SemiOT: Article on User Interface Design

[Fairlight]

Yo, homey, in case you don' be listenin', Dennis Malen done said:
> The file was a large file and when printed each page took about 30 seconds 
> or more. When preparing the page for print a box popped up indicating it was 
> going through a "flattening " process which I had not seen before when 
> printing PDF's.

That's because it uses (a LOT of) transparencies to get the effects
I'm generating, and those need flattening to print.  But only if you
don't use "Print as Image" in Reader.  Go into the Advanced button on
the Print dialog box and check "Print as Image" and then it'll just
do "Preparing...".  My wife said that flattening took less time than
preparing, I didn't see that on my end, but we have kind of disparate
hardware (Celeron 2.4GHz/512MB vs P4-3GHz/2GB).

Either way, it does take a bit to print, and the onscreen drawing was
slower than with most PDF's.  However, I liked the effects enough to keep
it, and I didn't want to turn it into a rasterised version without text
search on principle, despite the faster printing, drawing, and lower file
size that would have resulted.  I prefer slow and crisp and functional to
fast, a bit ragged, and crippled.

> In any event, the article was very well done.

Thank you!  I hope it's helpful to folks.

mark->