Done
A year ago I was seriously stressed out after having wrestled with the composition class' community writing project and had been disappointed with some of the errors that occurred during printing at a shop in the back of an office supply store. Oh. My. That covers both the initials of the business and the way I felt. Some of the responses I got from helpful people who read my rant made the ride smoother this year. The biggest change was that I transferred uploaded student files in OpenOffice to Word immediately--into a pre-made document of the same type--the student handbook, in this case.
In this year's experience, some stresses remained, however. I'm looking for help again to see what might have been the problem. Before I go into what happened, I should say that I'm more convinced than ever that many of our problems are attributable to our programs and equipment being too old, limited, or unsuitable. Our lack of "connection" is a hindrance too. Yet our equipment works fine for most of our needs at school. Without big bucks for big upgrades, what do you suggest--you who have some knowledge of how the print shops operate, especially? Publisher? PageMaker? It should be simple enough to use that a 60-ish lady can learn it.
One machine at school has Publisher installed. It's the "yearbook" computer. We've never used it for projects that consist primarily of text, and I'm not familiar with it.
When I talked to the person employed at the print shop (a Main Street business this time), and told him that I was using Word to do the word processing, he told me he thought it should be alright, although he mentioned PageMaker as being more likely to work seamlessly with their equipment. He suggested that I save it as a PDF when I have it in the right format. (He said this when I asked about emailing it.)
Unfortunately we don't have email at school and we didn't have a PDF program on any of the computers--and no internet connection to download such a program. Since the final corrections had to be made at school, I simply couldn't do a PDF and get it in on time. I delivered it in person on my flash drive, and the lady who took my order said that they would be working with it in the 2010 version. I looked at the proof today and it looked good. Unfortunately they had forgotten to call me from the print shop as they said they would, as soon as it was ready, and it can't be printed till next Wednesday because they're closed till then.
My Word program at home is a 2010 version. At school I used the 2003 version. Every time I saved the booklet document to my flash drive and transported it between here and school, I had to do many formatting corrections when I opened it. I'm sure this must have been because of some incompatibility between the two versions. If I had known this ahead of time, I might have made sure that I did the final work here at home, where my version was compatible with theirs, where I could do a PDF and where I could email.
All of the above is not that big a mystery, but what happened at school between my computer and the printer is a mystery. Every time, after everything looked right on my screen and I saved the document and then printed it, the formatting got messed up between the "save" and the "print" function. It all looked good in the print preview also. When it came out of the printer, charts that started out all on one page got split and spread over two pages, and stories started halfway down the page instead of at the top of the page. WHY?
Very frustrating.
All the above problems caused our booklet project to not be ready for sale to the holiday visitors--unless they're sticking around for New Year's Day.
The booklets will be available in the local churches as soon as they're ready. Contacting me or another student directly is an option also if you'd like a book. The students are Kristyne A., Kristi M., Carolyn M., Carol N., Michael Jon N., Marsha R., Andrew S., Jonny Y., Nathan Y. The price is $5.00 and the stories are basically about each set of parents with a student in the class. It's a mixture of family records, stories, and reflections.
P.S. My computer is spending Christmas vacation at Sanford's shop because it might have a virus. At least my thumb drive apparently picked one up somewhere, and we've had such problems at school recently. I mention this in case it would be more relevant to the above subject than I think it.
In this year's experience, some stresses remained, however. I'm looking for help again to see what might have been the problem. Before I go into what happened, I should say that I'm more convinced than ever that many of our problems are attributable to our programs and equipment being too old, limited, or unsuitable. Our lack of "connection" is a hindrance too. Yet our equipment works fine for most of our needs at school. Without big bucks for big upgrades, what do you suggest--you who have some knowledge of how the print shops operate, especially? Publisher? PageMaker? It should be simple enough to use that a 60-ish lady can learn it.
One machine at school has Publisher installed. It's the "yearbook" computer. We've never used it for projects that consist primarily of text, and I'm not familiar with it.
When I talked to the person employed at the print shop (a Main Street business this time), and told him that I was using Word to do the word processing, he told me he thought it should be alright, although he mentioned PageMaker as being more likely to work seamlessly with their equipment. He suggested that I save it as a PDF when I have it in the right format. (He said this when I asked about emailing it.)
Unfortunately we don't have email at school and we didn't have a PDF program on any of the computers--and no internet connection to download such a program. Since the final corrections had to be made at school, I simply couldn't do a PDF and get it in on time. I delivered it in person on my flash drive, and the lady who took my order said that they would be working with it in the 2010 version. I looked at the proof today and it looked good. Unfortunately they had forgotten to call me from the print shop as they said they would, as soon as it was ready, and it can't be printed till next Wednesday because they're closed till then.
My Word program at home is a 2010 version. At school I used the 2003 version. Every time I saved the booklet document to my flash drive and transported it between here and school, I had to do many formatting corrections when I opened it. I'm sure this must have been because of some incompatibility between the two versions. If I had known this ahead of time, I might have made sure that I did the final work here at home, where my version was compatible with theirs, where I could do a PDF and where I could email.
All of the above is not that big a mystery, but what happened at school between my computer and the printer is a mystery. Every time, after everything looked right on my screen and I saved the document and then printed it, the formatting got messed up between the "save" and the "print" function. It all looked good in the print preview also. When it came out of the printer, charts that started out all on one page got split and spread over two pages, and stories started halfway down the page instead of at the top of the page. WHY?
Very frustrating.
All the above problems caused our booklet project to not be ready for sale to the holiday visitors--unless they're sticking around for New Year's Day.
The booklets will be available in the local churches as soon as they're ready. Contacting me or another student directly is an option also if you'd like a book. The students are Kristyne A., Kristi M., Carolyn M., Carol N., Michael Jon N., Marsha R., Andrew S., Jonny Y., Nathan Y. The price is $5.00 and the stories are basically about each set of parents with a student in the class. It's a mixture of family records, stories, and reflections.
P.S. My computer is spending Christmas vacation at Sanford's shop because it might have a virus. At least my thumb drive apparently picked one up somewhere, and we've had such problems at school recently. I mention this in case it would be more relevant to the above subject than I think it.
posted by Mrs. I (Miriam Iwashige) at
7:54 PM
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