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.

Oh- funny story. My boss created a pdf form for a scholarship application that students could save and email in. SHe had IT set up a shared drive so that everyone who needed to read the applications could access them. They were not able to set something up where it would be automatically submitted as it was not a priority.

So, she had an office staff person recieve the emails and put them on the shared drive.

The office member printed out the emails, scanned them, and THEN uploaded them to the shared drive as pdfs. But now, the readers couldn't see the words in the boxes if the student typed longer than the box they were given.

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!"

"Good news, everyone!" Getting changes in the Word doc is a freaking nightmare. It's right there in the instructions; don't do that.

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.

By the time the paper gets to me, it shouldn't need more than the smallest editing from the author. It would be better if the authors would finish writing the manuscript before they submit it.

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.

Yep. Git er done. That happens because it's an automated process accepting the figure; it's just checking the resolution. If the resolution is too low, it'll look bad and the author will complain bitterly about it and insist that I redo it, as if I can give him perfect sharp figures when he sent me blurry crap he created at 96 dpi. That's why we insist on 600 dpi from the author. However, if the author sends me a figure that's still blurry at 600 dpi, I have to assume that he doesn't give a shit if it's blurry. I do care that the figure looks bad, but I can't force him to give me a better figure. The resolution is more important with complex figures than line graphs, I guess, but the automatic process can't tell the difference.

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.

This is what we usually do, and what I usually suggest to my authors. It's not "subversive", it's a "work-around".

I am back at work from a week's vacation today, and I don't want to be.