FMP DEADLINE OMG
Friday was a nightmare. My usual Friday timetable starts with L at 9.00 till 11.25 and then D from 11.30 to 1.00pm, at which point I scarf down my dinner and get the bus home at 1.15. But it was FMP Deadline Day! The very final deadline was at 4.30 so I could go as soon as I'd handed my work in, whatever time that happened to be.
I had problems from the word go. The room for L's class recently changed from a Mac room to a Windows one which caused an issue for me: my book uses non-standard fonts so they have to be installed onto whatever system it is I'm using. No problems with the Macs, however with the Windows systems only administrators can install anything. I had been using the Macs in the library for that reason but they were struggling with turning all my individual pages into one complete .pdf because the file size was pretty huge and they just weren't powerful enough. So I went off to the technicians to find out what my options were. After waiting till 9.30 for the technician to start work, he said he would be happy to install the fonts for me and advised me to use one of the computers in the IT room so he would be on hand to help out. He said they were the most powerful computers on campus so I'd have no problems there either.
Fonts were installed and I got busy combining all the book's pages into one large .pdf. As I saved the file, I got an error message saying one of the fonts had licensing issues and wouldn't be rendered in the .pdf. Disaster!! I'd turned the individual pages from Illustrator files to .pdfs at home and hadn't had that error so I had no idea there could be such a problem. My only alternative was to save each page as a .tif file instead - making it an image - and then combine those as a .pdf, therefore getting round the licensing issue. The only downside is that .tif files at 300dpi are HUGE. And my flash stick was already full so I had to hope that my never-used area on the server would be big enough to hold them all. I quickly got all the pages saved as .tif and then started to build up the final .pdf. By the time I got up to the Seventh Doctor's pages, I could tell the computer was starting to struggle with the size of the file. I was saving it all as an Illustrator file so I had the master to alter if necessary and the last save took so long, I really thought it had crashed. The final file size was 670MB! Thankfully the .pdf wasn't as huge, that was only 45MB. Only! The computer still struggled with it though. So much for being the most powerful one on campus. And then I had to do it all again with the banner.
By now, it was getting on for 12 so I quickly hurried over to D's class. All I had left to do was supporting documentation so it seemed like the worst was over. The Bibliography and Project Proposal were quickly finalised and uploaded to my student space for the teachers to access. Then it was onto the Contextual Resources document, where I had to acknowledge all the images I'd found online. I had to include the image, the site I got it from, the copyright owner for the image and details of the copyright. Most of my images are from the BBC's Doctor Who section so that was fairly straightforward. The problem was the sheer amount of images I've used for my project. Research for each Doctor's illustration took 3-4 photos and another 5-6 images are included on each double page spread. That's 90-110 images right there! And that's not including all the other images I used as part of my initial research into Doctor Who merchandise and general illustrators/illustrations! The worst bit was that I could only insert one image into the Word document at a time. It took forEVER. I think I must have spent 2 hours just on that. The final document was 43 pages long and just under 27MB. That was when I found out the upload limit to my student space was 20MB. D suggested compressing it which reduced it from 26.6MB to 26.2MB. Woo. He then said to try saving it as a .pdf which I'd already tried but it came out at 150MB! In the end, I just stuck it on the flash stick with my complete book because I could not be buggered faffing about any more.
Then it was off to the staff room to find M and hand the whole thing in, after a brief detour to the Little Shop in order to buy a folder to put in all 105 study sheets, my project diary, print out of my proposal and timeline, and the flash stick. I was so glad to get shut of it, I'd had enough several hours beforehand. I'd had no actual break all day and my dinner was spent with a butty in one hand and the other inserting image after image. I couldn't believe how tired I was, my entire body felt exhausted. It was 3.10pm when I left the staff room and the next bus was at quarter past so I hurried off to get that. An hour later I was at home collapsed onto my bed and that was pretty much where I spent the whole weekend!
I had problems from the word go. The room for L's class recently changed from a Mac room to a Windows one which caused an issue for me: my book uses non-standard fonts so they have to be installed onto whatever system it is I'm using. No problems with the Macs, however with the Windows systems only administrators can install anything. I had been using the Macs in the library for that reason but they were struggling with turning all my individual pages into one complete .pdf because the file size was pretty huge and they just weren't powerful enough. So I went off to the technicians to find out what my options were. After waiting till 9.30 for the technician to start work, he said he would be happy to install the fonts for me and advised me to use one of the computers in the IT room so he would be on hand to help out. He said they were the most powerful computers on campus so I'd have no problems there either.
Fonts were installed and I got busy combining all the book's pages into one large .pdf. As I saved the file, I got an error message saying one of the fonts had licensing issues and wouldn't be rendered in the .pdf. Disaster!! I'd turned the individual pages from Illustrator files to .pdfs at home and hadn't had that error so I had no idea there could be such a problem. My only alternative was to save each page as a .tif file instead - making it an image - and then combine those as a .pdf, therefore getting round the licensing issue. The only downside is that .tif files at 300dpi are HUGE. And my flash stick was already full so I had to hope that my never-used area on the server would be big enough to hold them all. I quickly got all the pages saved as .tif and then started to build up the final .pdf. By the time I got up to the Seventh Doctor's pages, I could tell the computer was starting to struggle with the size of the file. I was saving it all as an Illustrator file so I had the master to alter if necessary and the last save took so long, I really thought it had crashed. The final file size was 670MB! Thankfully the .pdf wasn't as huge, that was only 45MB. Only! The computer still struggled with it though. So much for being the most powerful one on campus. And then I had to do it all again with the banner.
By now, it was getting on for 12 so I quickly hurried over to D's class. All I had left to do was supporting documentation so it seemed like the worst was over. The Bibliography and Project Proposal were quickly finalised and uploaded to my student space for the teachers to access. Then it was onto the Contextual Resources document, where I had to acknowledge all the images I'd found online. I had to include the image, the site I got it from, the copyright owner for the image and details of the copyright. Most of my images are from the BBC's Doctor Who section so that was fairly straightforward. The problem was the sheer amount of images I've used for my project. Research for each Doctor's illustration took 3-4 photos and another 5-6 images are included on each double page spread. That's 90-110 images right there! And that's not including all the other images I used as part of my initial research into Doctor Who merchandise and general illustrators/illustrations! The worst bit was that I could only insert one image into the Word document at a time. It took forEVER. I think I must have spent 2 hours just on that. The final document was 43 pages long and just under 27MB. That was when I found out the upload limit to my student space was 20MB. D suggested compressing it which reduced it from 26.6MB to 26.2MB. Woo. He then said to try saving it as a .pdf which I'd already tried but it came out at 150MB! In the end, I just stuck it on the flash stick with my complete book because I could not be buggered faffing about any more.
Then it was off to the staff room to find M and hand the whole thing in, after a brief detour to the Little Shop in order to buy a folder to put in all 105 study sheets, my project diary, print out of my proposal and timeline, and the flash stick. I was so glad to get shut of it, I'd had enough several hours beforehand. I'd had no actual break all day and my dinner was spent with a butty in one hand and the other inserting image after image. I couldn't believe how tired I was, my entire body felt exhausted. It was 3.10pm when I left the staff room and the next bus was at quarter past so I hurried off to get that. An hour later I was at home collapsed onto my bed and that was pretty much where I spent the whole weekend!