Toolchain FAIL
May. 5th, 2009 08:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rhuInspired by Eric's looming success with Kickstarter, I started to work on what I hope will be the final push to get my siddur (paryerbook) to the point where I could see whether enough people would be willing to buy a copy for it to be worth my ordering some.
The text is done in DavkaWriter; the music is done in Finale which is then manually exported as a TIF graphic, trimmed and colored in PaintShop Pro, then imported as a graphic into DavkaWriter. DW is not my favorite program, but I've managed to trick it into doing just about all the typographic tricks I wanted. I'd be happier with something more like TeX, but DW handles the combination of Hebrew letters, vowels, and cantillation marks better than any other tool available to me.
The graphics, though, have been a pain. First of all, I don't like the fact that the steps from Finale onward are completely manual and error-prone. Last night I figured out a better way to do that, exporting the entire page and writing scripts to color and crop in ImageMagick which would make those steps much more reproducible.
More importantly, though, DavkaWriter's support for imported graphics sucks. They have to be placed and scaled manually again once inside the program, and if you want to replace one with a more recent version, you have to start from scratch. Very error-prone, very time-consuming, very frustrating. And because it converts everything to "screen resolution" by default, the images sometimes come out with odd pixelation effects.
But the kicker is that when I generate a PDF, sometimes an image that only contains a few colors ends up being turned into a black-and-white image. And if I use the built-in PDF export, then I get a PDF where the image looks like its color on-screen, but when I go to print it or export the page as a TIF it comes out as black-and-white. Not greyscale, even, but anything that's non-white turns solid black.
This is not acceptable.
So now I'm stuck seeing how quickly I can write a program that will do just enough typesetting and image placement to reconstruct my 172-page book so that I can actually, you know, print the silly thing. This is not a wheel that I really have time to re-invent right now.
The text is done in DavkaWriter; the music is done in Finale which is then manually exported as a TIF graphic, trimmed and colored in PaintShop Pro, then imported as a graphic into DavkaWriter. DW is not my favorite program, but I've managed to trick it into doing just about all the typographic tricks I wanted. I'd be happier with something more like TeX, but DW handles the combination of Hebrew letters, vowels, and cantillation marks better than any other tool available to me.
The graphics, though, have been a pain. First of all, I don't like the fact that the steps from Finale onward are completely manual and error-prone. Last night I figured out a better way to do that, exporting the entire page and writing scripts to color and crop in ImageMagick which would make those steps much more reproducible.
More importantly, though, DavkaWriter's support for imported graphics sucks. They have to be placed and scaled manually again once inside the program, and if you want to replace one with a more recent version, you have to start from scratch. Very error-prone, very time-consuming, very frustrating. And because it converts everything to "screen resolution" by default, the images sometimes come out with odd pixelation effects.
But the kicker is that when I generate a PDF, sometimes an image that only contains a few colors ends up being turned into a black-and-white image. And if I use the built-in PDF export, then I get a PDF where the image looks like its color on-screen, but when I go to print it or export the page as a TIF it comes out as black-and-white. Not greyscale, even, but anything that's non-white turns solid black.
This is not acceptable.
So now I'm stuck seeing how quickly I can write a program that will do just enough typesetting and image placement to reconstruct my 172-page book so that I can actually, you know, print the silly thing. This is not a wheel that I really have time to re-invent right now.