Reading: Ben Franklin bio
Music: Go Ahead, Punk--Make My Day
TV/Movie: Love Hina
Link o' the Day: United States Post Office

Info an the Fiction Writers APA can be found in February 26th's entry. If you're a writer, give it a look.

I will be contacting those who have expressed interest before the week's end.
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I have two tips for anyone who is thinking about a career in professional typesetting. (By professional--I mean doing actual press-production typesetting as opposed to 'desktop publishing' which would only be output via laserprinters.)

First, know as many of the main typesetting and graphics programs available. Know how to use (and use well) Quark XPress, Adobe Acrobat, Pagemaker, InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Freehand. I'll even recommend having a passing familiarity with gawdawful-MSPublisher which, while touting itself as a typesetting program, is nothing more than a glorified and unworkable version of MSWord (until fairly recently, it couldn't even do color separations).

Why do I bring this up? I just laid out the ads for the Nebula issue of the SFWA Bulletin. The majority of ads came to me in Quark Xpress format. This is usually fine, but I use Pagemaker to lay out the Bulletin (my program of choice). You can't easily import one into the other. So I converted my Quark files to EPS, then I opened them in Illustrator and saved them as PDF files, then opened them into Photoshop where I could flatten and save them as high-resolution TIF files--ready for import into Pagemaker. Sure, I could have just imported the EPS files into Pagemaker, but these were all Mac files, and the Bulletin sits on a Windows machine. The fonts would not have transferred over.

So the first key to being a good professional typesetter is flexibility.

The second key is laziness.

Huh?

Yep... laziness! A lazy typesetter doesn't want to have to sit there and physically strip out every incident of double-spaces after periods (an unnecessary throwback to typewriters that is not applicable in the computer age), or format paragraphs over and over again depending whether or not they're main body, block quotes, references, headers, or whatnot. In the former case, learn how to use Search-and-Replace to your best advantage. In the latter case, learn how to use style settings.

It can save you both headaches and hours of time.

And always, remember the Typesetter's Commandment: Jesus Saves... and So Should You--Often!

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I can do without the snow, but I s'pose it could have been worse.
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Today's link may be a boring one to some, but for anyone who has to do a lot of mailing, it's good to know that the United States Post Office has such a comprehensive webpage. I use this a lot to track shipped items, but I can also find information on my local post offices (which recently came in useful in designing a mail piece).

Enjoy!