Day of the Moron

What a crapload of emotions I’ve been struggling with today. Just be glad I wasn’t operating a bulldozer in your neighborhood.

It all started out so simply. I had a cute little advertisement to put together for ZoukFest 2008, nothing complicated at all. I did this in Photoshop against the advice of my younger brother and was happy as a clam until I wanted to put a little box around a snippet of text. I know, it’s absurd, but with all my years using Photoshop, I’ve never needed to do that one little thing. My God, what a horror.

Adobe Systems has a fabulous Help Viewer. If human beings were so thoroughly documented, there’d be no need for shrinks and analysts. But computers (and the people who write help files) are hopelessly specific, and I guarantee you that searching for “how to make a little box and put text in it” is not going to get you any results you can use. To find what you want from Adobe Help, you need to know at least 50% of the answer already. It’s that way with any computer software or hardware, even the wonderful products from good ol’ Apple. I don’t know what keywords I hunted for — there were so many — but one of them turned up an item called a stroke, and believe it or not, that means “border.” Who knew?

Okay, I would do it right! For years I’d been pulling down the Edit menu in Photoshop and looking at “Stroke…” without any idea of what it meant. (“Stroke”?? I don’t think so. Who needs that?) Well, it means to put a line around an object. I felt stupid but mildly overjoyed, as it all seemed so easy: just use the rectangular selection tool, draw a rectangle, and “stroke” it. I opted for a single-pixel black line, hit the “OK” button, and found myself looking at a GRAY border… Huh?

Damn, damn, damn.

You don’t want to know how many times I tried this with the same results. It was excruciating. It was maddening! I emailed my brother. I googled for hours. Finally, I emailed the MyMac.com staff mailing list with my “stupid question,” and that was the most entertaining of all: four different people had four different ways to make a little box with text inside, and none of these methods had anything to do with the officially recommended procedure! Each method was also more complicated than what I’d been tryng, and at least one of the respondents has actually worked for Apple. Oh yeah? Oh yeah! But to make matters as bad as possible, each solution produced the same gray border instead of black. AAAGHHH!

By this time my brother emailed to tell me I was nuts, because the file I’d sent him had what he considered to be a nice BLACK line around the text. To prove it, he had me blow up the image 1600%: sure enough, there was a single-pixel black border, plain as day. Oops. In fact, if I just enlarged it to actual size instead of the 30-50% magnification I’d been using to fit the thing on my MacBook screen, I could see a black line too. Ohhhhhh… Not a software issue, in other words, but a moron issue! it just hadn’t occurred to me to blow up the image for a closer look. At a one-pixel width but viewed at a third of its actual size, the black line rendered gray. Holy Mother of God, THREE HOURS wasted on this, and I was close to having a nervous breakdown. My wife was ready to start packing.

That wasn’t the only moronic issue of the day. I still had to produce an 8 x 5 inch press-ready PDF of the advertisement. PDF, incidentally, stands for “Portable Document Format,” or in my case, “pretty damn funny.” The whole idea being PDFs is that they can be viewed on any platform. The dirty little secret is that there are probably dozens of different ways to make a PDF, and all of them result in something just a little different. Imagine how much fun this is when confronting a snooty publishing house with its own very specific requirements.

The rest of my day was spent wrestling with PDFs and all the Google hits on how to custom-size them, none of which worked. In the end, I fired up Adobe InDesign, which I’ve used for less than a week, and rebuilt the ad from scratch. It looked a lot better, and lo and behold, I was able to export and produce an actual 8 x 5 inch PDF! Now all I have to do is apologize to my wife (again), my brother, and myself. (The MyMac guys didn’t know they were crazy and meant well, so no problem there.)

The client will want everything changed, anyway, so I’d better go take a nice long bath and try to relax.