revjim.net

The good news is, I got the first print of "the book":http://revjim.net/books/20054q-finding-place/ in the mail yesterday and most of it looks outstanding. It is so nice to see it printed and hold it in my own two hands turning each page. It really made me happy and I know that many of you share the joy of my work and would be very excited to have seen it too. In fact, I wanted to share it with someone so badly that I actually considered calling a few of you.

Of course there's a bad side to this too. About 90% of it looks outstanding. The remaining 10% needs some work. The font conversion didn't go over too well and there are a few slight but bothersome "kerning":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerning issues. Additionally, due, in part, to poor color calibration on my old monitor (thankfully, I have a new one as of a few weeks ago) and in part to the printing companies inability to describe how to achieve accurate colors, there are a few images in which the upper range of highlights look a bit "posterized":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posterization.

Of course, my problems are never that simple. The software that I used to create the book is a "festering pile of shit":http://www.acdsee.com/products/fotoslate/, so editing the contents of the book has become troublesome. I tried to find a different piece of software last night to recreate the book in but, after 2 hours of searching without luck, I threw in the towel. So, tonight I'm left with the task of trying, once again, to force the software I have into submission. If that should fail then I'm back at square one.

If any of you know of software that creates templatable PDFs from JPG images and their metadata (IPTC or XMP), I'd love to hear about it. The "software I used":http://www.acdsee.com/products/fotoslate/ (FotoSlate) is the only thing I can find that comes close and, even then, it reads EXIF not IPTC or XMP, so there's a whole conversion that has to happen (which is a large part of the problem thanks to EXIF limitations).

So anyway, here I am. Excited, yet frustrated and angry, and feeling quite alone. Sounds familiar, huh?