so there’s been this job floating around the shop for the past couple of weeks. it’s not high priority, or, rather, it wasn’t high priority until today, and it was one of those jobs that, when i originally looked at it 2 weeks ago, i said would have to be redone from scratch before it would print, and majid disagreed with me, so i said he could do it… so today, majid says that he can’t get it to colour separate – it’s only two colours to begin with, yellow and black – and when he can get close, it doesn’t print correctly. he wants me to recreate the document…

o-kay…

it was originally an illustrator file, saved as an .eps and placed in indesign. i imported the original illustrator file into freehand and almost immediately discovered that part of the reason why it wouldn’t print correctly is because it was made out of three individual sections, layed over a solid background, where it had to be one contiguous section in order to avoid some extremely arcane and rather nasty bizarreness in the postscript code required to draw that particular figure, that causes it to print out strangely… as it had been doing.

so i made a new layer, and traced around the logo, so that i had my one contiguous section, and then recreated the rest of the logo, saved it as a colour separated .eps, and had colour separations out of quark for him inside of 40 minutes, as well as finishing two other jobs at the same time.

majid was in awe.

if he gets a new version of indesign without also getting a new version of quark, then he’s a bigger fool than he appears to be, and it’s guaranteed that i will not be working for him very long.