Technological/practical "backward steps" we all just accept now

Because printing is the point where Word stops its bullshit and fucking around and has to actually draw what is on the page properly instead of a billion field codes and hidden whatevers, and then at that point the printing system swoops in and takes a sip of that pure page layout to write a PDF file (which is basically a wrapped and packaged version of the PostScript page description needed by the printer). In older versions of Word there was an option to save as "Microsoft PDF" which was a horribly damaged version with weird graphics etc., but now I think it just accepts reality and calls on the print infrastructure same as the user doing a "print ... NO! PDF!" fake-out.

^ booming post, presumably

I used to work in pre-press, we had to find ways to get proper layouts out of stupid software which had an internal document model unchanged from QuickDraw 0.8 in 1983 ... *shudders*

amazing explanation, thank you! one of those little things i've done for ages, but never got around to asking why it was. now feel like i know more about PDFs and DOCs both. are the "billion field codes" the reason doc/docx files are kind of enormous for not actually containing all that much text? i mean obviously the kilobytes a "hello world" DOC takes up about here are nothing in present-day terms, but i imagine they still represent something that might appear inelegant by that old-school metric. but i guess worrying about said metrc has long since passed out of the elegant/inelegant universe into genuine obsolescence.

It's like, if Pagemaker, Quark XPress, Illustrator, and Photoshop had been totally grokkable by the layperson

Quark is the most grokkable of the four – and there's so much less room for "what weird shit has happened now" surprises like Word. But the £1000 price and absolute user-hostility of the company would have doomed them on that front anyway.

The first versions of Pages (right up until the shitty iOS port to Mac) were actually a lot more Quark-like; I loved those.

So much of my Photoshop/Illustrator knowledge is like 25 years old. I don't use them as much anymore so there are entire new features and tools that do things much simpler but I have no idea they're there.

I also still have a moment of sheer terror when dragging the guides off screen because the Windows NT version of Photoshop 5 that I had at my job in 1997 would crash if I did this.

there's a prepress thread if anybody has any questions about InDesign/Illustrator, printing, color management etc. Happy to talk about that forever.

some ILX lore...onetime poster/music writer Geeta told me she was good friends with the head of Quark's daughter or something and they were driving in a car and he was like "we're not going to update Quark to be compatible with OSX, the mac is a dead end" and they were like "you crazy".

That may not be totally accurate, but Quark did take their time with that update and lost users to InDesign. Of course that wasn't the only reason they'd lose users to InDesign, nor the last.

That's a great story; I can believe it too — Quark was business-school case-study inept in so many ways, almost Commodore-level bad. iirc they fired their entire dev department after 3.1, outsourced everything and the resulting 4.0/Dispatch 2 was so bad it nearly bankrupted them. Then Adobe spent years limbering up InDesign and Quark still didn't have anything ready to stop it.

Quark: We're still "Qool" with a Q.

We’ve been pioneers in desktop publishing, digital publishing and content automation since 1981. Today, customers rely on us for closed-loop content lifecycle management so they can meet their desired goals – whether that’s entertaining subscribers with a digital magazine, educating employees through standard operating procedures, or furnishing regulators with documents to demonstrate compliance. Quark. Brilliant content that works.

I knew people who loved quark but it refused to work on the networked system 7 lab at school so everyone ended up using pagemaker. To this day I've never actually used it.

I have a whole rant about this and should probably not inflict it on yall

But I probably will

I learned Quark before InDesign; in fact, I'm sure I still have some Quark layouts of the first couple of issues of the Burning Ambulance print zine that I can no longer open or do anything with.

Markzware probably has a tool for that.

Quark 3.32 was killer. People were still stuck in that years later. 4 was buggy but by 6.5 it was still more or less the dominant program. But by 7 it was over. InDesign just kept adding features and quark lagged. I remember revolutions like dragging and dropping images from the desktop and being able to handle transparency.

are the "billion field codes" the reason doc/docx files are kind of enormous for not actually containing all that much text?

Nobody expects the full page imposition

My way of extracting mages from word or PowerPoint was always to export as a website. Then you get all the images in an images folder.

That regardless of the casting or script talent in a given blockbuster movie, the having ordered several hundred million worth of special effects three years in advance will see the last two thirds occur without reference to plot, pacing or indeed visibility

Yeah ive just watched a marvel movie

woaaaaaaaaaaaaah that zip file secret, that's cool, thank you!

^

things I was shockingly old when I learned

another great "extract images" trick is an application called The Unarchiver on macOS - if you drop a PDF on it, it makes a folder with all the bitmap images pulled out in their native resolution

damn matt

tools of the trade, I teach using figures from articles etc so I picked up a lot over the years!

Speaking of Q products. Quantel Paintbox, still ain't seen anything on modern computers that comes close to the simplistic and smooth performance that machine brought to digital painting. Fed up of drowning in a sea of icons on paint software these days.

Oh that’s old. My first post college job was at a service bureau that had quantel paintbox and flame suites. That was a different era for sure. A leather couch so the client can watch the work on a big screen. We also had Iris inkjet proofers. Silicon graphics RIPs, scitex prepress systems etc.

The whole notion of OPI seems so quaint. “Those 6mb TIFFs were just too large for any mortal Mac so we had to use JPEG stand-ins and swap them out at the RIP”

Oh yeah. Xinet. It was funny going through those transitions. At some point I started a job where we’d release files with all low res in place and send a dvd of the hires to the vendor and they’d do the swapping. I was the genius who was like you know we have the means to place hires ourselves and release press ready files, which is good because we have more control, assuming the production artists know what they are doing. Suddenly I was like ok we need to buy new computers for everybody because these aren’t cutting it.

I remember when Mac RIP software became available, we had a Power Computing Mac clone with about 90MB of RAM driving the image setter. It was working so hard it could only manage to spit out a line of text every few minutes. Often it took us 15-20 minutes to realise if it had crashed.

and those hilarious Syquest cartridges, I think some were as small as 44MB.

Yeah syquest was 44 and then 88 and later they had one that was like 135 but by then zip had taken over, which was 100 mg. That company also had jazz drives which were 1 gig and fragile as fuck. I was preflight at that service bureau so we had all of those and less popular things like magneto optical drives.

People would send in a syquest disk with a directory pointing to the file they needed printed and be like “be careful that disk is all of my work”.

My last job before my current one I was still burning dvds to release files but by the time k started my current gig 7 years ago that was history. All releases are just via Dropbox or we transfer.

Today, I made some Xmas purchases from my home computer in the morning, then I went to the farmers market. A few hours later, I went to Trader Joe's, where with a cart full of $100+ dollars worth of stuff, my card was declined. I was deeply embarrassed, but also angry, because I knew there was quite a bit of money in the account. So I paid with credit rather than debit, then logged into my banking app.

They put a hold on my account because they deemed my spending pattern of the day "suspicious."

I know the bank's reasoning behind this sort of thing, but what if I hadn't had a credit card with me? Red-facedly log into my banking app to tell my bank that none of my purchases were suspicious? Fucking ridiculous!

there is a big online yarn retailer i have ordered things from and now whenever someone asks a question about something i have purchased, i get an email asking if i can help the person. beats having to pay a customer service worker i guess.

also harbl can you take care of this gentleman's refund, he has misplaced his receipt

I used to find those helpful on Amazon (which has user answered questions) but the people don't always answer them correctly and vouch for something that's a piece of shit

the subject is "Can you help a fellow shopper?" not to mention the information requested in this one is on the product page so they could have a bot easily answer this.

right, like who's to say i'm competent to answer it or ethical enough to not just say there's 10,000 yards of yarn per ball thank you for shopping with us?

Red-facedly log into my banking app to tell my bank that none of my purchases were suspicious? Fucking ridiculous!

― we need outrage! we need dicks!! (the table is the table), Saturday, December 4, 2021 10:33 PM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

lol, i'm very familiar with this experience. like, "as your bank, we know you have been poor your whole life, so we have a really hard time believing you would spend $400 in one day."

Trying to buy a bunch of individual things on bandcamp tends to result in my card getting blocked

Trying to buy a bunch of individual things on bandcamp tends to result in my card getting blocked

This happens to me every Bandcamp Friday. I've even explained it to Citibank, but nope...

hah, same here, and also Citibank

Yes, it happened to me multiple times, and discussing with my bank was no help. It works better to route the payments through PayPal, but that is also a slower process. I kind of blame bandcamp for not having a cleaner payment system, but I assume they have their reasons.

idk works for me

the one thing that bandcamp does that probably seems odd from the processor side is making each label transaction unique even if you have a bunch of stuff in your cart. makes sense, because each could have different locations, shipping terms, etc. but if you check out with a bunch at once, you end up with a series of transactions hitting your card within seconds

may just depend on what your bank will/will not flag as suspicious activity. I assume doing it this way saves bandcamp some amount of transaction fees that would be incurred when dividing up payments on the backend.

It works better to route the payments through PayPal, but that is also a slower process

PayPal also charges a fee for international transactions across currencies. I forget what the percentage is now, but my credit card is fee-free for currency conversion.

Yeah, Bandcamp don't like you using Paypal. Or they don't like me doing it, anyway. There's always a little message telling me that if I checked out directly I could do it all in one go or something like that. I just ignore it.
I had my bank block an online purchase while I was in the middle of confirming it on the bank's own app, which was infuriating.

Yeah, Santander pulls this shit with me too. It's like your bank is an overbearing parent, "are you SURE you want to buy this"...

Ooh, here's one --- the volume adjustment on my phone is a really steppy, jump-from-5-to-6 affair. Often the actual ideal Goldilocks porridge bowl volume is smack between two volume levels. they're effectively volume menu options. you'd do better with a good old fashioned dial, i say!!!! but maybe other more cutting-edge phones than mine are way past this problem.

I've thought the same thing about digital radio displays replacing analog dials. I mean, sure, the radio station is broadcasting at 102.5 FM, but maybe it comes in just a little clearer at 102.55.

I got my haircut at a shop a few years ago where an old Magnavox TV set was on, playing "Gunsmoke" from a local station. It was the first time I had watched local TV without cable since they did away with the terrestrial broadcasts and went digital.

Now instead of rabbit ears, the barber had to use a digital tuner. And now, whenever the transmission would lose a little power, you wouldn't see the ghost of Miss Kitty stand behind some static, but instead a big solid blue screen would appear.

That volume thing drives me nuts

on my bedroom TV the ideal volume lies somewhere between 0 and 1 - is either off or too loud. and i think the 'dial' goes up well beyond 20 bars.

(main tv has a 'dial' that goes around more than once, 360 degrees is like 30% of maximum, which kind of breaks the analogy)

the microwave 'I've finished' beep sounds like it's designed to be heard from the other side of a large house, is far too loud for my 1 bed flat. but i can stop it by opening the door early.

I finally bought big, floor Bluetooth speakers cause was sick of all the smaller ones not being loud and/or bassy enough. These are for sure loud but vol level 1 is TOO LOUD. Luckily there's also sliders on the actual speakers so I can turn those down and have the volume be low enough.
If you go in the command hub or whatever the fuck apple calls it on the iPhone, you can slide the volume with your finger but of course it's a digital fake slider so you still get huge quantum jumps between volume settings. Dumb.

My 2017 car is bad with volume since the knob is non-mechanical. If I leave it up too loud, then when I turn the car back on it's several seconds before I can either turn it down or turn it off. I've had a few years to learn this lesson but it still happens occasionally.