Clients & Profits Tech Notes

SUMMARY: How to paste your company logo onto estimates, invoices, purchase orders, and insertion orders. Updated 8/20/02

With a scanner and Photoshop, your shop's logo can be pasted into your Clients & Profits database. This means invoices, estimates, purchase orders, insertion orders, and statements can be printed on plain paper, replacing expensive stationery or complicated pre-printed forms. This tech note describes the steps you'll take to place logo graphics from Photoshop into Clients & Profits, as well as how to handle cross-platform printing issues with estimates, invoices, and purchase orders.

How graphic files are handled by Clients & Profits

Any 300-dpi PICT or BMP graphic files can be pasted onto estimates, invoices, POs, and IOs. The logo can contain up to 256 colors, as well as scanned text. Clients & Profits can't handle Postscript files, JPEGs, GIFs, or proprietary graphic file formats. Since the logo field does not support Postscript, any small type in your logo may not print well. The overall dimensions of each logo is 1" x 2.65". Any type or graphic must fit within these dimensions, otherwise the graphic will be cut off. Your logo will appear in full-color when printed on a color inkjet or laser printer.

Cross-platform issues

Although Clients & Profits can display graphics on-screen between PCs and Macs, the "shared picture" resolution isn't high enough for most logos. That's because in order to share a graphic image between both kinds of computers, it is automatically converted to a lower resolution. All graphics, including logos, are converted to this lower resolution, cross-platform file format if the "share pictures between Macs and PCs" option is checked in your General preferences. Sometimes this setting causes some logos to print poorly (e.g., the logo appears bitmapped, cropped, or incomplete). In these cases, the logo will image poorly on printed estimates, invoice, and POs.

To print the logo at the highest quality, the "share pictures" option must be disabled (i.e., unchecked) in the General preferences. Disabling this option allows the logo to print in high quality, but only from either a PC or a Mac -- not both. This is a known limitation when the "share pictures" preference is selected. However, simple low-resolution logos can be shared between Windows and Mac users. Since every shop's logo is different, you'll need to choose the setting that prints your logo best.

To disable the "share pictures" option:

1 Choose Setup > Preferences.

2 Choose General from the Preferences pop-up menu.

3 Uncheck the "share pictures" option, then click Save.

Preparing your logo for Clients & Profits

These step-by-step instructions apply to both the Windows and Mac versions of Photoshop and Clients & Profits. While these instructions refer to Photoshop, nearly any graphic program will work in the same way.

First, start Photoshop and open your logo file. Then start Clients & Profits and open your database. Once you've entered your initials and password into Clients & Profits, switch back to Photoshop.

1 Start Photoshop, then open the graphic file containing your logo.

2 Modify the logo so that it fits within the 1" H x 2.65" W limit for the logo field.

3 From the Photoshop window, drag a 1" H x 2.65" W box around your logo.

All logos will vary in size, but none can exceed 1" x 2.65", otherwise they will be immediately scaled to fit these dimensions on the printed estimate, invoice, etc. In some cases, you may want to decrease the size of your logo in order for the entire image to fit inside of the logo fields in Clients & Profits. This step is important. The box you draw will be the exact area that's copied from Photoshop to Clients & Profits. The logo won't be centered by Clients & Profits; instead, the logo is placed in the top-left corner. If your agency logo is square in shape, you must make sure that the height does not exceed 1". Then, add additional white space to your logo to bring the total width to 2.65".

4 Choose Edit > Copy to copy this selection to the computer's Clipboard.

5 Switch from Photoshop to Clients & Profits.

On the Mac, choose Clients & Profits from the Application menu in the top-right corner on the window. Windows users can choose Clients & Profits from the Taskbar.

6 Once in Clients & Profits, choose Setup > Preferences then choose Estimate Options from the pop-up menu.

The Estimate Options window opens, displaying your estimating preferences including any existing logo.

7 With your mouse, click inside the logo field, then choose Edit > Paste.

The logo graphic should appear. In some cases, it may appear bitmapped on the screen, but will print in 300 dpi quality on the printed forms.

8 Click Save.

The same logo can be pasted into the database's Invoice Options, Purchase Order preferences, and Insertion Order preferences by repeating steps 4-6. To paste a different logo into a preferences window, repeat steps 1-6.

Testing the logo in Clients & Profits

Once the logo has been pasted into Clients & Profits, test the logo's appearance by printing a sample estimate, invoice, or purchase order. If the image quality, color, or position isn't acceptable, you'll need to repeat these steps. Once the logo is acceptable, it will be available to anyone who uses Clients & Profits.

TROUBLESHOOTING

PROBLEM: Sometimes the logo on insertion orders prints fine for some users, but not for others.

There was a bug in Clients & Profits 4.10 and Clients & Profits Classic 4.4 that caused the logo to print inconsistently on insertion orders and broadcast orders (purchase orders were unaffected). A patch is available that fixes the problem, which should be installed on any workstation that prints media orders.

PROBLEM: When I paste my logo, Clients & Profits only shows the top-left corner of the graphic.

The "share pictures" option is enabled, causing the image to be converted to a cross-platform graphic format. There are two options: (1) disable the "share pictures" option, so that the logo appears in high-resolution on either PCs or Macs (but not both); or, (2) try to simplify the logo by remove small lines, shapes, and type.

PROBLEM: When I paste my logo into Clients & Profits, it only appears on estimates printed from the Mac. Anyone who prints estimates from the PC doesn't get a printed logo.

If the "share pictures" option in General preferences is unchecked, the logo will only appear on reports printed from a PC or a Mac (depending on which kind of computer copied-and-pasted the graphic into C&P). This is a known limitation of the shared-picture preference. The only option is to enable the "share pictures" option then replace the graphic with one that prints acceptably on both kinds of computers.

PROBLEM: When printing more than one copy of an estimate, purchase or insertion order, the first copy prints fine. However, on the remaining copies the logo prints very small.

When printing more than one copy of an estimate, purchase or insertion order, select "screen" instead of "printer" from the "print to" pop-up menu. When the file prints to screen, click the P on the top-right scroll bar of the file. Select "printer" to print your desired number of copies.

PROBLEM: PICT or BMP files saved from Adobe Illustrator or Macromedia Freehand print poorly when pasted into Clients & Profits.

You must import your Illustrator or Freehand document into Photoshop, then paste the Photoshop file into the program. To do so, follow these steps:

1 Open Photoshop and create a new document 300 pixels high, 795 pixels wide.

2 Choose File > Place then locate your logo Illustrator file.

3 Place that file in your new Photoshop document.

4 Crop as necessary.

5 Save the new Photoshop file as a PICT or BMP.