kirkcudbright | arisia ate my brain...with some fava beans and a nice chianti (Reply)

In the past three days, I've delivered to the printer the Arisia Souvenir Book and Program Guide. The PG is an insert into the book, with the long program item descriptions and participant bios. Really, it was Skip's project, but I had to take over at least the delivery, in order to ensure that it matched the style and production values of the book. So I was up all night, taking changes up until 7:30, delivered to the printer's ftp site at 7:45.

Between the two, I've gotten maybe 3 nights sleep over the last week, and I'm coming down with a sudden (but well-timed) cold right now.

Check it out.

I wouldn't ordinarily repeat something that I've linked to (albeit indirectly), but here is the workflow for the Program Guide:

1. Jack runs a couple reports on Zambia, one for the program descriptions, one for the bios.

2. He saves them to disk, opens them in Excel, performs some manipulations to strip out the html, saves them as CSV, and mails them to Skip.

3. Skip runs the csv files through a TECO filter to convert the line breaks from naked carriage return (I'm guessing Jack's on a Mac), plus other unspecified manipulations.

4. He runs the output of that through a DCL filter for more perl-like manipulations. This creates a SQL/Access-like database on the VAX, from which he generates a pair of html files. (This database also generates the CSV files for the Pocket Program, and a (different?) CSV file for the Palm Schedule.) He posts the pair of html files on his website, and sends notification email.

5. I download the html, and hand-apply some corrections I know about. (I could have just run it through diff3|ed to merge changes. Oh well.)

6. I run the patched html through a perl filter to do further manipulations and corrections, some based on demoroniser, but many specific to the way I want the text formatted. This generates yet another pair of html files.

7. InDesign can't import html directly, so I open the html in Word and save it as doc. While I'm in there, I change all paragraph styles "Normal (Web)" to "Normal".

8. By this time, I've already set up the InDesign document, and specified how I want the styles "Normal", "Heading 3", and "Heading 4" to be formatted. The doc files are "linked" to the InDesign document, so if I update the doc, I just tell InDesign to re-link, and it re-imports the files in situ, with the InDesign formatting instead of the Word formatting.

9. Then I apply Eyeball Mark 1, and tweak the formatting of individual paragraphs as needed. When I'm reasonably satisfied, I export it as pdf, and post the pdf and the corrected html to my website.

10. For last-minute changes, I edit the "source" html (from Skip), and repeat steps 6-9. The actual time from editing the input html file to posting the pdf output is about 5 minutes.

Rube Goldberg would be proud.