Web Width Reductions

At what point should AP start producing an agate package that is friendly to those papers that are down to Calista Flockhart proportions?

 

How many columns are you running on the page? Then drop down one, 7 to 6, 6 to 5 and so on.
I was doing some playing around on inDesign and realized that the width of a 5 column, was about the same on the new paper width as the 6 column was on the old.
You can also edit your style sheets, but the easier fix is just making a wider column.

 

Right now, it's six columns. My SE is vehemently against five columns on the agate page, as he believes the columns would be too wide and waste space (I believe we measured them out at over 12p). To be fair, we have a five-column front and we both hate it because of the limited layout options (I discussed it in the design thread a few weeks ago).

 

You could think about rearranging your page, so maybe the the top third or quarter of the page is nothing but standings, scores and pitching matchups. Put that on a bastard width and then the middle and bottom of the page be on six columns and that be the boxes and roundups.
Then get a better fix for next season, assuming you don't lose more web width.

 

Our page two is funny. Normally, the left column of six is always devoted to standings, whether it be MLB or any of the big four. The next column or two (depending upon length) is shorts, announcements and agate. This inevitably makes the layout chaotic, because depending upon the day, we have two inches or 24. Today was a best case scenario, because everything was made to fit evenly into two columns, and I used the remaining space (which was about 3 1/2 of the columns on the page) to make three even bastard rule columns.

The worst case scenario is that the shorts package is significantly more or less than a column, and/or there's an ad stack, which means articles and columns in funny and near-random lengths and widths (call it DP "Old School").

We've asked our IT person to work the problem, but we share him with the sister paper in the next town over (and the press, located even between the two), so he can only fix it when he's here and nothing else in the building is breaking down.

 

RE: Changing tabs in Quark.
1) Go to your templates and change the column width to the new settings. This will obviously make them wackerjawed.
2) Highlight the lines in the template you will narrow and scroll the page up or down, depending on how it is on your screen, so the highlighted area is about an inch below the top of the screen.
3) Click on Style, go down and click on Tabs. This should bring up a small "ruler" at the top of your template for what is highlighted. You can click on this "ruler" to set tab breaks. They can be left-, right- or center-justified.
4) Make the changes you need, then save and use the template for future use.

Important note: Make sure you highlight every line in each template area you wish to change. My biggest problem was score by innings/quarters, so I had to higlight both the home and visitor score by innings/quarters before I made the changes.
Another change for me was the team stats for football (rushing-yards, pass attempts-completions-interceptions, etc). Again, I had to highlight everything from the home and visitor columns at the top to the end of the last stat line (one big block), make the changes and then save.

It was fun learning how to do it on my own because when we bought Quark years back, the lone instruction book (yes, lone book) was locked away by our parent company after we got a brief intro into how the program worked. Wonderful.

 

We went to 46" earlier this year. Which means we'll be resizing templates for the next year or so.

I reduced our bodycopy point size from 9.2 to 8.5 and nobody's complained. One interesting byproduct of the change is that it makes our centerpiece so much deeper that it makes it possible to put another story in the bottom part, which means we could start 6 stories on the cover and it not look crowded.

 

The IT guy was in today and the problem appears to have been fixed. Hooray!

(For the sake of the record, we're now down to 23".)

 

Your IT guy helped? Must be new.

 

Surprising, I know. Every time I see him, I say, "Well, what's broke today?" Surprisingly, he hasn't slugged me yet.

 

I actually have to design two fronts for my paper: One for the controlled circ piece that includes the free piece as a second section. The other for the free piece that gets distributed separately (it just gets a replate when it's included inside the controlled circ part).

The controlled circ front is a four column layout not including the rail. The free piece is a five column layout. I've been talking to our production manager and graphics dude/ad guy and telling him if we end up going through with the web width reduction, I'm ditching the rail.

If you think a five column layout gives you limited options, try a four column layout. Guaranteed to pull your hair out.

 

I did a redesign of the cover with a five column front and it had a top-to-bottom rail, so it was really just four column for the page field.
I didn't think it was that bad.