Friday, October 21, 2005
Halalluia, I'm an editor again
I'm just working on my first issue as editor of the newsletter of Southern Nevada Mensa. The poor club is so disorganized that they had some real problems when the editor died suddenly. She was a great lady, and I would have thought too young to go, but there's no stopping the going, even for editors. So, for what it's worth, I'm editing again. I was editor of the Denver Mensa newsletter about fifteen years ago. It's similar, but boy are things easier.
The real change is called Microsoft Publisher, a desktop publishing program that makes it just ever so easy to set type and do layout. This is our directory issue, so it'll be bigger than most months, but it took maybe five minutes to get it all put together except for the monthly calendar. Then the calendar took another ten minutes. Used to be it would take two days to print it all out and paste it up on those boards with the blue grid printed on them. I know that there are plenty of people that insist that "the old days" were better, but I guess that they and I live in different worlds. Just think: Caesar had to pay a scribe to write down everything he wanted written down, and to make copies to boot. Mark Twain was a typesetter, using a California job box maybe, hand placing little bitty letters of type that then were used on a flat printing press (that literally pressed the type into the paper) to produce books and papers. Fifteen years ago the bigger publishers had electronic typesetting machinery that used photo sensitive paper to produce strips of copy ready to be pasted down. I used a laser printer and computer. Now, it's all set in a jiffy, I send it to the printer electronically, and a few days later I get a box full of newsletters all ready to go.
Let's hear it for progress!
The real change is called Microsoft Publisher, a desktop publishing program that makes it just ever so easy to set type and do layout. This is our directory issue, so it'll be bigger than most months, but it took maybe five minutes to get it all put together except for the monthly calendar. Then the calendar took another ten minutes. Used to be it would take two days to print it all out and paste it up on those boards with the blue grid printed on them. I know that there are plenty of people that insist that "the old days" were better, but I guess that they and I live in different worlds. Just think: Caesar had to pay a scribe to write down everything he wanted written down, and to make copies to boot. Mark Twain was a typesetter, using a California job box maybe, hand placing little bitty letters of type that then were used on a flat printing press (that literally pressed the type into the paper) to produce books and papers. Fifteen years ago the bigger publishers had electronic typesetting machinery that used photo sensitive paper to produce strips of copy ready to be pasted down. I used a laser printer and computer. Now, it's all set in a jiffy, I send it to the printer electronically, and a few days later I get a box full of newsletters all ready to go.
Let's hear it for progress!
