When I started in design, my knowledge of fonts (or typefaces, if you prefer) didn’t extend much further than Times and Arial.

Now, my work is primarily all about fonts in terms of choosing the right ones and using them properly.

But I ran across something the other day that I wish I had when I started. It’s a nice PDF of font combinations that work well together, especially in subhead/body copy usage.

It is just one person’s opinion, but if you’re starting out and totally lost, one person’s opinion is a big help.

From the list on the BonFX site, I favor the Myriad/Minion combo. I also use Myriad/Garamond a lot. Like any designer, I actually use a number of combos, but those two work really well for the types of projects I do.

Before today’s Quick Tip, a quick note about my last post on chamber networking events and why they’re a waste of your time. I’ll talk more indepth on this in the future, but for now I’ll just say how interesting it was to see who was hitting this site.

Boeing hit the site in under 48 hours. (You’ll recall I mentioned Boeing on how they’re probably pretty smart about how they network… a lesson we could all learn.) Then there was a chamber in MN. No doubt they’re wanting to publish my thoughts in the next issue of their newsletter.

What I’ll be talking about in the near future is tracking visits to your site and why you should be doing it.

OK, on to today’s topic…

Some years ago, when CDs were becoming popular, I really wanted to buy an import CD from the U.K. But it was a bit pricey for a high school kid on a tight budget. My mom said, “Don’t worry… it will be there when you have the money.”

Turns out, she was wrong. The CD went out of print and didn’t become available again for another decade or so. Suddenly, I had the money, but the CD wasn’t available. (And this was pre-Internet, so finding it used somewhere in the world wasn’t an easy option.)

I’ve relived that experience in my business when trying to find information on a website I bookmarked only to find that information is gone. Don’t buy into the myth that once something is on the Internet, it never goes away.

If you’re anything like me, you buzz around the Internet, finding great information for your business, and then bookmark it for later. More often than not, that works fine. But Murphy’s Law says the bit of information you want most is the bit that someone is going to remove.

I solved this by making PDFs of sites that have great information I may want to refer to later.

In Adobe Acrobat, this is really simple and there are multiple ways to do accomplish it. Here’s how I do it:

1. Copy the URL of the site you’re wanting to save.

2. In Acrobat, go to File | Create PDF | From Web Page (I’m using Acrobat 8 Professional)

3. Paste the URL in the URL field and click Create. I don’t bother with any other settings beyond the default, but feel free to play around with it.

4. Once the PDF is create it, save it with a descriptive filename and place it in a folder that you have easy access to.

This has solved a couple of problems. The most important is “disappearing information” I talked about earlier. The second is an out-of-control list of bookmarks.

So my suggestion is to either take my steps, or come up with your own, and start archiving some of this information yourself so you can find it when you need it.

At this week’s MacWorld Expo, Recosoft Corporation announced an upcoming utility to convert PDF documents into InDesign files that can be edited.

Check out the news release, then come back and I’ll tell you why this has great potential for designers.

First, I don’t expect this tool to do a perfect conversion. I would think it’s virtually impossible for certain things to be translated. And I can’t imagine that the conversion process will create the individual character and style sheets that might have been used to create the PDF in the first place.

So as long as we’re not expecting perfection, we’re ok because I doubt it’s possible.

However…

If the conversion can get you “close enough,” that could be enough to save you loads of time.

Here’s a not-too-uncommon scenario that a direct market designer encounters where a tool like this will be useful. The client calls and says, “We’ve got a 300 page book that we need to make some changes on. We have the completed PDF, but the designer has the original files and we can’t get access to them.”

In some cases, it’s almost better to start from scratch, but that’s not always practical or cost effective.

Imagine, instead, that you could use this plug-in to do most of the dirty work, then go back through and fix the things the conversion couldn’t handle. How much time might that save you on a large project? What kind of hero might you be to the client?

Well, the bottom line is we won’t know how useful this plug-in will be until it’s released. But it’s definitely something you’ll want to keep on eye on if you’re an InDesign user.