Over the past few months, the past year really, I’ve been rebuilding the production process for Surfing The Deathline.
The project is built in obsolete versions of Adobe Photoshop, and InDesign – versions that won’t run on a modern operating system. On the assumption that vintage hardware will be unable to run for ever, I made the long term plan to build a dedicated virtual machine with the necessary applications, and fonts, to be able to continue to fix the work, should errata be discovered.
And boy, were errata discovered:
You can see the tag for the speech bubble doesn’t match the background colour of the bubble itself. They were supposed to be indistinguishable, and what I eventually realised was that I had switched the text box to an RGB-based black, while the tag end was still a CMYK black. The important point being that while they look the same at 100% opacity, as you apply transparency effects, the CMYK version takes on a grey tinge.
This error went live in an update of the books.
So back to the virtual machine; setting that up, learning to configure and run virtual machine software, acquiring an old version of MacOS 10.6 Snow Leopard Server, reinstalling old Adobe Creative Suite 5, migrating fonts – each step required re-learning old technology. Dealing then with the vagaries of migrated fonts; how some fonts that had been in my system for years wouldn’t work when re-added to a fresh system, and so necessitated finding replacement versions effectively meant manually checking, and adjusting every piece of text in the work.
Eventually it was all done, and I was able to start re-building Surfing The Deathline in the new environment. Along the way, I started to find issues – typos, and style items incorrectly applied. Some of them dated back to the first print publication in 2006, or the first pdf preview in 2004. So there was literally a couple of months of going through the book, page by page, massaging fixes, running output sets, proofreading, noting fixes, fixing, running output, proofreading, etc.
The biggest limiter was my inability to do more than one proofing run per day – the changes were so small and obscure that after reading the book once, I simply couldn’t see the next set of problems – fresh eyes were necessary.
And so, for weeks on end, I’ve been largely nocturnal, barely leaving the house. Groceries arrive, I cook, I read news, I work, I have occasional weekends off. This is me in work mode.
But the work has been done. For something I declared finished in 2021, now in 2024 it seems genuinely finished.