Page Layout/Designs

So I’m try­ing to do SOMETHING productive—anything. I did run the dish­wash­er today and moved the laun­dry for­ward. Not much, but something.

I’ve graphed some queer pride motifs as cross-stitch charts. I want to put them all in one “book” that’ll be print­ed to an Adobe Acro­bat file. I got it pret­ty much as I want­ed it in Word after much has­sle, but Acro­bat did­n’t like the fact that some pages were por­trait and some were landscape.

I know, Word is NOT a page lay­out pro­gram. I should go ahead and learn to use Page­Mak­er. I’m not feel­ing par­tic­u­lar­ly con­fi­dent about learn­ing new things at the moment, though. I could do what I want in HTML in no time at all, but that does­n’t print very well, and pat­terns just aren’t as use­ful to peo­ple unless they print nicely.

I’m also not cer­tain that I’ve got the graphs large enough to be eas­i­ly read­able when print­ed, which is an issue. So I’m still tweak­ing that, too.

The only thing I’m not all tick­led about with Pat­tern­Mak­er is the way it han­dles text. One of the oth­er design pro­grams is sup­posed to be able to use any True­Type font, and Pat­tern­Mak­er KINDA does it. But they aren’t ter­ri­bly read­able when you’re done. For instance, I’d like to find a nice script font for a sam­pler, and I haven’t found one that’s stan­dard in PM that works, and using the ones installed on my sys­tem isn’t work­ing right either (I am a cer­ti­fied Font Junkie. There are LOTS of fonts installed.) I could tech­ni­cal­ly make new Pat­tern­mak­er font files, but doing say takes sit­ting down and man­u­al­ly graph­ing every upper and low­er-case let­ter as well as num­bers and sym­bols. I don’t have that much patience. I tried search­ing to see if any­one has cre­at­ed some and post­ed them on a web­site, but came up empty.

I promised Sam that I’d eat some­thing for lunch while he was gone. I just can’t remem­ber what it was.