Change is good.
It's a nightmare now,
but it will be good
Just in time for National Newspaper Week, the Star Herald is embarking on a technological adventure, the journey for which has become somewhat of a nightmare.
The premise for our office upgrade was simple. (Always beware when the techies use the word "simple.")
It all started with a great idea to update our pagination software so the news and advertising departments could work in the same programs.
This, we reasoned, will make it easier to send our pages online to the printers, a long-held dream which will result in better reproduction.
InDesign is the much talked about improvement to both PageMaker and Quark, and the Star Herald is apparently a leader (guinea pig) in the regional weekly newspaper industry for making the switch.
So, we ordered the new software and looked forward to trying it out. The average techno-deficient word person figured the story ended there.
However ... the new software wouldn't launch on our old operating system.
So, we ordered Mac OSX, and later updated that order to OSX v.10.2 when it came out two weeks ago. At that point we felt very uptown.
We'd have the very latest pagination software clipping along on the very latest operating system.
However ... we had a few old Macintosh computers that were incompatible (too old) with the new operating system.
And ... the new operating system didn't run the old Microsoft Word program, so we upgraded Word, which didn't communicate with our old font management system (basic helvetica looks like arthritic handwriting on the screen).
So, we upgraded the font management program, which doesn't care for some of our favorite fonts, a problem we're still pulling hair out over.
Further, OSX, cleverly named "Jaguar" for its speed, also doesn't run our old Internet browsers or e-mail software. So, we upgraded those as well.
If you've called our office lately and been greeted with a cheerful, "What do you want?!" it's because we're all dealing with changes here. Lots of them. All at the same time.
Computer work stations tend to become little safe havens of familiarity in the work place. We sit down with our coffee cups and we all know what we have to do, where to find the files and what they're supposed to look like.
Now, everything's different.
Thank God the coffee pot still works the same.
Sending our pages online to the printer will eliminate two steps of reproduction, and the end result, we hope, will be a crisper, cleaner quality newspaper.
Meanwhile, I hope we don't all lose our minds, and we hope you, our readers, are forgiving of minor errors and omissions, if any, you may find in this issue.