🚀 go-pugleaf

> True. But there are a lot of people out there who seem to think they can
> read the PageMaker manual and they're desktop publishers. There's a fairly
> hefty learning curve out there. I don't laugh at the folks who are at the
> low end of the learning curve -- I was there a few years back myself. I
> laugh at the folks who don't want to believe a learning curve exists. I've
> seen too many ludicrous documents to do otherwise.

Not only that, but I've found that people sometimes confuse the
ability to design and typeset pages on the computer with the ability
to "use PageMaker." There have been many occasions when people have
complimented me on my ability to deal with computers, but many fewer
times when people have told me they thought I was a good designer.
(And I don't think it's because they think I'm a bad designer. :-) )
It's just that many people think that they can learn PageMaker and
then be considered a "designer."

Also, when moving from traditional pasteup methods to PageMaker,
the kinds of things that look sloppy are totally different. At the
newspaper I work for here, PageMaker has all but eliminated crooked
lines of text and makes every box perfectly square and neat. But now,
people try to squeeze text into columns that are too narrow, leave too
much leading between lines of headlines leave boxes and text elements a
pixel or two away from the right place, and do other things that
didn't seem to be as much of a problem before. It seems errors of the
X-Acto knife have been replaced by errors of the mouse.

				-Greg
--------------------
Greg Brail
gjb@cs.brown.edu