How Geeks Pick Battles
My son’s got a birthday coming up, and we’re having it at one of those local gymnastic places. On their website is a “print your invitations” link, which turns out to be a 2 page PDF. More specifically it is 4 rectangles – two front, two back – intended to be printed out double sided on card stock, then cut out and mailed. Cool enough.
I do not have a double sided printer, though, so I print out both pages and take it down to the local copy place, where I realize that…they don’t line up. Damnit. It’s clear what’s gone wrong, the people who cobbled this thing together put a 1” border from the left on both pages – but since page 2 is on the back they should have measured 1” from the right.
The wife tells me no worries, she will just buy some invitations at the store. I assure her that this is not a problem, I just need to muck with the margins on page 2.
After discovering that your typical PDF reader does not let you play with the margins on a per-page level like that, I switch over to a PDF editor – InkScape, to be specific. Technically, though, InkScape is a graphic editor with import/export PDF, so I can only edit one page at a time. Fair enough.
I will save you lots of cussing, but fast forward a half dozen sample printouts when I realize that it’s not that they are not lined up properly (they are not), but that one of the front rectangles is a different size than the others! This is throwing everything off. That’s seriously annoying.
But! I’m in an editor after all. Select all. Ungroup. Select background rectangle. Resize. Done. :)
I spent maybe an hour and a half on that. At any time I could have just skipped the whole thing and let the wife buy some new ones, but part of being a geek is taking the battle for supremacy very seriously, and not letting the machines win. If the only thing standing between a problem and a solution is something involving technology, I’m not about to give up easily. And it has been known to drive me occasionally crazy. But I wouldn’t change it. >:)
