Emerging from the Deep

Advice to designers, editors, dissertation writers, and anyone who’s contemplating a big desktop publishing job in the future, imminent or otherwise:

a) make copious, redundantly copious, stupidly copious, backups. So when you accidentally overwrite a file of fifty pages with only the first page, all you have to do is go to the last backup and enter (tediously, admittedly) all the latest iteration of edits, not retype the whole thing. I know there are people who know how to retrieve supposedly lost file copies but they aren’t around at six in the morning or nine at night on the weekend. And I’m not one of those people anyway.

b) never, ever make global changes of anything when you’re tired. This is the way to end up with sentences that start like this: “In generallifornia…”

c) resize all your fifty gigantic maps BEFORE you need to go to Kinko’s on Friday night and it’s due on Tuesday after a holiday weekend with a skeleton staff of people who will be working at three in the morning with more or less of a clue.

d) don’t eat that extra scoop of ice cream before going to bed. Do you really need your heart racing that fast?

e) decide on a style and STICK to it. The Central Valley/Bay-Delta controversy has changed so many times over the last week I’m still not sure where we are with it, but I think it’s changing anyway, to Central Valley and Bay-Delta, hyphen not endash. But this will have to be in the next draft. As it went to press it was Central Valley and Bay-Delta (endash).

f) When compiling styles for multiple documents be sure, always, to set them in the master document, not in satellites. I have a style called Appendix Chapter Title, appchtitle, appcht, and probably one other one. They all do more or less the same thing. More or less. The less part is going to harrass me for days.

During this past week I’ve hardly even read email, let alone read blogs. I hope to rectify this now.

I did hear from my sister about the legalization of gay marriage in Spain: GO SPAIN. Thirty years ago, when we lived there, a mere suspicion that someone was gay or lesbian was enough to land them in jail. Reading through the Spanish press subsequently the general tone seemed to be this: and you have a problem with this why, exactly?