A New Era of Printing at Heartland Family Graphics

[ttl]

A quick preview of things happening at HFG. The biggest is an upgrade of our printing equipment... one which will allow us to offer super high quality prints with essentially archival durability for all orders on all of our paper options. Prices will stay at our same low rates for the time being, with the paper grades formerly identified as archival remaining as our top grade offering.

We'll be doing a revamping of our website over the summer as well with new tips and techniques to enhance your charts. That's going to take a while though, so I wanted to make sure you all knew now about the printing capability currently in place for the upcoming family gathering season.

[pdburrow]

Re: A New Era of Printing at Heartland Family Graphics

Tim,

I received my charts last week and we are delighted with them. They are so clear and readable. Printing is great, colors very nice and service was good. Thank you. The relatives in France will be so happy to get theirs. I just hope I have all of the living people spelled right and in the correct family! - pb

[ttl]

Re: A New Era of Printing at Heartland Family Graphics

Thank you for the kind words (and your patience during the lengthy installation process!). The smaller text you needed was something our previous archival system could do satisfactorily, but not fabulously as I would have liked. The new system does it very well indeed. The differences are subtle, but definitely real.

[ttl]

Re: A New Era of Printing at Heartland Family Graphics

Just one more comment from me before this thread falls off the bottom of the page. I mentioned at the top that there will be new content on our site; here's a link to an example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lB1KsdDIZY . We'll be trickling out videos like this over the next several months to make http://www.familygraphics.com an even better chart creating resource.

[SHewlett]

Re: A New Era of Printing at Heartland Family Graphics

Just one more comment from me before this thread falls off the bottom of the page. I mentioned at the top that there will be new content on our site; here's a link to an example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lB1KsdDIZY . We'll be trickling out videos like this over the next several months to make http://www.familygraphics.com an even better chart creating resource.

Thank you for the video link, Tim. Quite an easy method to improve my photos, instead of using iPhoto's "enhance" option. Looking forward to more videos.

Also, I am remiss in not thanking you publicly by mentioning on this list the splendid charts you prepared for my client in November, and your turnaround time to make that Thanksgiving deadline was extraordinary. Thank you!

My client is very pleased and is getting close to making a decision on a format for the next chart order.

Sandi Hewlett, CG

[ttl]

Re: A New Era of Printing at Heartland Family Graphics

Thank you for the video link, Tim. Quite an easy method to improve my photos, instead of using iPhoto's "enhance" option. Looking forward to more videos.

Also, I am remiss in not thanking you publicly by mentioning on this list the splendid charts you prepared for my client in November, and your turnaround time to make that Thanksgiving deadline was extraordinary. Thank you!

I'm glad you had a good experience with HFG; we enjoy what we do but hearing things like this make it even better!

Enhance is weird... sometimes it performs magic, and sometimes it doesn't seem to do anything at all. For others reading this, if you're editing a photo in iPhoto and are on the Quick Fixes panel, all you need to do is click the Adjustments tab in the upper right and you'll be presented with the levels curve.

The next video will be on a subject that should be near and dear to you, Sandi, but I'm afraid you won't learn much from it after what we did in November.

[harringg]

Re: A New Era of Printing at Heartland Family Graphics

One thing I haven't done is worked with printing charts. I'm working one for a family reunion this summer.

Is there any guidance on making the most of available space on a given chart (as few pages as actually needed)?

I created a Pedigree chart, Waterfall and it is 2 wide by 6 tall. The boxes almost all fit on the left side and a few are just barely overlapping the right hand side (the 1x6 right side), and I've moved off page breaks with the menu and it pushes them to the right instead of the left.

Is there a setting to auto-fit one page wide for example?

[ttl]

Re: A New Era of Printing at Heartland Family Graphics

I created a Pedigree chart, Waterfall and it is 2 wide by 6 tall. The boxes almost all fit on the left side and a few are just barely overlapping the right hand side (the 1x6 right side), and I've moved off page breaks with the menu and it pushes them to the right instead of the left.

Is there a setting to auto-fit one page wide for example?

I should be able to help with this one. For some reason I have a vague recollection of a page width setting for waterfall charts but it doesn't seem to be available now (if ever). In this case, I'd select Object->Align->Everything to Top Left. If you then use the Cmd-Left Arrow key combination, you can squeeze the tree until it fits on that one page width. Reaccomplishing Page Setup at that point should recenter the tree in the remaining pages.

[ttl]

Re: A New Era of Printing at Heartland Family Graphics

One thing I haven't done is worked with printing charts. I'm working one for a family reunion this summer.

Is there any guidance on making the most of available space on a given chart (as few pages as actually needed)?

If you're preparing a chart for a reunion, it's been my personal experience that the waterfall orientation--while extremely compact--can be difficult for a lot of people (especially non-genealogists) to follow because it's so dense horizontally and so spread out vertically.

A left to right orientation retains a lot of compactness and is typically a lot easier for most people to interpret. It can usually be displayed well on a banquet table or two. This is the orientation I usually recommend for people wanting a good display while using a minimum of square footage.

Ideally, I recommend a top to bottom option because it facilitates wall display and allows a lot of people to view it without bunching up or contorting themselves. The next video will deal with a variation of this.