Rhapsodies

Well I’m happy to say my progress in getting ready for the Emerald City Comicon is coming along well. I managed to get all of my merchandise orders out before I had to pay more to get everything here on time. So now I am a that stage where I worry about whether everything shall arrive just as I ordered them or will I be getting a lot of expensive crap. (Unfortunately this isn’t just me being paranoid. I have gotten a few printing errors that were all my fault. The worst was last year where I didn’t realize you had to set the resolution when making your PDF and what I had set the printers was the absolutely lowest setting)

But despite all of the worry I’m glad to be done with it. Getting the book was the worst. I thought this year that since I was repackaging earlier material it would be a cakewalk and mostly that was true with one exception. I had too much faith in automatic kerning. This is not a good idea. While most of the fonts have this covered there are lots of exceptions to this rule. Especially when you had it set to bold for when a character was shouting. There were many instances where a lot of words looked more like a short sentence and other instances where letters were nearly merged together they were so close. So I decided to go to the originals and clean them all up. This led me to my second problem. These cartoons were all done back in the day I had a much smaller hard drive and I used to merge most of my layers to save space. While the text was still thankfully a separate layer it had all been rastarzized. This meant I had to select individual letters or words with Photoshop’s lasso tool and nudge them one by one… It took me all day.

But now that that is behind me I can focus on all of the other things I have to get ready for this thing. Making sure I have an assistant to help man my table, have a way to get all of my gear to the convention center… string.

You know… the easy stuff.