Vortex, I'm sorry your boss is being a jerk. I hope a good solution works its way out.
Jilli, much -ma to you and you dad. Wife and mother, mother and grandma in what? A month? That's horrible. You have my sympathies.
Jilli, can you email me your address?
Bonny, what's your website?
ION, OMFG, can I just tell you the difference in taking a Xanax in the morning is making in my teaching stress level? It has been AMAZING. I'm not out of it or anything; I'm just...even-keeled. I'm laughing, joking with the kids, not yelling.
The doc gave me a 30 day script for .5 mgs., but things are going so much better -- also, I've been out of Ambien since Sat, and I have been taking 2 Xanax at bedtime, and I have not been laying there worrying and obsessing. I FELL ASLEEP, Y'ALL! Like a normal person! I am going to try to take just one tonight, see how that works, but I so need to talk to someone about this -- it's seriously helping SO MUCH. Thus far.
Bonny, what's your website?
Erin, this one is for people and this one is for dogs.
Is there a question I can answer for you?
Good lord. I'm sorry, Jilli.
Actually, Bonny, I just wanted your address, for non-stalkery reasons!
Jilli, I am very sorry.
I FELL ASLEEP, Y'ALL! Like a normal person!
Seriously. Isn't it amazing when that happens?
Cass, it's like angels come down and massage my soul when that happens. It's like Thanatos loves me for a night. Barry White love, not Celine Dion love.
Oh, Jilli. I am so sorry.
Oh, it's totally Barry White loving.
Jilli, I am so sorry.
The rice pasta shells are actually whole-grain brown rice pasta by Tinkyada.
The lasagna noodles I use are brown rice pasta from Tinkyada. I'm not fond of their spaghetti noodles (they just don't act right to me), but that could be because with spaghetti, the noodles are front and center, under some sauce. But with lasagna (at least the way I make it), the noodle is maybe 20% of the whole dish, so it's not overwhelming.
Finally, dear sweet Christ, if anyone can explain overprinting in graphic design to me, please speak up. My problem specifically involves checkboxes, like the kind you would make a checkmark in if you want to indicate your choice of [whatever]. We use them in our house ads (believe me when I say that design-by-committee is hell on earth).
We have used the same ads -- same files, I mean; we don't make new pages from scratch in Quark XPress every month -- for a long-ass time. Years in some cases.
In XPress, the checkboxes were made in the Zapf Dingbat font, and whoever made it (possibly me) used the keystroke that gives you a solid black box, and then applied a faux outline AND faux shadow to it from the style palette. (I am now aware that I could have just typed a goddamn "o" in Zapf Dingbats and would have gotten the same thing, without the faux styles applied to it. God damn it.)
For our printer, I output the XPress files to PDF using the settings THEY GAVE ME, which involves first outputting to Postscript and then using Distiller to make the final PDF. (I don't know; it's what they told me to do, and I assumed that following their instructions would yield a final product that looked the way we wanted it to.)
So. As I said, we've used these ads with the checkboxes (made with the faux outline and faux shadow) for years. And they always print properly. Every month.
Until this past issue, when EVERY checkbox (there are a lot) overprinted with black.
Did I mention that I am entirely self-taught, learned on the job? I really don't know what in the hell trapping and knockout and overprinting are, except in the most general of terms. Meaning, I use all the default settings. And it's never been a problem.
So we call the printer today and ask, WTF?!? The printer tells us the production team turned on Overprint Preview in Acrobat and saw that the boxes would overprint black. (And then helpfully printed the entire press run.)
What I'm flailing about is this -- I haven't changed anything about how I create or output the files. (The printer INSISTS that they haven't changed anything that they do. "We are at an impasse, then," I told them, "because *I* haven't changed anything *I* do, which I do using the settings YOU GAVE ME.") I have no idea why, when the stupid motherfucking checkboxes have NEVER overprinted black before, they're doing it now.
Possibly they've always been inclined to overprint black, and until now the printer manipulated our PDFs to fix that (although I don't think so).
But I guess what my rage-blackout-inducing frustration is about is -- I really don't know enough about XPress to know why those checkboxes would overprint black in a black/white publication.
This is a long shot, but...anyone? ANY idea?
