1. we never worry about house fires on Mondays2. the rest the week we enjoy next door silence
3. when was the last time YOUR neighbors did anything interesting?
Yeah? Well we asked your neighbors and they said the same thing about you. Except they heard every word of that last big family feud you had, though. They still talk about it like it was y’day. It was? No kidding. Maybe you should take up a hobby like writing.
Actually, the hobby I have in mind is printing. I was in the shop today to peer into the booklet sales adventure. It was odd that I could not find a single bad word about the operation. That made me suspicious enough to do some searching on the topics instead of the company. Within minutes, I found 15% of the articles printed openly on multiple web pages and a full 40% of the titles I checked were taken from other sites. So the guy compiled lists of already written articles where the authors were crazy enough to use ASCII text instead of portable document formats. Then he resells it to others and it seems nobody has yet complained.
This took me back to square one, where the problem of publishing the booklets myself is the only way I can do that business. Most of you know I kept hammering at that issue of how to do foldover printing because the lack of software just plain stank of the Internet. That is, nobody would simply tell me how and every site you visit that says “free” is trying to con you into something. Well, guess what? It just took one more search and I’ve located something called FinePrint 2000. Examining the literature, I may have been trying to seek a work processing solution when it may turn out to be a printer driver solution. Of course, I will evaluate and tell all.
Did you know I published my first computer booklet in 1983, around ten or fifteen years before most of you even touched a work processor? I still have it around somewhere. I’m reminded of it because this new product, FinePrint 2000, reminded me of the name of the 1983 software. It was called ClickPrint and I had only a DOS version. I foolishly gave that disk away in 1990. It is curious that as far Internet solutions are going, all of my useful software has come from England, while everything American has been nothing but a sales pitch. I don’t mind sales pitches, provided they are for what you want to buy instead of what the salesman wants to sell. The Internet fails to make that distinction.
Later. I have a trial version of FinePrint 2000 and it is definitely descended from ClickPrint. It is a nightmare to operate and the instructions were written by retarded space cadets. The product is just plain too difficult for the average person to deal with. As it came back to me in pieces, I see it suffers fromevery same problem as the original. These include changing the font size without asking, ignoring the page gutter settings, and page feeding instructions only for printers with a backside hopper.
It still has difficulty with certain positions and types of graphics. The menu is incomprehensible and there is no screen signal when your task is half done, that is, the point and which you have to turn the paper over and reinsert it for duplex printing. Despite these and dozens of similar quirks, I was able (after wasting 36 pages of paper and ink) finally able to print a 12 page booklet after 3-1/2 hours of trial and error. I just know I could do a better job of writing that program. The first thing I would do is have the user print out a test of numbered pages and ask them to match that to a chart with every possible combination.
