Flashes of Panic

In the background, my system is grinding away at PDFing a Quark chapter of one of our titles.

For whatever reason, we’re making PDFs of a particular book. Now, ordinarily, we’d have these PDFs hanging around as a by-product of the production process, but this time (again, the reason’s not important) we don’t.

We could get the page-proof PDFs from the printers, but they’re so swamped right now, it would take days.

So I’ve got the CDs that we archived the Quark files on, and I’m grinding away at it, because I’m the one whose list is short enough that this rises to the top.

This is increasingly frustrating work for two reasons.

One, the version of Quark we’re still standardized on stores absolute paths for images. Therefore, in order to PDF one of these, I need to correct the paths for all linked images, from the old path to the production file server to the new path on the CD. This is amazingly tedious in OS 9—each figure is in its own sub-folder in the Art folder, so for each one I need to navigate up a level, down a level, click, when OS X and the Columns view would have me breezing through. You’d think, too, that it could figure out that all the files are still in the same (relative) position, it’s just the root of the document tree that has changed. But no.

Two, since this version of Quark still runs in the Classic shell of the MacOS, I can only do one at a time. I actually have to wait for the progress bars on Chapter One to finish before I can start on Chapter Two.

Can’t I script this somehow?

Fortunately, I only have to play toaster (did I mention that each chapter is on a distinct CD?) for so long before I head out to catch a flight to St. Louis.