Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

LOL. That's what makes homemade gifts so special! It sounds wonderful.

I know what you mean though. Try a publishing program for cards like MS Publisher, or well, I don't know but others are out there. It might help next time.

I was looking at Cafe Press the other day thinking I'd make some bumper stickers. Dang, I think of myself as super computer literate and I just gave up after a bit. It's very humbling to see the millions of people who are doing it. I still want to do it, but I see it is going to take when I have a whole 2 days or so to devote to it.

You may want to see this from today... "we've now reached the limits of the current GUI paradigm"... help is on the way... from MS... :)

Try Apple Keynote. Or Pages. Couldn't be easier.

You really want to use Publisher for that task. It has all sorts of templates for cards and the like. People use PowerPoint for things it was never intended for. The old "if all you have is a hammer" problem.

Alfred, that pretty much sums up Powerpoint; a blunt instrument with nothing subtle or refined to offer.

Thank you for that. ; )

Learn from the pros (not I). I've seen them doing this.

Take an empty sheet of papers. Draw and write a sketch the text and images as they should be printed.

Use this as a guide for the computer work.

[Re: Emil's link]

The new interface displays galleries of possible end-states, each of which combine many formatting operations. From this gallery, you select the complete look of your target -- say an org chart or an entire document -- and watch it change shape as you mouse over the alternatives in the gallery. The interaction paradigm has been reversed; it's now What You Get Is What You See, or WYGIWYS.

Or rather, it's What You Get Is What We Think You Want, an interaction paradigm (by gum) which I've been resisting ever since I started using Word. With diminishing success, I might add. (You know how I like my lines of text? With no extra space before and no extra space after. You know how I like to break paragraphs? By leaving one line blank, or 'hitting Return twice' to give the procedure its technical name. You know what Word thinks of that? Not a lot - AutoFormat automagically deletes all those blank lines and substitutes trailing space after paragraphs, which is precisely what I don't want (think lists). I could go on - boy, could I go on...)

While I'm blathering inanely in a randomly-chosen comment thread - I've just seen Tom Coates' plug for Online Information 2005 (feat. D. Weinberger). Looks pretty good. These days I never go to conferences unless I'm speaking - that's not me being queeny, I just hate conferences - but if OI2005 were a bit more local I'd probably break that rule. (200 miles. Yeah, I know - never talk distances with Americans. My all-time winner was a guy from Montana who told me he used to drive 200 miles to play basketball...)

Dave,

This is a problem that probably won't be solved by application software. The biggest part of the problem is "front-loading" vs. "top-loading" printers (e.g. HP vs. Epson) and whether you should flip the paper along the short edge or the long edge or not at all and whether you should rotate it 180 degrees without flipping before reinserting into the paper tray.

In RealeWriter ("Really Writer", which I develop under contract and is great for making cute cards), I solved this by making the flip/rotate as simple as possible for the particular kind of loading configuration and having software rotate the page for printing. The biggest technical problem is that our application software can't detect or even guess whether the printer is front or top loading, so user needs to be educated a little and check the right box. OS vendors could solve this by exposing a read-only property in their respective printing stacks. As an aside, OS X really has the best printing architecture of OS X, OS 9, and Win32. I could write a book on it, but by getting the user model right, the architecture just flows to the print dialog, the page setup dialog, the driver responsibilities, etc. Except for the front/top loading thing!!!! Grrrrrrr.