Mars needs graphic designers. Or printer-fu. Like, now.

[serinde]

I desire to print out invitations on nice card stock for an event. I thought this was some basic task, the ways and means of which would be obvious to the meanest understanding. Apparently it is not so, and the usual method of accomplishment is to assemble a postscript or Acrobat file with exactly what you want, and print that onto plain card stock.

I do not speak .ps or .pdf, and I like the card stock I found. I just want to print out the basic who/what/where in a pretty font on this non-fold card stock AND MAIL THE BUGGERS THIS WEEK ahem. Help? Anyone? I will give you Pez from the bee dispenser Eli presented me last week.

Comments

[reddragdiva]

OpenOffice is not a DTP program, but I've beaten it into doing my Christmas cards one year. It's somewhat less painful than doing the same in Word, which really is not a DTP program.

[syringavulgaris.livejournal.com]

I last tried Open Office about a year and a half or two years ago, and it made me run screaming into the night. Mostly because it bogged my poor ickle machine no end, even when I had theoretically quit out of it. I understand it's better these days?

(DTP = Direct To Printer, I take it?)

[reddragdiva]

Desk Top Publishing ;-) i.e., shifting page elements (text, pictures) around on a page.

[mangosteen]

If you have a (non-sarcastically speaking) small amount of cash to throw at the problem, I'd recommend going to any one of the two bazillion print shops around your place of employment (Y'all are still int the Flatiron district, right?), and say "Here's the cardstock, here's the PDF, print like that, and fold like this." It likely won't cost all that much, and it'll save you the hassle.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_nicolai_/]

Oh, I assumed she was trying to do this, and having problems creating a PDF for the print shop to deal with. Assuming one possesses a PDF, outsourcing the dead-tree-marking problem is definitely the way to go.

[syringavulgaris.livejournal.com]

I just saaaaaaid I don't know how to create a PDF. *whine*

Though I begin to think you're probably right and I should not try to do this all at home. It just seemed like it should be straightforward.

[damned-colonial.livejournal.com]

Yeah, as per mangosteen and _nicolai_'s confused assumptions... what do you *have* right now? I mean, other than a ream of dead trees. What format is it currently in? I presume the problem is getting it from that to PDF/PS, right?

[sweh.livejournal.com]

There are windows "printer" drivers that will let you "print to PDF". OpenOffice 2 has an "export to PDF" function.

[syringavulgaris.livejournal.com]

I have the text planned in my head. I thought there existed some utility where I can type it in, inform said utility that I am printing on a page that is X" by Y", and the utility communicates this to our fancy-dan printer which can handle card stock without mangling.
(And, if I understand Diva correctly, I could use Open Office for this.)

[reddragdiva]

No, you have to figure out the text boxes, picture boxes, etc. by hand and it's an utter bastard even when you know exactly what you want to do.

[damned-colonial.livejournal.com]

Yes. The trick with getting from OOo to postscript is to say "print" and then say "print to file" and tell it print to foo.ps ... or something roughly like that, keeping in mind I don't have OOo installed here or anything.

Make sure you do the necessary "page setup" sort of stuff to set your page size before you start, if you're using anything other than Letter size (or whatever your system default is -- but I'm guessing that's US Letter). I think page setup is in the File menu but again not 100% sure.

Anything command-liney will only get you ASCII text on your invitation, and will still be a bit of a PITA, unless you, like, actually want to learn to program in postscript (you don't, at a guess). But just FYI, if you ever want to turn ascii to postscript, a2ps is the tool to use. It's good for multi-paging stuff like RFCs so you use less pager. mpage is another tool that will do similarly.

Oh, and if you wish to convert between postscript and PDF, there are tools called ps2pdf and pdf2ps which I think are part of some kind of pstools package on debian at least... your distro presumably has some way of searching for these tools, so do what you gotta do.

[damned-colonial.livejournal.com]

OTOH if you mostly just want text of various sizes/alignments/etc, or something like that, then it's good enough.

It's not as if there are any *better* alternatives for Linux/etc. But yeah, kinda crazy-making for any non-trivial DTP uses.

[syringavulgaris.livejournal.com]

I can do Windows too (I presume that'd probably be a little easier anyways).

[damned-colonial.livejournal.com]

Much the same, though Word is marginally smoother for formatting than OOo is. Any *real* DTP requires a) dosh, and b) training. DTP != word processing. It's more of a graphic design skillset, really.

[syringavulgaris.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I mean, if I was going to do anything but text, I wouldn't even be trying to wrangle it myself. But this is supposed to be simple and classical, and if I had nice copperplate handwriting I would have just penned them all, but I don't; but all this is supposed to do is evoke the kind of invite you would have gotten in say the 30s.

[sweh.livejournal.com]

Anything command-liney will only get you ASCII text on your invitation
Bah; learn nroff and pic and eqn and tbl and you can do wonders with an ascii interface! This fancy shmancy WYSIWY(dont)G stuff will never catch on! Command line all the way!!

[scavgraphics.livejournal.com]

Ah..I've read more... talking about making a mountain out of a donut.

Assuming the plan was to use your computer and printer.....

You have your font. You have your words. Now just choose your program and go.

Word (MS Office, Open Office, whatver) will do fine..just use Page Preview to make sure the text is where you want it on the page.

A graphics program like Photoshop(GimpShop (http://plasticbugs.com/index.php?p=241) likely also) can do it too..just make a page the size you want..write your invite..print to normal paper to test, then away you go.

[xlerb.livejournal.com]

Anything command-liney will only get you ASCII text on your invitation

In a word: LaTeX. (Or perhaps that should be written L^AT_EX.) It's been... far too long since I've really done anything with it, but I'm pretty sure I remember all the bits needed to put some potentially-centered text on a strangely-shaped page. And, of course, output to PS or PDF is trivial. Font selection might be “fun”, however, depending on how much that is cared about.