedicated blogging systems like WordPress and the like.

In setting up my first blog with BC, the limitations are appearing pretty quickly.

One example: The subtemplate used to display an individual blog post within a whole series of blog posts on the “front page” of the blog is exactly the same template used to display an individual blog post on a page by itself (i.e. on its “permalink” page).

What Business Catalyst Needs from Adobe

I wonder how far Adobe looked into Business Catalyst before deciding to bring it into the Adobe stable of products a few months ago?

Business Catalyst claims to be an “Online Business Building Tool” and, yes, it offers a wide variety of functions in a single online tool. But this very diversity is also its undoing. It is broad, but it is also shallow. And it is immature.

The shallowness is revealed to the web developer as soon as they start to use the system in earnest. It manifests in every aspect of the product. It is a system which does the basics in each functional area, but no more. It lacks the sophistication and polish of the specialised tool designed to do one job only and do it really well. By trying to do all jobs it does nothing particularly well.

About this Blog

After studying and graduating in Electrical Engineering from Monash University, I joined a small publishing organisation where my work with typesetting equipment kindled an enduring interest in graphic design.

This has been my main area of work for over 30 years. For much of this period I have operated my own graphic design business. Fortunes have fluctuated but at its high point in the mid 1990s we had a staff of four people … and this was in a Queensland country town.