Part 1 of 2 parts

Recently after a conversation with David Blatner, (see http://indesignsecrets.com/,  and http://63p.com/), David described that InDesign provides layout capability for both printed materials and websites, and the data should be as flexible as possible. Vectors are preferred over raster. High-resolution raster over low-resolution raster. This comment led me to think about a way to know how flexible is the data you use.

The concept of soft and hard data occurred.

-Soft data relates to the world of ideas, where the characteristics of a thing can change and specifications are malleable.

-Hard data is real world stuff where things are measured, are fixed in dimensions and location in space.

InDesign is a purveyor of soft data and a RIP is a creator of hard data. But telling the difference between hard and soft data is more difficult that you would think. InDesign uses both hard and soft data and turns soft data hard. To better understand the distinction between hard and soft, let’s look at a couple of examples.

There is vector and vector

Soft: The distance between points is described in a number of units, as a ratio, as a formula, and as a matrix. Distance between points can be hardened with the introduction of a coordinate transformation matrix, (CTM), or a measurement system.

There are 5 increments from point A to point B. Five units is soft data. The CTM signifies that the units are in inches and the enlargement is 200%. In this case the CTM makes the soft distance hard. Five units becomes 10 inches.

Hard: Measurement of distance such as with the metric system. The distance from point A to point B is 5 inches, 12.7 cm, etc. The system used to measure the length doesn’t change the distance. The length is hard.

There is raster and raster

Hard: InDesign displays the hard metric -- pixels per inch, (ppi) -- of an image before and after scaling. The ppi relates to a unit of measure, inches, and that metric hardens the soft data. InDesign scales the image to the image’s rectangle size, and hardens the data and displays the resulting ppi. It then hardens the data even more by changing the number of pixels to a reasonable number of pixels per inch for halftoning. The real world requires hard data and as soft data is described by real world stuff, that data becomes hard.

Soft: The Apple CIImage framework scales the rows and columns of the image to the rectangle size. CIImage has no concept of ppi, and hence keeps the data soft. (Quartz developers will cringe at my description.)

Soft or Hard: High definition digital television resolution is specified in what seems like hard data but is really soft. The specification, 720 pixels wide, does not indicate the size of the pixel, the size of the TV, nor how many pixels per inch is displayed. The diagonal dimension, 42 inches, makes the soft specification hard. A 26 inch TV has smaller pixels than a 42 inch TV.

Next blog:

Information gained from hard and soft data. (The term “blog” doesn’t pin me down as to when I should post the next part. – as would “next week”. “Blog” is soft data, and “Next week” is hard data.)