29 July 2010

I'm hooked - blog #2 underway

I'm creating a second blog to run in parallel with this one... both linked from my website. I'm going to gradually post hints and tips about Microsoft Word onto it, as I use Word all the time for some quite complex stuff...the idea being that if someone disagrees with something I say, I'll have learnt something!


I've also gained another follower on Twitter, so I'd better keep it going now I've started!

19 July 2010

Blog and website linked

It's taken me most of the weekend to sort it out – my CSS skills are a little rusty and I'd never seen the Blogger code before – but I've managed to integrate Blogger and my website... and I'm reasonably pleased with the result. I've published this blog to subdomains of clearly-stated.co.uk instead of leaving it with a blogger url. I played with Blogger to get the general look and feel as I wanted it (as much as I could with my limited knowledge), then changed the CSS of my website to correspond. It's not perfect... and some of the differences are deliberate... but I'm really pleased with the overall result. You can tell that you've left my site (the top bar gives it away!) but you also feel that the elements belong together. Overall, a success. I'm just waiting now for someone with a browser I don't have to tell me it doesn't work on their combination...

10 July 2010

Not all changes are bad... but I do wish they'd warn you!

I'm currently working on a suite of documents that were created in versions of Word ranging from Word 2000 to Word 2003. Most of the team is now using Word 2007... but that shouldn't be a problem, should it? The templates still work as expected, and the documents look fine while working on them. The problem only raised its head when I created the first press-ready PDF. What had happened to all the beautiful high-resolution diagrams? They looked awful - and there were a lot of them!

I wasted a bit of time messing about with Acrobat, making sure I hadn't accidentally changed a setting, but no - everything was still OK. A bit of searching online soon revealed what appears to be the culprit... the graphic filters in Word 2007 are different from previous versions. The .eps images have always looked a bit odd in Word - you are only seeing a low-resolution preview at that stage - but have always looked fantastic in the PDF sent to press. Now, the press-ready PDF didn't look any better than the Word document - the images were low-resolution and blocky. Fortunately opening the Word files in Word 2003 and creating the PDFs from there solved the problem... and I needed to add any new images in that format into Word 2003 as well.

Less than 24 hours before the deadline is not the time to find this out!!

09 July 2010

Where does all the time go?

You know what it's like... you start something off, have a clear idea of where you're heading (or maybe not) and think it'll all be done and dusted in a week or so. That was the "big idea" about this blog... all bar the writing, of course. It only took me a Saturday afternoon and evening to get it up and running... and most of that was waiting for the technical stuff to filter through (I wanted it to be part of my domain, not on someone else's). I wrote my first two posts over that weekend, too. Then it all ground to a halt. All I needed to do was add a link to my website, and the job was done... I've finally got there!