"Is god an evil dwarf?"

[greygirlbeast]

First things first. Gimp sucks gangrenous donkey ass. Really, I spent half of yesterday fighting with it, trying to finish up the layout on Sirenia Digest #58. Not a speck of intuitive design anywhere in the goddamn programme. Not a whit. I so miss Photoshop 7 (which, you will recall, was rendered useless when I updated to OS X 10.6.3

Comments

[stsisyphus]

Something very, very cool happened. Potentially very cool. But right now it's a Secret. .... Oh, and did I mention I had a great meeting with an editor from Dark Horse during the HPLFF? Well, I did. More on that as it develops

Shakespeare's got to get paid, yo. Or so I can hope.

[greygirlbeast]

Shakespeare's got to get paid, yo. Or so I can hope.

All my toes are crossed.

[ashlyme]

Kraken is *brilliant*: the best thing China's written since Perdido Street, and a hell of a lot of fun. No spoilers, but I think you'll find the ending interesting.

[greygirlbeast]

Kraken is *brilliant*: the best thing China's written since Perdido Street, and a hell of a lot of fun.

All the opening stuff in the British Museum was wonderful, in part because I know it first hand, and he did a great job of communicating that great space.

[greygirlbeast]

that is an amazingly beautiful old theatre. i hope the interior was as impressive. great atmosphere for the film fest. i like the old single screen theatres so much better than the stadium seating multi-plexes. but then, i'm a luddite.

Sadly, the interior hasn't aged quite as well, though it's still nice. And there are actually three screens, a big one downstairs, and two small ones upstairs that were added at some point.

[ext_232776]

I have no idea what program functionality is required to put together an issue of Sirenia Digest, but I am wondering if Photoshop or Gimp are the right tools for the job if it takes so long. As I've mentioned before, I do not read Sirenia Digest in PDF form so I have to convert each issue to a more readable format. First, I grab the text and clean it up (this is the most time consuming part, I have to get rid of header and footer remnants and fix line break issues). Then I drop the text in Apple's Pages program and I drop the images into the appropriate locations. Finally I clean up any style issues (text alignment and style, page breaks between chapters, etc.) and I am done. Now I can export to PDF, Word (the Kindle supports converting Word documents to native format) or ePub. If I had a clean version of the text, the entire process might take 15 to 30 minutes

[greygirlbeast]

I actually do the text layout in MS Word. It's simple and dirty, but it works. It's the image and cover layout I use Photoshop for. And while I'd truly love to make the digest available in other formats (though, I say again, I hate Kindle, Nook, etc.), that first paragraph made my head spin.

[ext_232776]

I guess I should have left it at "Copy, then paste!" :)

Using Word makes more sense. I was trying to figure out where Gimp came into the picture.

ebook format

[uulemnts]

As much as I dislike the idea of ebooks taking the place of printed books, from a publishers stand point, I think the formate will replace massmarkets, simply because of the waste involved in that formate. I also like the idea that there will always be a version of a book in print, even if its only in ebook format, just think of all that lost classics that could be brought back. That said ebooks will never take the place of a printed book and the tactile enjoyment that it brings.

[chn_breathmint]

I may have access to a free copy of Photoshop Elements from the software deal I got for my Wacom Intuos 4 (with a legitimate registration code), and since I have Photoshop CS5 I don't quite need it. Would you like me to see if I can download it and burn it to DVD for you?

- Mel

[greygirlbeast]

Hmmmmm. Let me think on it, but thank you.