Exit
  • Global community
    • Language:
      • Deutsch
      • English
      • Español
      • Français
      • Português
  • 日本語コミュニティ
  • 한국 커뮤니티
0

99.9999995587038% instead of 100% ???

Contributor ,
May 16, 2018 May 16, 2018

(Mac OSX 10.13.4, Adobe CC 2018)

Info:
I use InDesign to create templated imposition files suitable for output to our litho presses. I now need to remake a single K plate from an old CMYK job for a reprint. (the old K plate got damaged in storage)

Action:

I have an A4 letterhead .INDD file (with 2mm bleed), which is then placed in and repeated 4 times into a separate SRA2 imposition templated .INDD file.

Issue:

If i relink the A4 document with another A4 document, again with 2mm bleed, instead of relinking at 100% it comes in at 99.9999995587038%.

More info:

A4 INDD files are regularly swapped in and out of the templated SRA2 imposition file without issue, and i have never really noticed them be anything other than 100% when placed in the imposition template before...maybe they were 99.9999995587038% and i just never noticed as most of the jobs would not have had been to be replated

I am now concerned that the new K plate i need to make will not register correctly with the original CMY plates because of the percentage difference, and i am puzzled as to why the files do not relink at 100% as i expected them to.

Can anyone help please?

818
Translate
Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Expert ,
May 16, 2018 May 16, 2018

It is admittedly strange – where could such a small error possibly have crept in? – but ... this made me smile and reach for a calculator:

Andy_Baz  wrote

I am now concerned that the new K plate i need to make will not register correctly with the original CMY plates because of the percentage difference ..

This "percentage difference" is less than 1 part in 2 million. Your new K plate may not fit perfectly, but the error is right about the size of the wavelength of visible light. That means that it'd be barely visible even if the transfer from computer to plate to paper is 100.0000000000000% perfect (using the same amount of significant digits as your percentage is in).

Translate
Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Contributor ,
May 16, 2018 May 16, 2018

ha ha ha... i always knew i was perfectionist but i've never had it quantified before.

Maybe just maybe i can let it go this one time!!!

But yeah it is rather unusual behaviour from ID.

Translate
Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Expert ,
May 16, 2018 May 16, 2018

@Jongware

is this something to do with floating point numbers? showing my programming naivety here.

If the answer wasn't in my post, perhaps it might be on my blog at colecandoo!
Translate
Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Contributor ,
May 16, 2018 May 16, 2018

hmmmm i wouldnt have thought so.....as 100% is 100% no decimals required...if i was performing some kind of reduction or enlargement scaling to it then maybe so.

Translate
Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Expert ,
May 16, 2018 May 16, 2018

Colin, that is indeed possible.

<lecture>

The problem with "floating point numbers" is, surprising as it sounds, they are not as accurate as most people think. One key problem is that the space in which they are stored is limited: 2 bytes for the most basic version, mostly 4 but even as much as 8 bytes in most current software. This means that the range of values is limited. Simplified, that means you can store 2,000 numbers ranging from -1 to +1 with an accuracy of 0.001 (no real numbers but that is the general idea), or, by using more bytes, you can store 2 million numbers with an accuracy of 0.000001 – but you cannot store "0.000001 / 2" without using another extra byte.

Also, no number of bytes in the universe is large enough to store a value such as "0.1" exactly – it will be stored as either 0.9999999 or 1.00000001 (where the number of '9's and '0's varies with the total storage size). It does not matter how many bytes you use; that inaccuracy will always be there, at the final digit!

That is due to how a decimal fraction is stored. Just like you can write one divided by three in a concisive way as "1/3" but there is no way to write it down 'exactly' in decimals – 0.33333333333.... (fill the rest of universe with 3s and it's still not 'exact') –, decimal fractions do not play nice with binary numbers. A floating point number fraction is stored as 1 divided by a power of 2, so 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16, and so on. "Multiples" of these are exact; three-eights, for example, is 1/4 + 1/8. But '0.1' cannot be formed with these multiples, and, as when expressing 1/3 in decimals, expressing 1/10 in a binary fraction leads to a repeating series "000110011(0011)+".

So "0.1" cannot be stored exactly, but if you show it on screen with, say, 5 decimals of precision, it will still display as "0.10000" – what's the problem? Well, if you add up 0.1 to itself a few times, you suddenly see that final digit jump from '0' to something else! It's that pesky final-digit that suddenly adds up, just like when you add "0.33333 + 0.33333 + 0.33333", you do not get "1.00000".

</lecture>

However, I would regard it as "probably not the case here".

The internal calculations of InDesign are magnitudes more accurate than Andy_Baz' 13 decimal digits, where it is already off by the 6th digit. This should be at least 1,000 times smaller (off by the 9th digit); the full range is something like 18 significant decimal digits.

A possible other cause could be that "the" size of an A4, as stored in InDesign, changed by just a tiny bit over several versions. I just created an A4 sized document and requested its size in millimeters with JavaScript (which shows much more decimals than InDesign itself):

alert (app.activeDocument.documentPreferences.pageWidth + ' mm\n' + app.activeDocument.documentPreferences.pageHeight+' mm');

and instead of the expected "210 mm, 297 mm" I got this:

209.999999999936 mm

296.999999999461 mm

Yes, there is a difference (more than nine decimals in), but it's nowhere as large as Andy_Baz finds: the width is off by 99.999999999969524%, the height by 99.999999999818519%. That is nearly spot-on in the range I'd expect for 'normal' inaccuracies because of recalculating millimeters into the internally-used points. Not surprisingly, requesting the A4 size in points and recalculating them back to millimeters returns the exact same 12 decimal fraction digits.

Translate
Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines
Community Expert ,
May 16, 2018 May 16, 2018
LATEST

https://forums.adobe.com/people/%5BJongware%5D  wrote

… A possible other cause could be that "the" size of an A4, as stored in InDesign, changed by just a tiny bit over several versions. I just created an A4 sized document and requested its size in millimeters with JavaScript (which shows much more decimals than InDesign itself):

alert (app.activeDocument.documentPreferences.pageWidth + ' mm\n' + app.activeDocument.documentPreferences.pageHeight+' mm');

and instead of the expected "210 mm, 297 mm" I got this:

209.999999999936 mm

296.999999999461 mm

Yes, there is a difference (more than nine decimals in), but it's nowhere as large as Andy_Baz finds: the width is off by 99.999999999969524%, the height by 99.999999999818519%. That is nearly spot-on in the range I'd expect for 'normal' inaccuracies because of recalculating millimeters into the internally-used points. Not surprisingly, requesting the A4 size in points and recalculating them back to millimeters returns the exact same 12 decimal fraction digits.

Hi Jongware,

the values how exact an A4 document is defined is dependent on one factor, I think:

Did the user do it with a predefined default document preset or did the user type in the numbers coming from a custom preset where no A4 or A5 document was the origin. E.g. if a custom preset was done with 100 mm x 100 mm and that is changed to 210 x 297 mm the numbers should be exact in Millimeters. Not so with the default A4 preset InDesign is offering that is internally based on a named document size.

Regards,

Uwe

Translate
Report
Community guidelines
Be kind and respectful, give credit to the original source of content, and search for duplicates before posting. Learn more
community guidelines