Sunday, 27th February, 2005

Typographical Nightmare

I hate Microsoft Word files . Don't get me wrong — it's not that I hate Microsoft Word itself (although, granted, I never use the thing ) — I'm sure a lot of people have been trained to do all sorts of things on it, and indeed whenever I talk to someone who uses it, they cheerfully point out to me that it is, indeed, the best word processor our there.

pause for flames about OO.o, or Pages, or whatever

No no no — this rant has nothing to do with the pros and cons of using Word as your word processor of choice ... it's about trying to make some typographical sense out of the crap that finds its way onto my desktop via the bufooned minds of well-meaning idiots

Let me explain

The traditional styling methods in Word seem to revolve around old typing practices: two spaces after a full stop, double line breaks after a paragraph, you know the sort of thing. This is all very well when the outcome of the document is a ream of A4 paper, but not when I have to import it into Quark XPress and turn it into a sodding book

The number of search-and-replaces I have to do just to strip out all the double spaces and double line-breaks is staggering.

And then there's the sheer, unadulterated joy of trying to convert a series of tab-delimited lines into something that resembles a table.

I Hate Word Files! I Hate Word Files! I Hate Word Files! I Hate Word Files! I Hate Word Files!

Is that clear?

...

Sorry for that — it's just that I came across a table-of-contents where the author had used multiple full stops to indent things, to make it all look pretty on his page, without realising that it's going to take me ages to turn it into something even remotely respectable in Quark

Grrrrr

I can just picture him, sat at his PC thinking "aha — this will make the designer's life easier"...

...well it fucking doesn't

I dream of the day when people send me plain-text files and all I have to do is concentrate on setting up a series of logical, sexy style-sheets and command-licking my way through a 600-page document in twenty minutes

...

Mildly related is my little triumph about ten years ago when I was compiling a local what's-on guide using a Filemaker Pro database. I set it up with a series of cunning search-and-replaces to churn out XPress Tags so that all I had to do was import the output into Quark, and the whole thing would automagically format itself into typographic sexiness Then I did some other search-and-repalces to format the whole thing into web pages

A few months ago, when I was contemplating the idea of publishing this weblog as a book, I toyed with developing a PHP script that would reformat the MySQL database into XPress Tags (or, more precisely, InDesign Tags, as Quark is annoying me right now)

Maybe I'll get around to it at some point

Ian, that's kinda what I meant by this not being a rant against Word — it's the way some people use it to prepare source text without really understanding what a typesetter will have to do to it to make it managable that get me

I do end up wrangling it in BBEdit though

LOL

Exactly though — and it ties in rather nicely with the idea of separating content from style. I remember when the whole "make a webpage from a Quark document" thing meant a hideous bunch of static tables and an HTML file that just replicated the print-layout.

Lazy, lazy, lazy design.

It amazes me that still I have to slave away over a keyboard to convert a Word file into a Quark file, when the whole thing should be so easy.

Although, thinking about it, I wouldn't get paid

Scrap what I said earlier — I take it all back

OK, reverse scenario ... someone gives you instructions to "use one of the photos from our website" in print. I mean, don't they know the difference between 72 and 350dpi? Don't they? Eh?

Ah, but then of course, comes the phrase "can't you just blow it up?" to which you reply "yes, but it will look like crap", which gets the number-one-all-time-stoopidest-request ever in the history of the world:

"Can't you use your computer to enhance it?"

I'm not sure about the new Apple wordprocessor — Pages — seems to me to be iNewsletter. I was listening to Phil Schiller talking about it during Steve's keynote speech yeah, and he was like "We know that people want templates"

(Sorry, for some reason I switched into valley-mode for a second there )

No, sorry Phil, that's the last things I want. The first thing I do with MS Word (when I have to use it) is close that bloody 'wizard' thingy. I much prefer starting with a blank page thankyouverymuch, not some graphic-laden pseudo newsletter.

Of course, personally, I'm running through the vi tutorial every few days

How about "OK, I'll blow it up — but it's going to be messy"?

TV Guide

Ha ha ha! HA ha ha ha hardy ha ha!

Sorry, I know, old joke

So, I'm sat here, tapping my fingers, and it suddenly occurs to me that I haven't watched any telly since that Grayson Perry documentary. Not a sausage. Absolutely squat (as long as you don't count the few seconds this morning when George stood on the remote control and woke me up to a snowstorm and the waking-up-fanfare of white noise )

Off I trot (metaphorially, natch) to www,radiotimes.com (which, I have to say, is looking rather swish these days ) and I notice that HELP ( BBC 2, 9.30pm) starts in about an hour and a half, and until then there is a choice between Ray Mear's Bushcraft ( BBC 2, 8.00pm) and Never Mind the Buzzcocks ( BBC 2, 9.00pm), or The 100 Greatest Cartoons (Channel 4, 8.00pm)

Not sure which to watch Although, in typing up this, I've probably missed half of them.

I missed that. What was the outcome?

I'm finding it hard going to be honest. Even though my earliest computer experiences were all command-line based, I'm so used to pushing text around with a mouse these days that it seems alien to me.

The reason I decided that I really ought to know how to use it though, was, well, two reasons I guess. Firstly, I find it really useful to be able to ssh home from wherever I am and fix stuff, and secondly, I was watching my father using it one night (I'd just shown him, after two years of having an iMac, that it had a command-line He was very excited, even more so when he realised he could use X11 — but that's a whole different story) and I was amazed by how he was navigating, editing, shunting stuff around with just the keyboard.

Maybe I've got lazy with the mouse

One thing though, especially when I'm coding, I find it hard to get a grasp on what I'm doing with the screen on my iBook — It's just too small. And it's usually the iBook that I'm on when I'm using vi.

If I'm at home, then I figure I may as well use BBEdit — especially for the syntax-colouring, which I find really hard coding PHP in vi without.

An RSS feed for the comments? Um, OK — that'll take a bit of regular expression fun ... I'll add it to my list of Things I Want To Do Here When I Get The Time:

• RSS Comment Feed
• del.icio.us/flickr real-time blog insertion tool thingumy
• Sticky pages
• Technorati Ping (I already ping weblogs.com, but I just never got round to Technorati)
• List of all the archives listed by title rather than the little calendars

I'm sure there's more — but I think I should do some of the jobs that pay before I crack into that little lot

All sharp and ready for action First job ... make vim's syntax colouring look remotely pretty. I can't stand the default colours — I have a much nicer muted pink-and-blue palette that I use in BBEdit. Oh, and I wasn't using vim before — I was using vi

That, my Porcupine-Tree-loving friend, is inspired