ColorBurst explodes on me

We have an Epson 7600 color printer--a monster--and print with ColorBurst 5.8.5. A series of problems and solutions have alternately bedeviled and beangeled me since yesterday.

Problem: CB crashes on opening.

Solution: Delete "HotFolder".

Problem: Settings are lost.

Solution: Figure them out again. Test printing.

Problem: Documents printed don't show up in CB.

Solution: Print to the right printer, Dodo!

Problem: Documents show up but can't be deleted.

Solution (thanks to tech support forums!): Delete preferences and RIP support folders, then restart CB.

Problem: CB can't find printer.

Solution: Edit the printer and select "Test IP Connection." Get message: "Printer found." Voila'! It prints!

Kind of anti-climactic, but who am I to complain? :-)

The Trouble with Textile

...is that there doesn't seem to be any good online source of documentation. Granted, Textile doesn't seem to need a lot of documentation. But it would be helpful. As a new Textiler, I wanted to create a hyperlink to an anchor, and I had to search around until I found this helpful post:

p(#anchorName). Inserts an anchor with "anchorName" as the ID into a "p" tag.

"Link":/path/#anchorName Links to the anchor; "/path/" can be omitted if the anchor is on the same page.

Perhaps it should have been obvious to the author of the post, but it wasn't to me. Also unclear to me was the fact that the "." at the end is part of the Textile markup, not the English sentence--the Textile code won't compile properly without it. That shows how much of a novice I am, but it would be nice for novices like myself to have a resource to find this sort of thing out rather than hunting and testing for aeons (ok, tens of minutes).

I'm posting it here for posterity. :-)

An additional reason to use Acrobat

As a follow-up to the previous post, I should mention that 30 minutes before the design meeting I received an urgent call to print SIX more covers.


Our cover printer prints... S... L... O... W...

which meant I had to get the covers *ready* ASAP. And Acrobat helped me get them ready really, really quickly. Meeting was still 5-10 minutes late, but not bad. :-)

Printing Book Covers

We have a design meeting coming up, and since our design person just retired it fell to me to print the flashy new cover proposals. VERY cool printer, VERY big and intimidating if you've never used it, printing on VERY VERY expensive card stock!

= Low margin for error. *gulp*

Anyway, the printer paper is 24" x 12", large enough for several book covers to be printed off in a row. The design person used to manually copy and paste each cover into a massive Adobe Photoshop document, then work some Page Setup/Print magic and voila'! Multiple covers!

I'm not a Photoshop guy--more of an Acrobat person, myself. My solution, carefully selected after hours of wrangling with PS to follow my wishes as well as my commands, was more along the lines of:

1. Combine the PDFs into a single file in Acrobat.
2. Change the Page Setup to print 24x12.
3. At the Print dialogue, tell Acrobat to print multiple pages per sheet, namely 3x1.

Which worked fine...

EXCEPT that one of the covers was twice as large as the others (front AND back instead of just the front). Which meant that Acrobat wanted to squish it (to use the technical vocabulary) down to a normal 8.5x11 sheet like the others when printing three-across.

But I hated to throw out a good, time-efficient idea for one little reason like that.

Picture package was one option, but I'd already determined that it wouldn't work for other reasons. Same with its twin, Contact Sheet II. PS was out of the question, as I now have an eternal despising of copying and pasting various layers in that artist's dreamworld.

Final Answer: Duplicate the last page (i.e., merge the same file into the compiled PDF again). Use Acrobat's "Crop Page" option to crop one image down to the back cover (and spine), and the other down to the front cover.

Worked like a dream. :-)