My recent reunion with Cindy and Sheila and the story I did about printed Picayunes being ramped up 15 years ago got me thinking about updating all those electronic copies. Many were made in PageMaker 4.2 or QuarkXpress 3 with graphics in Illustrator 3, Streamline 1 or PhotoShop 2. Think it really sucks when your computer becomes obsolete, namely Apple being completely converted over from PowerPC processors to Intel. Try using files you can’t open because the current applications can’t fathom these ancestors. Actually, it was only a nuisance with the PageMaker, QuarkXpress may cost more yet those guys make sure you can upgrade your work.
I really wanted to recover Cindy’s letters to e-mail them to her for nostalgic purposes. Then I was growing to accept them as being sealed to the ages unless I suddenly could find a working copy of PageMaker 6 running on Mac OS 8.6, how Twentieth Century! It would require enlisting the assistance of people who troll sites that are best avoided too. Thankfully my stubbornness paid off as I kept trying different search strings through Google (useless) and Adobe’s knowledge base. PageMaker 7 remains available on a 30-day trial basis! It’s required since InDesign (PM’s successor) only converts versions 6 and 7. Too bad InDesign 3 quits whenever I try to print so I must use the conversions to PDF which are immune to ravages of upgrading.
Now comes the process of finding all the missing fonts the applications squawk about in the splash screens. I can’t believe I used Cairo and Chicago on one of these! Once the fonts are in place, the layouts have to be tweaked because InDesign doesn’t respect PageMaker’s settings; yes, “respect” is the correct technical term, I read it all the time regarding Access Control Lists in Mac OS X Server. Fear not, I’m not “improving” any of them a la George Lucas. The typos, errors and other flaws (mainly the writing) will remain since they’re time capsules into the past.
For an extra laugh, I gave my favorite college papers another upgrade to Word 2004 so I can review them again and wonder how did I get good grades on these. Despite many of them receiving A’s, they will never be for sale or posted on the Internet.