LeftBrain Artist
04-12-2007, 05:15 PM
Warning: Rant. I don't expect, nor do I want any answers for anything I may seem to be asking.
So I had to help out one of newer employees get a catalog ready for print on Tuesday. This file was a mess. It wouldn't package from InDesign because one of the fonts wouldn't copy, which stalls the whole packaging process, so I have to package everything except the fonts, create a new document that has all the fonts from the catalog and package the fonts from that - which shouldn't work but does.
A little more background on this "catalog" - it was originally done by the client's in-house designer, who decided to go freelance - translation: that person Pancaked everything up to the point where it couldn't be fixed easily anymore so that person decided to jump ship. Nice. Nice.
So we got a mac firewire external drive with all of this persons working files, done using Quark 6. I have the only copy of Quark 6, which gets used to open up Quark 6 files so that they may be saved down to Quark 5, opened up on our PC which has the only version of Quark 5 so that we can save it down to 4 and thus open it in InDesign on any number of our Macs.
So back to the "catalog". I was super busy as usual on Tuesday so I just got all the fonts and links together, made a high res pdf, and uploaded the packaged files plus the pdf to a third party (client's printing vendor) ftp site. The notify me Wednesday morning that they did indeed receive the files and everything is cool.
So I get in today to see an email from the printing vendor: "your file is only 23 pages and needs to be 24 for printing, please advise asap as this has to go to the printer today".
23 pages? WTF?! Granted the girl we had working on it is just graduating school and really doesn't have that much knowledge about pre-press - I don't blame her - but my boss who was art directing this, and our contacts at the client - they've all seen this many times and never caught that?
So I call up client ask them, "should we just add a blank page before what is to be the rear cover" the easy solution? The client talks to his president, who is now very upset that this has happened and no, that blank page is valuable real estate, its costing them a lot of money, there has to be content. So they decide to pull another page from a different catalog, which means I have to find it on that crummy firewire drive, convert it, modify it according to new info, and plop it into the layout. Of course with my boss over my shoulder the whole time stressing out - I decide, even though its a pretty stupid way to do things, to modify the Quark 6 doc, save it as a pdf, place the pdf into the new Indesign file (different size), and then my boss wants to add some footer stuff from the new catalog pages. Fine, I do it. And make a new pdf of the page to have the client approve before I send it off for print. I check out the pdf - theres a large purple bar in the background of the header that's not there in the InDesign Document (I found no hidden layers mind you) - and certain elements in the footer are gone.
I send it anyway and its approved. Great. But its still driving me nuts trying to figure out whats up with that InDesign File. Its a mess. There's 18 master pages for 18 pages, totally unnecessary as far as I can tell, they use real numbers (on the masters) instead of auto page numbers, there's about 20 spot colors for this CMYK job, fonts are fubar, and when I can finally get an overprint preview (by converting the spots to process) - a couple of logos in the footer disappear for no apparent reason. I still can't figure out why that purple bar (a former master page item) shows up on the pdf, but not when I print to our ricoh.
Textbook prepress nightmare.
Please don't try to answer - I don't have time for this anymore. If anything, because this is a conversion of a conversion of a conversion, this file needs to be created from scratch using proper production methods. Unfortunately the client waited to the last minute to do this project and imposed a rather strict budget, so we don't have the time or the money to do things properly.
I need to talk to the girl who worked on this, who is out today. She's pretty sharp - I have a hard time believing she screwed things up this massively, one would have had to work pretty hard to make a mess of these proportions. Its more likely this is residual crap from the clients original in-house files.
So I had to help out one of newer employees get a catalog ready for print on Tuesday. This file was a mess. It wouldn't package from InDesign because one of the fonts wouldn't copy, which stalls the whole packaging process, so I have to package everything except the fonts, create a new document that has all the fonts from the catalog and package the fonts from that - which shouldn't work but does.
A little more background on this "catalog" - it was originally done by the client's in-house designer, who decided to go freelance - translation: that person Pancaked everything up to the point where it couldn't be fixed easily anymore so that person decided to jump ship. Nice. Nice.
So we got a mac firewire external drive with all of this persons working files, done using Quark 6. I have the only copy of Quark 6, which gets used to open up Quark 6 files so that they may be saved down to Quark 5, opened up on our PC which has the only version of Quark 5 so that we can save it down to 4 and thus open it in InDesign on any number of our Macs.
So back to the "catalog". I was super busy as usual on Tuesday so I just got all the fonts and links together, made a high res pdf, and uploaded the packaged files plus the pdf to a third party (client's printing vendor) ftp site. The notify me Wednesday morning that they did indeed receive the files and everything is cool.
So I get in today to see an email from the printing vendor: "your file is only 23 pages and needs to be 24 for printing, please advise asap as this has to go to the printer today".
23 pages? WTF?! Granted the girl we had working on it is just graduating school and really doesn't have that much knowledge about pre-press - I don't blame her - but my boss who was art directing this, and our contacts at the client - they've all seen this many times and never caught that?
So I call up client ask them, "should we just add a blank page before what is to be the rear cover" the easy solution? The client talks to his president, who is now very upset that this has happened and no, that blank page is valuable real estate, its costing them a lot of money, there has to be content. So they decide to pull another page from a different catalog, which means I have to find it on that crummy firewire drive, convert it, modify it according to new info, and plop it into the layout. Of course with my boss over my shoulder the whole time stressing out - I decide, even though its a pretty stupid way to do things, to modify the Quark 6 doc, save it as a pdf, place the pdf into the new Indesign file (different size), and then my boss wants to add some footer stuff from the new catalog pages. Fine, I do it. And make a new pdf of the page to have the client approve before I send it off for print. I check out the pdf - theres a large purple bar in the background of the header that's not there in the InDesign Document (I found no hidden layers mind you) - and certain elements in the footer are gone.
I send it anyway and its approved. Great. But its still driving me nuts trying to figure out whats up with that InDesign File. Its a mess. There's 18 master pages for 18 pages, totally unnecessary as far as I can tell, they use real numbers (on the masters) instead of auto page numbers, there's about 20 spot colors for this CMYK job, fonts are fubar, and when I can finally get an overprint preview (by converting the spots to process) - a couple of logos in the footer disappear for no apparent reason. I still can't figure out why that purple bar (a former master page item) shows up on the pdf, but not when I print to our ricoh.
Textbook prepress nightmare.
Please don't try to answer - I don't have time for this anymore. If anything, because this is a conversion of a conversion of a conversion, this file needs to be created from scratch using proper production methods. Unfortunately the client waited to the last minute to do this project and imposed a rather strict budget, so we don't have the time or the money to do things properly.
I need to talk to the girl who worked on this, who is out today. She's pretty sharp - I have a hard time believing she screwed things up this massively, one would have had to work pretty hard to make a mess of these proportions. Its more likely this is residual crap from the clients original in-house files.