Geology 4717/5717 Field Guide Construction

We will make an electronic version of the field guide that will be put on the iPads we expect to have on the trip (and also any laptops, should we bring any this year, though the laptops will stay in trucks). This would allow for some color figures and some other unusual material, but note that there will not be iPads for everyone....(well, maybe there will be...we'll see). Note that the fieldguide is printed in black and white, not in color.

The final goal then is to make a pdf version of your final annotated bibliography, your one page summary, and your illustrations. The easiest path to that might not be obvious. Admittedly if you gave me four pdfs (a page summary + figures and an annotated bibliography, one for each topic), it would be easiest for me to assemble. But in many cases that proves difficult and we want the guide materials to be legible, so there are other options depending on your comfort level in making high quality pdfs...

Annotated Bibliography: This should be straightforward. This can be a Word file or a pdf (or rtf or Pages or text, I suppose), but please make separate files for each topic! The topic name and the presenter(s) name(s) should be at the top of the page.

One page summary: Also pretty straightforward. Same rules: Word or pdf (or rtf or Pages) but separate file for each topic (And NOT merged with the bibliography--bibliographies will be at the end of the guide). Please be sure to have the topic title and presenter names at the top.

Illustrations: This is the hardest part of doing this electronically. There are three parts to this: getting the illustrations into the computer, assembling and annotating them, and then making a single file for use in building the field guide. These days, almost all geologic literature is available digitally. Note that if you are using some color figures, you might try printing them in black and white and see how horrible they might look: if they are really bad, you might want to make a separate black-and-white version, if possible. If you alert me to having both grayscale and color versions of figures, I will *try* to get the color in the pdf for the iPads while using the grayscale in the printed field guide. Although it is easier for me to work with a single illustration file for each presentation, if you are having trouble laying out the images, then send me images and captions separately and I will do what I can. I strongly discourage Word for creating the illustration file. Word simply is a lousy page layout program. If you really decide to play with Word, I would suggest exporting the file to a pdf and then confirming that pdf looks OK; the reason is that for some reason, Word files with illustrations often reformat themselves on other computers. I've often seen images degraded so much that they are nearly worthless having passed through Word's illustration management.

How many illustrations? Well, it is possible to have none, but usually you'll want something a bit more technical than what you can draw on a small whiteboard along for the ride. Ten pages is clearly way to much (you are not making a flipbook). Most topics do well with 2-4 pages of figures. If you are planning on going above 5, please check with me.

Scanning figures: Obviously for materials unavailable as pdfs (which could include figures you made yourself), you are stuck scanning the figures in. We have a scanner on the Mac across from my door; ask about the account to that machine for those of you that want to use it to scan materials in. There is also a scanner in the library (well, there was; I think it is probably still there). Unless you are really talented and careful, phone photos of graphics really look amateurish and are often distorted. There are loads of different scanning packages out there on different platforms, so I cannot give specific guidance here (but VueScan is cross-platform and very nice). But there are some general rules. First, scan in either color (if your figure is color) or grayscale; do not scan in black and white unless there is no gray anywhere, and I wouldn't bother with 8-bit color these days (24 or 32 bit color is fine). 8-bit grayscale is usually adequate for black-and-white or grayscale images, if that option is available. A lot of times there are presets for various output destinations; these can be misleading, I'm afraid, and I tend to kick on advanced options to see what I am really doing. I tend to work backwards from what I want on the page: if I am thinking of a figure for a full page, I want it to be no less than 300 dpi (dots per inch), which on the printable part of a page is about 2100 x 3000 or so pixels. When I select the area to scan, I then look to see what the final image size will be and will change the scan resolution to get what I want (some packages allow you to work backwards and specify the output size). If you decide to scan in black-and-white, I suggest no less than 600 dpi (the file sizes are not bad as there is only 1 bit per pixel). Generally you will want to save as a JPEG with a quality setting in the medium to high area (70-90). Once you have scanned your image, preview it to see that the image will work for you (zoom in enough to be sure that you got the resolution you need). The two most common mistakes made in scanning old artwork are to use too low a resolution and to use an inappropriate scan type (e.g., black and white on a grayscale image).

Special scanning notes: If you are scanning color or a printed grayscale image, you will often find that it is made up of lots of little dots of color. Many scanning packages will have a descreening option that tries to deal with this so your scanned image is more like the original than the screened image on the page. These are usually set to 75 dpi (and are often set by default if there is a magazine or newspaper option), but some images are printed at a higher screen density and so will lose resolution when being scanned. If you can adjust the screen setting, you might examine how this affects your scan if you are having troubles with a particular image. Another control than can influence color images is color balance. Fortunately for most of what we would scan, this hardly matters, but there can be instances where you can improve the visibility of the scanned image through these tools. In making a grayscale image from color images, it can be quite helpful sometimes to greatly alter the color balance (for instance, many landscape photos are very blue; reducing the blue channel or changing the contrast within blue can improve the visibility of features when rendered in grayscale).

Extracting images from pdfs: This can be pretty trivial or exceedingly painful, and sometimes it depends on the pdf source. Tools I use tend to be Apple's Preview and Adobe's Acrobat Professional (Acrobat Reader is much more limited but can do some useful things in this regard). You may learn that many of the images scanned in pdfs are low quality for much magnification. Sometimes there are higher resolution versions of the images that can be downloaded from the original publication. Often times a published paper's pdf version will contain the highest resolution image while the html version of the paper will be far lower in quality.

Preview can be very quick: if you use the Select tool to outline the figure you want, and then copy it and then select "New from Clipboard" from the File menu, Preview makes a new pdf with the full resolution of the original. Saving this as a pdf will give you your image (though it is a bit of a cheat: in fact, what Preview saves is that full page with a crop box that you have made). You can also save as a jpeg or other format, specifying the resolution. Either is usually better than pasting the selection into another program (though it depends on the program; I have had terrible luck with Word but done OK with Pages).

Acrobat should be more powerful but the program is laden with challenges (Acrobat Pro is free for campus users). The temptation is to use the Snapshot tool; this will make a TIFF image at the current screen resolution. So to use this, you will want to zoom in to probably 400% or maybe more before using this tool so that your image will have a good enough resolution for use elsewhere. The regular text selection tool will also allow you to select images if they are embedded image files; right-clicking (command-click for Macs) will allow you to save the image as a file. This is not a useful tool if the image is a constructed pdf (you'll notice you are selecting pieces of text within the figure). An alternative is to extract the page with the figure (in the Document menu) and then crop the page to the figure and save as a pdf. Note that exporting as a jpeg from Acrobat is usually unsatisfactory: it often sets the dpi to 72 at the original scale of the figure, which is far too low for reproduction. Acrobat also has an Export Images command that will apply to embedded jpegs (but doesn't work well for other images)

Other options: Adobe Illustrator can read pdfs and in some instances you can manipulate things there more completely than in Acrobat; the same can apply to Photoshop. Neither is particularly quick or easy for this work. CanvasX/CanvasXDraw similarly can open and deal with pdfs; it is more flexible in many ways but not available as a cheap download.

Building your illustration page(s): Many students try to use Word for this. As I said above, this is not the ideal option, although the improvement in page layout tools in Word of late has made it less painful. The problem is that often Word will move images from page to page or overlap things or do other insensitive things as you struggle to get the pieces organized; it is also not so wonderful about dealing with pdf files. If you do use Word, I suggest trying the Publishing Layout option in the more recent versions of Word. Please see if you can export the document as a pdf, and then open the pdf in some pdf reader to see that it all looks OK and that the resolution of the images is adequate. If you want to actually make a really nice layout, Adobe's InDesign works very well, especially if you have saved images as pdfs. Apple's Pages works very well too in its page layout mode. Frankly, I would prefer 10 files with individual figures to one Word file with figures dragged in.

You should label each figure with, at minimum, your own figure number and the source of the figure (using a proper citation, e.g., Smith et al., 1990). If you wish to provide a caption, be sure it is located rather obviously in association with the figure in question. I would suggest putting the title of your topic at the top of the page for easy reference. As before, do not combine materials from multiple topics. If you are submitting separate figure files (e.g, one per image), be sure the file labels are clear (something identifying which topic and which figure number the file contains).

Exporting and submitting your illustration page(s). Please save the final product as a pdf if at all possible. On a Mac, the most reliable way is often to use the Print command but then select Save as PDF from the PDF button at the lower left of the Print dialog. On Windows machines, this can be more difficult, depending on what tools have been installed on the machine. If you are stuck saving the illustrations for a single topic as separate files, please indicate the relative page numbers in the file names (e.g., TopicNameFigs1.pdf, TopicNameFigs2.pdf, etc.).

I will combine the pdfs within InDesign or Acrobat, depending on what kind of files I am given, and where I can also generate page numbers. So don't make the pages reach too near the top or bottom margins so we have room to add the page numbers.


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Please send mail to cjones@colorado.edu if you encounter any problems or have suggestions.

C. H. Jones | CIRES | Dept. of Geological Sciences | Univ. of Colorado at Boulder

Last modified at February 15, 2023 4:08 PM