Old Computer Challenge, Day 6
I spent a few hours taking text I'd written in various gaps between bits of work over the past couple of weeks and putting it into MS Publisher. I initially used MS Publisher and decided to stick with it. I had a pretty rough physical health day today but worked through it, and I didn't have the spoons to do any pages in Aldus Pagemaker.
I had several goals for today's 2-3 hour session:
- Get all 8 pages of text into the zine
- Lay the pages up in a way that looks at least semi-consistent
- Define styles for sidebars, lists, pop-out sections etc
- Generate a PDF
- Print a copy for review
I'm very much going for the 90s newsletter/magazine look via Publisher and I think it works even at this size. The main issue I have is packing everything in, and I think I need to rethink what I put in for future zines. This might not be as good a format for my content style as initially hoped. I also noticed the sidebar font was all wrong and I need to re-think what to cut to make things fit. Considering how shitty I felt this afternoon overall I think it turned out ok.
I inserted a blank page at the start in MS Publisher. I then removed it from the final PDF and replaced it with my main cover using PDFTK on a Linux box. The resulting 8-fold PDF is generated there. This lets me focus my Windows 3.11 time on the individual pages and will hopefully mean I can do both A4 and US Letter without changing too much.
I would love to put in more screenshots and clip-art but I don't have a lot of space. I'm going to have to cut some text in order to keep things readable without magnifying glasses, but I think 1-2 iterations and this should be ready. I also need to play with pdfjam to see if I can do something about those external borders. I'm all for the internal lines but the outside borders are annoying.
One thing I did notice was that aside from Publisher's quirks and the T42 Thinkpad's propensity to register mouse clicks when using the keyboard close to it, I actually managed to get a reasonable flow on. It ain't no Quark XPress, but it'll do for now.