It must've been the full moon

I so was not planning on being at work until midnight tonight. Ugh.

A small but important project came through. Had to be finished tonight, as they were needed for a meeting with BillG and SteveB tomorrow morning. Not very big at all — just twenty prints, five double-sided 11×17 sheets folded and stapled into magazine style booklets. Should’ve been a quick and simple half-hour bang it out job.

Which, of course, meant that Murphy’s Law kicked in — with a vengeance.

The first major issue, nobody could do anything about. Our primary color printer, a DocuColor 2060, was out of commission — horrid copy quality on all colors, and images skewing up to 10 degrees. Not anywhere near a printable state. Service was called, but not likely to show up for a few hours at best, most likely tomorrow morning. So, rather than that, we had to use our DocuColor 12 — decent copy quality, but not nearly as fast. Still, it was at least working.

The customer brought in a DVD with a PageMaker file and all the linked high resolution graphics. Seemed like we were off to a good start, as that’s far more than many people know to bring in (“Oh, you mean that the 342k Publisher file I sent you doesn’t have the 2Mb graphic image I used for the design already in it?”).

There were two files on the DVD, too. In the first, the file was laid out in seqential order (page one, page two, page three, etc.). While this is a perfectly reasonable way to set up a document, it won’t print correctly like that, as the pages need to be reordered to align correctly when set 2-up on 11×17 sheets, assembled, and printed (the process is called a “signature” — you’ll have to pardon me if I don’t try to explain it in more detail than that at the moment).

Thankfully, there was a second file on the disk that had the document signatured correctly for printing, and where the first file was just named “document”, this one was named “document_print”. Rock on, we’re off and running.

After a bit, we finish up, and the customer comes in to get the books — and what do you know, but they’re all bad. Turns out that there were some last-minute edits to the document just before it was burned to disk and brought to us, and those edits were only made to the sequential document, not the signatured document with \”_print\” in the filename. Argh. Okay, then…time to start over. Now, though, I’ve got to work with the file that’s set up sequentially.

Now, normally, this wouldn’t be too much of a hassle, as PageMaker includes a plugin that automates the signature process, determining which pages need to go where. Click the menu item, watch PageMaker think for a moment, and bingo, everything’s reordered and print ready. Unless, of course, the bookletmaking plugin crashes halfway through the process. Okay, time to figure out why that’s not working, as a little troubleshooting time is (at this point) preferable to breaking the publication apart and rebuilding it by hand.

Eventually, I find the problem — a single line that was placed outside of the 11×17 print area, all the way to the edge of the pasteboard (the largest area that PageMaker can work with for each page image). Apparently, as PageMaker was working its way through the page reordering, it found this line that was so far off to the side that it couldn’t create a workspace large enough to include the line after shifting and combining two of the pages, so it just crapped out. No good error message, so it took me a while to track that down, but at least I found it. Re-ran the bookletmaking plugin, and everything looked fine.

Until I started flipping through the pages. Turns out that some of the pages had images that spanned the gutter, so they’d been split between two spreads. Not normally a problem, but these images had 2-pixel borders around them that I couldn’t find a way to delete, and would have ended up creating a single solid line when the booklet was assembled. Not good.

Okay, time for plan B — break the booklet down and reassemble it. Luckly, there’s a good shortcut for this. Rather than having to entirely break the publication apart and reassemble it, I can just print the entire thing to 8.5×11 images as a postscript file, convert that postscript to a .pdf file, and then import each page as a single entity into a new PageMaker publication. Fairly quick and simple to do, so I did, and we started printing the books.

Here comes the next issue — the Doc 12 started acting up. The booklet had a lot of deep blacks, and the toner wasn’t adhering to the paper correctly. Suddenly, all of those deep black areas were flaking off like crazy on the cover page. Luckly, that was the only page, but it still meant trouble. Once it was obvious that we weren’t going to be able to get that to come out quite right, we started improvising — combining printed pages for most of the body, with copies produced from the few prints of the cover sheet that didn’t have the flaking problem. Since the copies were done slower, one side at a time, they took longer, but the toner was able to adhere to the page. Okay, so we’re making progress again, and the end is in sight.

At least, the end was in sight. Our customer came back to pick up that round of books, started flipping through them, and realized that there was yet another problem! One of the pages had an image of a person, with the text wrapped irregularly around the person’s silhouette. For some reason, at some point during the postscripting, .pdf’ing, and re-construction of the document, that text had been dropped behind the image of the person, and the background of that image was now obscuring about half of the text on that page.

Crapola. And many other stronger words, to boot.

Back to improvising. The end result was a mishmash of printed pages from the final document, copied pages for the pages that had flaking problems, and a copied page from the original booklet to take care of the text wrapping problem around the picture on that page. Not nearly as easy as it should have been, and not quite the quality that we would have liked to have seen, but in the end, it was passable, and it was done.

And at midnight, we were out the door.