This week I have a huge blodge of typesetting to do – some for TRP and some contract work that we have to take on to ease the task of swimming upstream against the cash-flow. Typesetting induces a curious form of mental exhaustion like a shamanic trance – whereby you forget what your name is and where the potty went. Huge appendices of tabulated data was the first round after breakfast and then a tweak-every-line margin-buster before lunch. Modern typesetting programmes – we use InDesign - are spectacularly good at processing large blocks of roughly homogenous text. I can change the font or the leading of an entire novel with 3 clicks. I can change the bottom margin of a whole poetry collection in four. With five I can do a contents page for an entire conference. But god help you if you start messing with the automatics – a page with a wider margin here, an exception to to the rule there. Pretty soon you are back to boiling lead and slotting blocks of it into racks, one letter at a time. Then it really is time to go fishing. We are up to our chest-waders in fish at the moment. Sea Trout were on last week. I caught a salmon over the weekend. Sharon said “coo – flippin heck” or words to that effect when I wandered down the drive with my 9lb fresh hen. And now the mackerel are close enough in to catch from the bottom of our field. So I nipped down after a morning’s InDesign and caught 3 for lunch. Then I’m fit for anything – an asymmetric recto/verso format, or 128 footnotes in the first 5o pages. A snip.
David
