Another Friday Night for Fritschie

Being alone in the Art Department at least four days a week has taken a little getting used to. It seems like I have one huge project each week with a rush deadline, and a ton of small jobs to act as my "break" from the big project.

This week, my albatross has been a roster book for a professionals association. This is a project that has had no choice but to sit at the back of my priority list for three weeks while I've tackled the other huge projects I've been working on the past three weeks.

I've worked my ass off this week on this job, and I got final approval at 4:30 this afternoon. It'll print this weekend, which means my friday night is to be spent running plates. Thirty plates to be exact. On the surface, this looked to be a piece of cake. To save time, I planned to impose ten plates, and run them while I set up the next ten. Three phases of copy, paste and print, and I can go home.

The first ten plates went off without a hitch, and it looked like I was gonna be able to have the next ten ready to run right behind it. Then Quark decided to crash on the 19th page. I quickly re-opened the file and found I had only lost a couple pages worth of work. I saved the file after every half page. First half of the 20th page, no problem. Saved successfully. Second half, crash. At this point, both Quark and our font management program crashed.

Long story short, the problem is the system's originally installed version of Helvetica, and how it was conflicting with the better version I was using for the layout. I have been getting error messages all day about it. So, I trashed the system's version and restarted. Then, the system crashed and wouldn't fully come back on.

Now, I'm spinning my wheels on the internet using the other iMac while I'm re-installing the system on mine. Fingers crossed!

UPDATE: In the immortal words of Dr. Emmet L. Brown, "IT WORKS! I FINALLY INVENTED SOMETHING THAT WORKS!"

After waiting an hour for the system software to re-install, I found that the file was still crashing. So, when in doubt, section the fucker. Three files, ten pages a pop. Plates are running, I'm having a smoke.