The intention here is to show anyone the basics of how to use the Serif Desk Top Publishing software plus how I create the charts and chartfile logs. If any reader wants to help with finishing off files of the Real Chart they will need to have this software installed and plus know how to do the layout correctly. As I can't upload the Serif files containing the charts to the blog directly. Readers will have to e-mail me using the comments section below so I can send them to you. Mark any comments as not for publication and you can then included your e-mail address. All comments are seen by me only before publication. So security is assured.
First things first. The software:
I use mostly Version 7 which you still buy for around £16.
Or you can get the more updated version X-9 for around £20
Follow the install instructions and you will have to register the product with Serif. There might also be some additional updates the versions need free from them.
Once open (if you have one of my files) it should look like this:
This is the X-9 version on a blank document. So next you click on FILE and select the file you want to work on. In this case it's the 1950 chart.
You can see in the left hand corner all the pages in the document as tiny thumbnails. If you double click on any of them it will take you to that page. The small scroll bar will take you to any of the other pages not shown in the preview. Below it is the manual page adjustment, which will take you forward or back one page at a time, or to the start or end using the two other indicators. This will happen on the main area - not the thumbnail previews.
Lets have a closer look at the top bar this time in the X-7 version.
The folder paper icon will create a new blank document, the disc icon saves the file. Printer of course prints the file. The red Adobe icon creates a PDF of the file. The next icons are cut, copy, paste - past special. The roller is the format painter, but I rarely use it.
We'll look at some of the other menu's next.
This is a close up of the page thumbnails.
Below is the Text Styles menu.
Whenever you add text to a document it creates a separate style for it. But you can change the style using pre-set styles or modified or created styles of you own. This menu features in the Chart file documents, which look like this when loaded in.
The Chartact Style is actually the artist and title of the song. While Chartact2 style is probably the number one text. You will notice that after each title is a reversed "P" symbol. These are the invisible returns for the text. The squiggly symbol in the blank column is the indication of the end of the text. None of these show up when printed. You can probably guess some of the other text styles form the names. HP for the highest position column. Last Week for the last week one.
One the very left you will notice a series of icons start with the arrow for the Frame mode. On the above chart page you can see faint lines or dotted lines around the columns. These are the fames that text and other things are held in. By clicking on the box with the letter A in the corner, you can create text frames. Go to the place you want the top left hand corner to start on the page and click and hold. As you move you mouse a frame will start to grow. When you have it where you want it and to the size you want, release the mouse button. And a new frame will be created. It will have a squiggle icon in it, set in the default style of text. You can change this to any style you want by clicking the icon and then selecting either a style created or one of your own. If you click the reverse P at the side of the style name it will give you all sorts of options for the text style.
Highlighting a piece of text with the mouse. The clicking on the colour bar shown here will change the text colour.
You can also do this using this option.
The colour below the letter A is the current text colour selected. This can be changed by clicking to the ICON itself and the colour bar will change.
In the ASSETS box above you can save any pages that you might use again and again. This is how I save the weekly pages from my working file of the chart to the year ones. I find it best to save one page at a time otherwise the file can crash! You do this by clicking that "Add" at the bottom. It will then show you a full set of pages of the document in question. If you are on a current page it will have a tick on that page, which is the one it will save to the asserts box. You also have to specify a folder to save it too. By right clicking on the page in the assets box you can name it like I have done here. This can then be used any other Page Plus document. You simple drag the asset to your page in the other document. You can see that I have already created the name page for each chart year. Once into the document you can edit it to change any details such as giving it a new year. This does not alter the original.
Moving From Page to Page
This is easily done by using these buttons.
The far left arrow will take you to the very first page. The second left arrow takes you back one page. The numbers are the page numbers plus how many pages on the file. The right arrows do the same as the left but take you forward one or to the last page.
If you click on the forward or back arrow and you are on the first or last page you will get the following menu:
With this you can add more pages. The amount you add can be selected from the "Number of" menu. If you select after it will add the new page(s) after the last page (in the case 35). If you select before. It will put the pages before the last page. So that if you added two pages the last page would change from 35 to 37.
Once the new page is added you will have to create text frames for the text to go. If you are working on a chart file such as the A chart shown below. The reason you will need to add pages is that the current text is overflowing and can't fit on. At the bottom of each blue column you will see two buttons. One of these will autoflow the text into new pages. However this is quite difficult to control, since the two columns on each page flow into each other. So you are better selecting the button which produces a icon of text. You can then go to the next page and click inside the blue box and hold the mouse button down and drag the box to fit the blue box. On the bottom of the newly created text frame where the text will have flowed into, you need to click the same text overflow button and do the same to the next column on the same page. You then repeat till you have run out of text to flow. It's a good idea to create several pages, if you think you are going to add a lot of text to the document. However remember to go to the last page that has text and then flow each column in sequence.
On the actual chart pages each week has already been created. But you might need to add pages if you are compiling best sellers list. You will have to create a new column for the sales, highest position and the numbers as well as the artist and title.
Working With Pages
Due to a quirk in the program it will load up the page in a size that is generally too small to see.
For example A Chart file to get it to look like this:
You have to click inside this window:
Precisely at the % numbers! Type 90 into it and it will show the full page at a readable size. You also can use the plus and minus buttons and there are some pre-set sizes, but I find it best to use them. For adding sales figures up I click inside the sales column and press ALT and 2 at the same time. This really enlarges the page.
Text design on the Chart File pages
The chart file pages are already set up. The text is worked out too, but there are some things you have to do. If you are transferring titles of songs from a chart to chart file then if the text has no sales symbols, you can copy the text, by highlighting it with the mouse and click the copy button.
The copy button is the two pages option next to the scissors. In this image it is faded out as nothing has been selected to copy. No menu will appear when you do click the none faded out icon.
By the way you can have a chart page open and chart file at the same time. The program shows them inside the software. You do not see two files on the desktop bar like you do in some other programs.
You can then click the other document and put the cursor where you want to place the copied text. You have then two options. If the text does contain a sales symbol, you only have one really. And that is the Paste board icon with the white page icon. Which in this is not faded indicating there is something to paste. This paste icon copies everything directly as the original. If you don't have any special symbols included in the copy text, then you can use the second paste option with the blue box on it. You will then get a menu asking the format of the text. Selecting the simple option will paste the text into whatever format is set up in where you place it. As song titles are in italic on the charts, this is a good idea since it will remove the italic. This is not a good option for any that contain the sales symbols as it will remove those and just use the key that is used in the font for it. For example the 250K symbol users the "@" key. If you have to use the first paste option you can get rid of the italics by highlighting the text with you mouse then clicking the sloping "I" button shown below.
The scissor option will cut of course any object or piece of highlighted text. If you don't need to keep it you can press the delete key on the keyboard for any highlighted text and get rid of it that way.
It's a good point to mention these two buttons:
The two arrows are the undo and redo options. The left one will undo whatever you have just done. For example if you have pasted something in the wrong place. And the right arrow will redo the last action. You can do this with both times for several times depending on the limits set by the software.
I find them very useful.
The text is set by TAB spaces. The spacing of which is set up already. The date of entry is set like this. 00-TAB-MONTH-TAB-YEAR-TAB-SONG TITLE. The top ten and number one symbols are inserted before the TAB for the song title. You should find a symbol somewhere in the document. Or on the first page shown below.
Copy it and then place your cursor in the place it should go and use the first paste option. If it jumps forward you have picked up a tab stop with it. Go to just before the symbol and hit the back delete key. If you paste one in and the song title turns into googly-gook text, then press the undo button and go back to the symbol and copy it again but this time make certain you don't go to forward with the highlighting. This can also happen if one of the codes for the sales increase symbol text is still present in the text, even if it does not appear! Since the chart positions require more tabs to be set. You have to go to the text end and press tab on the keyboard. This should insert the dots to the position place. If any other symbols appear you will have to undo and make certain that you are past any spot where the text line is still under a symbol font. If you can't find one, pull the font menu down and select the Geneva Font. This will restore the text line and you can then tab it.
You might find it hard to place you cursor at the front of some text, especially those staring with "I" or "l". As it will sometimes select the blue box adjusting it size! Go to the other end of the text in that case and start from there. Till you reach the other end. If you include the end reverse P when highlighting text, it will put a return in when pasting.
If you past text into a sales or weeks or highest position column by mistake the text in the box will vanish. Use the undo key to get shut of the pasted text. In the previous week column you can only have the three numbers or the lower case "new" or the large dash.
The green for the highest position column is number 162. Due to another fluke of the software the end paragraph symbols sometimes go the same colour as the sales increase symbols. This doesn't effect the look of the finished document and you can ignore it. However if you do a return for another new line on one of these coloured paragraph marks, the following line text will be that colour! So you will have to change I back.
Styles in the text
The following shows the text styles for Chart File.
The most important are the four bottom ones. Three of them are shown in the image below. However "misc text" is not. This occurs after the song titles and is used to mention credit numbers or "see also".
The first smallest arrow points to the artist info line. Most of this text is pasted from the internet. You do not have to select the italic option.
The upward arrow points to the Song Title style. You will notice that red lines occur all over the place. These are the spelling errors. But because many words and names are not spelled right in the music business you can ignore these, unless you know it's wrong!
The last large left arrow points to the text style for the Act Names.
If you wish to create a new artist entry then put you cursor on the start of the artist name. Say some artist before Absent Elk. So you would put the cursor before the letter A. Then hit return! This will create a new text line in the style of Act Names. Before you put anything else there, hit the return key on the this new line twice more. This will create another artist info line and then a song title line. If Absolute was at the bottom of the column when you do this it will jump to the next column or next page. Since there wouldn't be enough room. If you also need to use the misc text one as well, clicking on the blank song title line will only create another song title line. So you have to go to the menu line and select misc text from that.
Only song title second entry and misc text are not kept together, when overflow happens. The Act Names, Artist Info and first Song Title line, will stay together. For example if there is lots of information for the artist, then the text will leave a bag gap in the column to compensate for the movement to another column.
The following shows how the text missing a tab will appear.
In this case the first tab after song title is missing. Clicking before the 68, pressing tab key will restore it. I generally put in a space after the wk and wks. But it doesn't affect anything so you don't have to.
You can look at the text styles settings by clicking the paragraph symbol in the text styles menu.
This first menu show how the song title style is set up. The font is Garamond at 10 points (this is the size of it. 72 points being one inch high! You can see that the next style hen a return is pressed is the same thing. Clicking on anything in the tree menu will till you the settings there.
This menu shows for example the font option. The drop down menu on the font will show all the fonts listed on your computer.
NOTE - REMEMBER CHANGING ANY SETTINGS HERE WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING IN THE WHOLE DOCUMENT ASSIGNED TO THAT STYLE.
If you do not want to change any fixed style, make certain that the cursor is not on any text in the document. Then create a new style which you can apply to what you want.
Lastly the tab settings are shown on this menu.
Clicking each of the tab stop positions like the one highlighted in blue, will reveal the different settings. For example the tab with the dotted line will have number 2 option selected in the Leader part.
Another menu bar now
If your menu bar doesn't look like this that's how you can getting looking the same.
The orange arrow points to the raised text seen in the song titles when a featured artist appears. Generally a number after a title. You click this and then add your number. The Green arrow points at the dash used for returning records on the chart. The other options after it change the text. Change Case which is highlighted will change "TEXT" like this to this "text". Sentence case will change only the first letter in a word of a sentence to upper case. Lower case will do the reverse of any text all in upper case to lower case and vice versa for the next option. Title Case will change nearly all the letters from this - "letter by me" to this "Letter By Me". However on some two letter words it will leave the letters small, so it might leave By as by.
An Update on Serif Page Plus and Windows 10 and 11.
Serif page plus will work with the above operating systems. I have found no problems with Windows 10 using it.
Serif did tell me a code (Universal Key) for all software that they no longer update or produce. You insert this when you install the software.
881887
More to follow soon...
No comments:
Post a Comment