Some authors make me want to scream. (Apologies to all people here who have published or will publish in academia; I'm sure you respect your editors or at the very least follow the instructions they give you. If so, congratulations! You are not the authors I'm talking about!)

We don't send authors the edited Word docs, because if they make changes, we can't know they tracked everything, and then we'd have to compare their version with our version line by line. So we send them a PDF.

I have an author who asked for the Word doc, and when we said no, you need to work with the PDF, emailed back with "Good news! I converted the PDF to a Word document! I will re-convert it back to a PDF before I submit it!"

STOP IT, EVIL HAND.

Smooth surgery ~ma, Theo.

"Good news! I converted the PDF to a Word document! I will re-convert it back to a PDF before I submit it!"

Nope, not good news. Crazy-making news. Argh.

And I had to politely word my email so it doesn't say WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU WE SENT YOU INSTRUCTIONS THAT SAY NOT TO DO THAT JACKASS!

Instead I used phrases like "we kindly request" and "not feasible with our stringent production schedule" and "unable to use such a document."

(And this is a bullshit 2-page article that's a bio of a historical medical figure that -- I am not making this up -- the senior author's HIGH SCHOOL daughter wrote as a school project. She is listed, of course, as one of the authors. Since when does the goddamn AMA publish Sophomore history projects?!? ISTG, as soon as I found out one of the authors was a high schooler, I should have known this was going to be nothing but a headache.)

New email: "Can you tell me how to edit in a PDF document?"

Reply I can't send: "That's the whole point, jackass; we don't want you altering the content of the article."

Reply I sent: "The textual content of a PDF file cannot be altered, but you may indicate corrections using the comment tool."

I am 100% positive that this guy won't know what that is or how to use it, and will need instructions (I don't actually have an instruction sheet or anything, because we assume our authors can use Acrobat). This is fucking ridiculous.

"Good news! I converted the PDF to a Word document! I will re-convert it back to a PDF before I submit it!"

It's cute when they think they're being helpful.

My plans for today involve talking to an old manager and officially expressing interest in roles based in California. After work, I'm on a mission for Cinderella shoes rather than an Elsa dress, because reasons.

Surgery went well (it was a secondary infundibular cyst making a large bump on my forehead) except for the part where I squeaked when they injected anesthetic. There seems to be a pain path directly from my forehead into my vocal cords.

(Infundibular is a fun word to say. All that it is, is a hair follicle gone rogue. Essentially it traps all the natural oil your average follicle produces and just grows. Ick.)

I'm not supposed to remove the bandage until tomorrow, and have to go back next week to get the stitches out. No prescriptions, no special instructions aside from not scrubbing at it hard. It's nice when "minor surgery" really is minor.

Stephs author is being crazy, of course, but I will say that it is frustrating to do anything other than the smallest editing in the pdf when your bibliographic program and figures are native to Word. It would be better if authors and editors could collaborate on the lossless version of the manuscript.

I'll tell another one. Some journals will not accept figures generated in Excel, because they are not high enough resolution. However, if you print out the Excel figure and then scan it back in at a (meaningless) high resolution, the figure is acceptable to the journal. When faced with the prospect of learning a new graphics program to finish a paper they long since stopped caring about, people fire up the printer and git er done.

Holy crap, he figured out how to do it! And helpfully emailed me to tell me "Ok...figured out how to do that...thx."

I should have said "Ask your daughter, dude."

It's cute when they think they're being helpful.

For values of cute that include screams.