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Firefox New York Times Ad Hits the Presses

Posted by michael on from the extra-extra dept.

Dave writes "The long awaited New York Times ad for Firefox has finally hit the presses. Because of the vast number of donations the ad covered two pages of the newspaper. It's being timed to coincide with 11 million downloads."

24 of 721 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Higher resolution image? by Kreldon · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://www.mozilla.org/press/nytimes-firefox-final .pdf

  2. Re:Higher resolution image? by Gossy · · Score: 3, Informative

    Here you go...

    High resolution PDF

    You can zoom in to read the names nicely.

  3. Re:Higher resolution image? by jea6 · · Score: 3, Informative

    The Mozilla Foundation press release ( http://www.mozilla.org/press/mozilla-2004-12-15.ht ml) has links to a high resolution PDF http://www.mozilla.org/press/nytimes-firefox-final .pdf. Names are quite legible at 150%.

    --

    sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
  4. Re:Just how exactly are they paying for this? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    The ad was funded by donations.

  5. All you wanted to know about the ad... by Jonny+Royale · · Score: 5, Informative

    Here is a link to the folks behind the ad. Including a PDF version, a poster you can buy...and a place to put in the correction if they mis-typed your name.

  6. Re:What are the chances... by afd8856 · · Score: 3, Informative

    elinks is possibly better
    supports tabs and a visual layout closer to the original page. Plus, http autentification, making it superior to links.

    --
    I'll do the stupid thing first and then you shy people follow...
  7. PDF version and Posters by Johan+Veenstra · · Score: 2, Informative

    You can download the pdf version from:

    http://www.spreadfirefox.com/

    There also a link there to the mozillastore where you can order posters.

  8. Re:Typo! by Phisbut · · Score: 3, Informative
    Dammit, they misspelled my name!

    The SFX team provided a page for misspelled names and typos.

    --
    After 3 days without programming, life becomes meaningless
    - The Tao of Programming
  9. Re:What are the chances... by hab136 · · Score: 2, Informative
    elinks is possibly better
    supports tabs and a visual layout closer to the original page. Plus, http autentification, making it superior to links.

    Link karma whoring to the rescue:
    elinks homepage

  10. Re:Higher resolution image? by TreeHead · · Score: 2, Informative

    ;with the exception of "non-freestanding" starbucks (such as those run by marriott), the answer to your question is yes, they should all carry nytimes. to be sure, you might want to ask this guy.

    ;and it's not *what* you drink that makes you pretentious, it's *how* you drink it.

    ;treehead

    --

    "If any part Linux was stolen, then Windows was the biggest heist in history."

  11. Re:It's not really text-text, you know?! by WoodenRobot · · Score: 2, Informative

    All the names are in alphabetical order, so it's not that hard.

    --
    ---
    "I did nothing. I did absolutely nothing and it was everything that I thought it could be."
  12. Re:Higher resolution image? by frozenray · · Score: 5, Informative
    Those are "Community Champions", meaning that they got 10 or more other people to donate for the ad.
    Due to the large number of names and the semi-frequent changes and corrections on top of the way the names were sorted (by last name) it was fairly impossible to pull out the Community Champions separately. I decided that it also made more sense for them to be seen as "integrated" within the community, rather than segregated out on their own... AND, in some ways... the underline brings a sort of mysterious attention to them--the kind of special notice that they deserve!
    (from spreadfirefox.com)
    --
    "There are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is NOTHING like Shakespeare." - Blair Houghton
  13. Re:Location? by a_timid_mouse · · Score: 2, Informative

    I just got my copy from CVS pharmacy in the Washington, D.C. area. The ad is on A24-A25 in my copy.

  14. Page #s by ioctl · · Score: 3, Informative

    For those who haven't seen it in print yet, the ad is on pages A34 & A35.

  15. Re:"Fed up with your web browser?" by rmcii · · Score: 3, Informative

    Actually, most people *are* fed-up with Internet Explorer. It might be allowing pop-ups once a minute, or not displaying certain websites correctly (most often https), or just behaving slowly.

    I've worked on 758 help requests for college students living in dorms since September. I'd say about 20% of them had problems that were simply solved by installing a copy of Firefox, nothing more. Many of these students are sold on the idea of Firefox. They do their own advertising... I've watched the most non-technical students advocate Firefox to the kid across the hall.

    Last night I got a call from a user who could pull up yahoo.com, but after entering a simple search, the page would load and give some web server error. She went to Help->About, and clicking "OK" wouldn't close the dialog box. This was with an updated version of IE. Got her to go to mozilla.org, and the green "Download Now" section wouldn't display. After linking directly to the mozilla suite, and getting that installed, she was able to properly view webpages.

    Out of the 758 students I've dealt with this semester, and the equally high number I've dealt with in the past 3 years at this job, only twice have I seen a resident contact us saying that Firefox won't load a certain page.

    All those webpages with ActiveX controls..... the everyday user doesn't care about them. And slashdot not loading properly, I think we all know why that is.... its reporting itself as HTML 3.2 and still gets 116 errors from http://validator.w3.org/

  16. Re:Cheers! by pbranes · · Score: 3, Informative
    Check out this google news search. Many many media outlets are already picking up on this and running it as a news story. That means that the monetary investment into the ad has paid off by growing into real news stories.

    http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&ie=UTF-8& q=firefox+new+york+times+ad&btnG=Search+News

  17. Re:Hidden Image or Subliminal Ad? by swordboy · · Score: 2, Informative

    Its a sailboat, you idiot.

    --

    Life is the leading cause of death in America.
  18. Re:Higher resolution image? by mattyrobinson69 · · Score: 2, Informative

    kpdf makes out the names just fine. im running a ~x86 world (updated today) in gentoo, not sure what software versions

  19. Re:Cheers! by Skidge · · Score: 2, Informative

    There was a story on NPR a couple of days ago about the ad. That's probably better than them just running the ad.

  20. Re:Try it under UV Light! by juanillodgn · · Score: 2, Informative
    Oh, shit!!! That was close... Nice trick your tinyURL redirection. Thank god my slow internet connection... Firefox advised me in the status bar:

    "Connecting "http://www.goat.cx/..."!!!!!!

    <closeTab>

    Phew....

  21. Re:Wow!! by factoryjoe · · Score: 4, Informative
    Here are the final specs on the names:
    • Font: Univers Bold Condensed
    • Size/Line-height: 4.5pt/4.6
    • Tracking: -23
    This is slightly bigger than when the c|net article came out and MUCH bigger than when it was only one page!! In all my test prints, the names were fairly legible, and from what I hear, they look pretty good in the paper.
  22. Re:Higher resolution image? by XO · · Score: 2, Informative

    er.. newer versions of Adobe Reader can search it just fine...

    --
    "Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
  23. Re:Higher resolution image? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative
    GS is capable of making Press-ready PDFs.
    InDesign is capable of making PDF and Postscript files that are NOT tied to a specific PDF viewer. In fact, the ISO spec for Prepress only requires PDFs to be version 1.3 or lower, have fonts embedded, and images in the CMYK color space (among other things) and rejects all higher version features that aren't related to putting ink on paper (javascript, forms, embedded QT, etc).

    Funny, this is a free software project, right? So how come they can't produce a pdf that is readable in any free software project? Aka ghostscript (7.x), xpdf, kpdf, and gpdf all cannot render the names properly. I had to load acrobat reader (not free software!!!) to read the names.

    Probably because their priority was to make sure it was in a format the NYT could use. I note that it was made by Adobe InDesign; extremely unfree software in every sense, but pretty well guaranteed to print correctly. InDesign uses OpenType to a much greater extent than any other DTP app, so it's probably some font issue that's the problem with other PDF apps. Also it's a huge amount of text to have on one page, possibly they're just overflowing -- as just about every non-Adobe implementation is based on GhostScript I think, a common bug would stop them all.
  24. Re:Higher resolution image? by plj · · Score: 2, Informative

    I don't know if even being an Adobe implementation helps in all cases: AFAIK Apple's Quartz PDF implementation is licensed from Adobe, but Apple's Preview.app still fails miserably to show the ad - it hangs swapping like hell, eating well over one gigabyte of virtual memory and never showing the ad. The only way to open it on OS X (10.3.7) I found was to fire up Adobe Acrobat.

    And for F/OSS advocates: the only thing that has probably mattered anything in making this PDF has been it's re-usability on NYT's publishing desk. Press optimised PDFs are quite another world comparing to normal ones, and I've seen maker-up guys being really pissed when people keep sending them low-resolution PDFs having images embedded in them in RGB (instead of CMYK) and using non-postscript fonts.

    If you ever get your hands to Adobe Acrobat Pro, launch it and check out the "Document/Preflight" menu. It's quite interesting how huge the difference between a PDF and a PDF can be.

    --
    “Wait for Hurd if you want something real” –Linus