Success!

How satisfying is it to be able to teach something new about any subject to someone who knows far, far more about that field than you do? I'll tell you--it's fantastic!

A trio of authors sent us a disk that was supposed to have complete page files and all artwork from their self-published book, which would make our jobs easier and the book relatively inexpensive to produce. If we had to produce it from scratch, it would cost us more than we wanted to spend, but they already had the page files assembled from the previous edition of the book. Piece of cake, right?

Not necessarily. First, the disk wasn't readable on the designer's Mac. So I took the disk to my PC, copied the files to my desktop, and burned them to a new disk (which now worked). However, there was one small problem: three files on the disk--one of them a KEY file we really needed!--were corrupted and the computer couldn't recognize them. Do we try bugging the authors for another disk? What if the file is corrupted on their computers? Then there's no point making a new disk, is there?

But I remembered a computer trick someone had taught me over a year ago: Quark or InDesign page files--or any computer files, really--can sometimes become corrupted if the filenames lose their endtags: .jpg, .tif, .psd, .eps, .doc, etc. But if page files in Quark or InDesign get corrupted, try renaming the files with .qxp on the end--it sometimes tricks the computer into thinking they're perfectly good Quark files.

Before I bugged the author for a new disk, I wanted to see if this trick would work, so I suggested it to the designer, who was going to try it on the three files we couldn't open. A few minutes later, I got an excited phone call from her: it totally worked, and the files were now useable! She knows so much more about production than I do-- how is it I was able to teach her something? Score one for seemingly useless pieces of information!

Peter P., I owe you a drink for that trick!