This Is Fifty-Three, day 30

Argh! This afternoon, I did battle with InDesign CS6, which is becoming increasingly finicky as time goes on…

I had initially exported the completed draft of the book to a PDF without any problems beyond the amount of time it takes to render all those images and graphics. As I started to think about getting feedback from folks, I thought I should re-export to a smaller PDF format.

Unfortunately, I kept getting this error message at the end of the export:

 

No PDF for you!

To see which of my files might be causing the problem, I tried exporting each section individually. Naturally, it was when I got to the Oddities file, which contains all the more complex graphics, that InDesign threw up the error message.

Maybe I am asking InDesign to do too much, I thought. I began copying some of the more complex/layered graphics to Illustrator, saving them as Illustrator files, then replacing the wacky stuff I had originally created within InDesign.

On the next export, I got a new-ish error message:

Okay… Well, the only thing I had done was to import Illustrator files; maybe InDesign was having trouble there. I went back to Illustrator and re-saved as EPS files. Same thing.

The process being in its early stages, I did have some JPEGs in my document. Seeing as how this error message did not see fit to tell me WHICH JPEG WAS THE PROBLEM, I opened all of them up in Photoshop, re-saved as TIFF files, and swapped them out for the TIFFs.

The next attempt to export to PDF generated an Out of memory error. With 32 GB of RAM, I don’t think so. Still, re-starting my computer seemed like a good idea anyway.

No dice. The original error message continued.

Just to see what would happen, I tried exporting using the same settings I had for my original, successful export. It worked! Not ideal, but I can always use Acrobat’s preflight function to generate smaller files that can more easily be sent via e-mail.

---

Earlier in the day, I created another cover draft, this one a variation on the vertically oriented version with the wacky red boxes.

I tried a few different typefaces, but stuck with Athelas for this draft; while inspired in part by constructivist graphics, as filtered through Ryuichi Sakamoto’s B-2 Unit and Neo Geo album covers, I am less interested in aping a style than I am putting to use a technique (exaggerating InDesign stroke widths for effect) I have played around with now and then.

(27 June 2016)