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

Heee. I'm at my dad's place and he has an old college friend here - another guy who has known me my whole life. J has a Samsung phone one model older than my Samsung phone. He was struggling with something and handed it over to me to figure out. Which I did. Around a couple of 70 year olds, I'm the tech savy kid. Cool.

Someone from a task force working on a new chapter to our ongoing manual of practice sent us the information as a PDF. It's loaded with photos, charts, etc., that they downloaded (stole) from websites all over the place. (Some of the photos are meaningless and were inserted because they're pretty. They very helpfully (sarcasm font) sent a Word file with the images and links to the sites where they downloaded (stole) them.)

When we asked for a Word file of the actual text, they said they didn't have one ... that we should do the edits in the PDF. Which doesn't answer how we're going to get it into the same layout/format as the rest of the manual. And doesn't begin to address the blatant copyright violations they're insisting on.

Toddson, I share your pain. (They could send a Word doc with the images but NOT a Word doc of the text? A PDF has to be created from some source file -- that's nuts!)

yup ... so I converted it to a plain text file and did a major copyedit in Word with Track Changes so my people could see what I'd changed (mostly stomping the serial commas - which I like but which our style bans - and correcting tenses, typos, etc.). They're going to get the thing back to review ... odds are, they're going to send it back as a PDF, carefully laid out in the style they like, with all the downloaded (stolen) illustrations put back.

One trick I've used to cheat with high resolution is to save an Excel-generated graph as a PDF and then output the PDF from Acrobat as a .tiff with a high resolution.

Saves a trip to the material world and back. Much better solution, though equally subversive.

I tend to use the low-res chart (or whatever) as a guide and recreate it in Photoshop at a high resolution. Saves having to create it from scratch (or at least figure out how to place various elements) while giving me something that can be used for print. It also allows me to reset colors to go with the color scheme of the publication itself.

Minus-t and Jesse: mind your digits.

Not doing great at that - burnt myself again on lunch. Maybe I should stick to cold meals for a while, but that is not appealing with the current weather.

On the plus side, my stuffed peppers are quite tasty.

Y'all are making me glad I don't have your jobs.

We once requested screenshots to use in online training, and the company faxed them over.

We once requested screenshots to use in online training, and the company faxed them over.

Is there a German word for laughing+crying=funny because it's true?

The copyright thing makes me crazy. High up people are always giving me pictures that they got "off google" and or/they think it is OK as long as they give credit to the website. It is pretty funny to get a marketing brochure with citations.

And as much as I tell them to give me just the content and some idea of what they would like (especially since I am required to put it in a template that our marketing department designed) they still design it themselves in Word and give it to me to "make pretty" and the editor to do content edits. And the editor and I both send changes back to them and it is just a mess.