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Yesterday, I signed the prints, put them in the transport case I had purchased from Archival Methods, and took them over to Hartnell. Eric had already received the plex, and had arranged it on the gallery floor as he figured out how many pictures would fit on each wall. He told me that he thinks he has room for at least 30. I brought him the 34 that he asked for, so either they’ll be a few left over or he’ll find more space as he puts the photographs up.
Eric said he didn’t need any help hanging the show, so my next challenge is the postcard.
After I installed Office 2010, I noticed that the Acrobat ribbon was missing. I went to the Adobe website and learned the story. It seems that in versions of Acrobat 9 before 9.3, the Acrobat ribbon didn’t work right with Office 2010. Adobe came up with a fix in the 9.3 release: they removed the ribbon. Clever, huh?
Without the ribbon, there are a couple of ways that you can make pdf files, but none of them are as convenient as using the ribbon. If you make a lot of pdf’s, and don’t need any Office 2010 features right away, you might as well keep on using the previous version until Adobe sorts this out.
I told you all in a previous post that my experience with Microsoft support on what turned out to be a font problem with Office 2010 was abysmal. I promised to spare you details then, and I won’t rehash that call now. However, yesterday I received a signoff e-mail from the support tech. The critical section read as follows:
“Agreement of Issue: to use outlook 2010
Resolution/Recommendations: case was resolved by performing office upgrade”
I had sent the tech a detailed message describing what I went through to troubleshoot the problem and how I eventually fixed it. From the resolution section, it looks like the tech either didn’t read or didn’t understand what I sent him. This is frustrating for me on two levels.
First, it demonstrates what I have noted before: that communications with Microsoft’s support tends to be unidirectional. They’re very happy to tell you what to do, but they’re not willing or able (I’m not sure which) to understand a detailed explanation of the problem. This means that the solutions suggested are often demonstrably inappropriate based on information already given to them. I go to a great deal of effort to pin down the problem before a call support about it. Often, it seems like the effort is wasted.
Second, the fact that the tech did not understand what I did to solve the problem means that that solution will not be available to other people who call Microsoft about similar problems. When I solve a problem, it makes me feel better if I believe that my solution can help others. It looks like that’s not going to happen this time, at least through Microsoft.
Over the last 10 or 20 years, I found that Microsoft’s tech support is usually pretty good. However, I’ve had two recent experiences which are causing me to change my opinion. In both cases, I wasted a lot of time and energy, got minimal help from tech support, and ended up having to solve the problem on my own.
In previous posts, I reported that upon upgrading from Office 2007 to Office 2010, corrupted some fonts caused Outlook and Word to crash. There are a couple of possibilities here. Maybe the fonts were fine before the upgrade, and somehow the upgrade corrected them. Maybe the fonts have been corrupted for a long time, and it wasn’t a problem for Office 2007, but is for Office 2010. The first alternative is extremely unlikely, since reinstalling the problem fonts doesn’t fix them.
It is clear, however, that the Helvetica and Times fonts installed on two computers (the only computers on which they are installed) cause Word 2010 to abend, and that Word 2007 was fine with them. This shows a clear lack of defensive programming on the part of the people who designed Word 2010.
There are two arguments against defensive programming. The first is based on performance: programmers argue that checking input variables and datasets causes the app to be pokey. The second is based on minimizing development time: putting in all of those checks and testing them doesn’t come for free. I don’t have a lot of sympathy with either argument; processing speed is getting pretty cheap, dataset testing is eminently parallelizable, and unreliable software puts users through hell.
I’m blaming this whole mess on the Microsoft programmers who let a little thing like an imperfect font crash their app (I used the word corrupted to describe the fonts before, but I think that probably overstates things, since the fonts worked in Office 2007).
Just when I thought the Office 2010 font wars were over, a new battle broke out. I got an e-mail with a Word attachment that crashed Word 2010. I brought it up in Word on a computer that had only the standard Windows 7 fonts installed, and saw that the predominant font was Times. I opened up the control panel and brought up the font browser on the computer that was having trouble. Sure enough, Times and had the odd $%& pattern in the preview icon that Helvetica had had. I deleted Times, and Word could open the file just fine.
Concerned, I went through all the fonts in the font browser, looking for the $%& pattern. It appeared in Tekton, Futura Book, Futura Light, Frutiger 45, Frutiger 55, Frutiger 95, Optima, and Optima Oblique. What these all have in common are that they’re Adobe Postscript Type One fonts. However, I had many Postscript Type One fonts that didn’t have the problem. I removed all the fonts with the $%& preview pattern and reinstalled them. They still exhibited the funny pattern.
However, all of these fonts except Tekton (not tested) appear to work in Word. I’m not sure what the difference is between these fonts and Times and Helvetica, both of which crash Word.
Those of you who regularly read this blog know that I’m a heat seeker: somebody who gets involved in technology before it is well tested and debugged. I don’t do beta tests, but I’m usually near the front of the line for new versions of operating systems and applications. I try to do most of my testing on machines whose good operation is nice to have but not essential. Only after that do I upgrade the machines I’m counting on to do my work.
It’s a good plan, but sometimes I inadvertently don’t follow it. Case in point: I just upgraded my main workstation from Office 2007 to Office 2010. I’ve done a fair amount of testing of Office 2010, but apparently not enough. I didn’t analyze the results of the testing closely enough, but now I realize that I’d done five completely successful clean installations, and only two upgrades, one of which had mysterious problems that appeared to fix themselves.
On Friday I performed an Office upgrade from the boxed DVD.
By the way, I’d like to congratulate Microsoft, in a left-handed way, on the Office 2010 packaging. It’s not that the packaging is so good, it’s just that it’s a big step upward from the fingernail-breaking exercise in frustration that characterized Office 2007.
I let the installation program do a default upgrade. It finished after about 20 minutes, the last 10 of which had the installation progress bar full green. I thought it had hung, but my patience was rewarded with the success screen. The installation program wanted to do a reboot, which is a new thing with Office 2010; the previous two or three versions did not require a reboot after installation, which I had always found fairly amazing since I tend to think of Office as an operating system upgrade disguised an application.
After the reboot, I fired up Outlook. It appeared to have ported over all of my old mailboxes. I’m not sure if it was running off the old mail profile, or if it had upgraded the profile, but everything appeared to be there. Unfortunately, that was the end of the good news; when I hit the send/receive button, Windows 7 announced that “Outlook has stopped working.”
Back in the mainframe days, there was a term for program termination in an unexpected way: abend (for abnormal ending). The word seems to have fallen out of favor, but I suggest that it might be time to bring it back. The word “crash” refers to a certain kind of abnormal ending that is about the least graceful way a program can finish. “Hang” means that the program has stopped accepting input and performing useful work. The new, and welcome, tendency for the operating system to monitor the behavior of programs, and step in when they go awry tends to disguise what’s actually going on. Abend is a nice general term that pretty much covers the waterfront.
I tried hitting send/receive again, just to make sure that it wasn’t a coincidence, and Outlook obediently abended. I removed all the add-ins, to no avail. I tried safe mode; no joy. Then I deleted all of the POP3 accounts, and reentered the information. That fixed it. Apparently, the porting over of the information in the mail profiles was not as successful as I had originally thought.
I started reading my mail. The first two messages went OK, but reading the third one caused another abend. This sounded familiar; it was the same situation and I had encountered on a previous Office 2010 upgrade (and have previously reported here). The previous upgrade used the 64-bit version of Office 2010, which Microsoft does not recommend for general use. I had put my earlier problems down to the 64-bit build. Now, it looks like I had jumped to an unsupported conclusion. I checked the directory in which Office was installed on my main workstation, and verified that the installation program had installed the 32-bit version.
So, some of the e-mail messages caused Outlook to abend. The ones that did not seemed to be the ones without much formatting. However, I was unable to easily create an email message that caused an Outlook abend: text formatting, imbedded URLs, and imbedded jpegs and didn’t seem to faze it. Since Outlook uses Word to display e-mail, I thought this might be a Word problem. Sure enough, I soon found several documents that caused Word to abend.
I put in a call to Microsoft tech support. Interestingly, the Microsoft web site didn’t recognize my Product ID, and charged me 49 bucks for the call. It was a complete waste of time and money. I will spare you the details.
Since I had an unbroken series of successful new installs and two problem upgrades, it would seem that the logical thing to do would be to uninstall and reinstall Office 2010. I resisted that fix. If it worked, I wouldn’t know why it worked, and, as an engineer, I don’t like that. If it didn’t work, I would’ve introduced yet another variable that might complexify solving the problem.
“Why wouldn’t it work,” I hear some of you asking. The problem with the uninstall/reinstall solution in general is that the uninstall programs don’t we turn the machine to the state it was in before the installation. Many of the uninstall programs leave now-useless (and possibly harmful) junk in the registry. Many of them don’t clean up the application data files completely. I don’t know how good Office 2010s uninstall program is, and I certainly don’t know enough about it to trust it.
I went over to the test machine that still had the previously-troubled installation of the 64 bit version of Office 2010. The male clients seem to work OK, even with the viewing pane enabled. I opened up one of the Word documents that had caused problems on my main workstation. While it didn’t cause the 64-bit Word to abend, it couldn’t read the document. I went to a machine that had a clean installation of Office 2010, and it could read it just fine. Now I knew that the installation that looked like it had fixed itself had not actually done that; it had just gotten better. That diagnosis was confirmed when I found an email message that caused the 64 bit version of Outlook 2010 to abend.
I took stock. I had two Office 2010 upgrades that had failed, and they had failed in someone different fashion. Searching for a single cause would probably be fruitless. That left a time consuming research process, or the blunt instrument of uninstall/reinstall. I didn’t have a lot of time – I’ve got a show coming up – so I tried uninstalling and reinstalling on the main workstation.
The uninstall, using the Windows control panel, was uneventful. The reinstall took less than ten minutes. When I was done, I opened Word. Going to the File ribbon showed me a whole bunch of recently-opened files, indicating that the uninstall had not removed all traces of the previous installation of Word. Opening a problem document caused Word to abend. Bringing up Outlook showed all my mailboxes as before. The emails that abended Outlook 2010 the first time did the same thing.
I did a web search for “outlook 2010 crashes reading pane”, and found a forum with this statement: “In Windows 7, I checked Fonts through Control Panel and my Helvetic[a] icon instead of displaying “ABC” was showing “$%&””, together with information that the author had fixed his reading pane problems by deleting the (probably corrupted) font. I found a similar (not quite the same because I had several Helvitica fonts installed) thing in the font control panel on both computers that were experiencing Outlook abends. I removed the fonts.
Problem solved.
.
I talked to Eric the other day about the wall labels for the Hartnell exhibition. He said he’d be happy to format and print the labels; all he needed from me was a Word file with the titles and dates.
Since the titles of the images were already entered as metadata in the image files, I set about to export the titles from Lightroom. I failed utterly. Near as I can tell, there is no way to export any metadata other than as part of an image file.
So here’s my suggestion for the Lightroom 4 wish list. Add an “Export Metadata” command that, when invoked, brings up a dialog box with check boxes next to all of the possible metadata fields. The user checks those boxes that apply to the fields that she wishes to export, then clicks “Export”. Lightroom exports the metadata for the selected images as a comma separated values file, which the user can then turn into either a spreadsheet or a text document. Extra points for allowing the user to export the metadata in common spreadsheet, database, and word processing formats.
Lightroom does have a feature that allows the printing of images with titles generated from the appropriate metadata field. I used that capability to print out all the pictures and titles for the exhibition on a four by five grid. We’ll need those pages when it comes time to hang the show so everybody can see which titles go with which pictures. I took the pages, opened up Word, and used the Windows 7 speech recognition feature to dictate in the titles. Then I spent 5 minutes cleaning up the mistakes; speech recognition doesn’t work very well except on complete sentences or phrases.
Not elegant, but the job is done.
Within a few months of starting to use Lightroom, I was using it for all my printing. The Hartnell show is no exception. Printing from Lightroom has many advantages over printing directly from Photoshop. Parametrically specifying the margins means you can print a whole series of images without worrying about the detailed layout of each image. Lightroom can also print a whole series of images in sequence, so all you have to do during the process is shuffle paper.
Sharpening is another place where Lightroom shines compared to Photoshop. Since the right amount of sharpening depends upon the printer, the paper, and the viewing distance, I always leave sharpening until the end. Without Lightroom, the work flow is as follows: load the photograph into Photoshop, save it under a temporary file name so that you don’t inadvertently overwrite it, sharpen it, and print it. With Lightroom, you just pick the right check box. It’s true that Lightroom’s sharpening options are limited compared to Photoshop, but they’re good enough for most purposes.
Another advantage to printing from Lightroom doesn’t apply to the Hartnell show, because I’m not using mats; it’s the ability to add printed information off to the side or below the image. Lightroom’s flexibility on this point hasn’t quite progressed to the stage where you don’t have to write any identifying information on the print, but it eliminates a lot of the boring copying of information.
I haven’t used Aperture, but it probably has similar advantages over printing from Photoshop.
The standard typewriter keyboard was designed in the 1870s to minimize jams. The key layout had the unfortunate side effect of slowing down typists compared to alternative schemes. None of the alternative layouts are popular today, in spite of their demonstrated advantages to a typist trained in their use. The reason? People have gotten used to the qwerty keyboard, so used to it that they are unwilling to learn another layout.
What’s this got to do with photography? For many years I used 2 1/4 square reflex cameras, most of the time with the waist level finder. Because of the mirror in the light path, images in the finder are inverted right to left. I got used to that, but I had no idea how used to it I was until a day a couple weeks ago, when I started using the Sony NEX-5.
The NEX-5 is a small digital camera featuring an APS-C sensor and interchangeable lenses. The small camera combined with the big sensor yields a compelling package. The camera has an interesting quirk; the LCD screen folds out from the back of the camera until it is almost horizontal, so you can hold the camera at waist level like a Hasselblad or Rolleiflex. When I figured this out, I was excited; I had always liked the low angle that you got with a waist-level finder, and I find the waist-level position much more stable than trying to hold the camera at arm’s length and eye level.
As you would expect, the NEX-5 does not invert the image horizontally. This would seem like an advantage. However, for me, at my current level of familiarity with the camera, presenting the image in correct orientation slows me down. When holding the camera waist level, years and years of old habits kick in, and I keep wanting to move it as if I were looking at the ground glass of a Hasselblad. After two weeks of using the Sony, I still often move the camera in the wrong direction.
Habits are strong. The mind is truly more comfortable with the devil it knows.
Before Eric picked out the work for the Hartnell exhibition, he had to know about how many prints he could get on the wall. To figure that out, he asked me how big the matted prints would be. I told him that I usually print these images on 17×22 paper with 1 inch margins. With 1/2 inch relief all around, 3 inches of mat on the top and sides, and 3 1/2 inches on the bottom, the matted work would be 24 1/2 by 29. Using those dimensions, Eric figured that 34 prints would be about right.
After Eric picked the prints from the show, I read a column by David Vestal in Photo Techniques in which David talked about a show that he was preparing. He had decided to present the work unmatted under glass. I was intrigued. I had always matted exhibition work before, and had some misgivings about the cost, and didn’t like getting the work back and having to find some place to store it — it takes up six or seven times as much space matted as it does loose. I asked Eric if it would be all right to present the work unmatted if I printed the images on Arches Infinity 22×30 paper, with an image size similar to what I originally proposed. He thought that was fine, and said that he had enough 22×30 glass already in stock.
Some say that in war no plan survives contact with the enemy. My printing plan began to unravel almost immediately. In between flipping levers while I was converting the 9800 from Photo Black to Matte Black, I checked out my paper supply. I found one 25-sheet box of Infinity. “Oh well,” I thought, “I’ll just order some more and get started with what I have in the meantime.” I poked around on the web for 15 minutes and couldn’t find Arches Infinity in that size.
A little history. In the late nineties, when I started using 22×30 paper, it was a standard watercolor size. It probably still is. I first started out printing on regular watercolor paper. Later, when paper with coatings optimized for inkjet printing became available, 22×30 seem to be “grandfathered in”, at least by the paper companies that already had a watercolor paper business. Over time, the photographic inkjet market grew and, I imagine, the watercolor market remained relatively static, until we reached the point where the photography market was much larger than the watercolor market. At first, in the US inkjet sheet paper was mostly available in the standard graphic arts sizes of 8.5×11 (A size), 11×17 (B size), 17×22 (C size), 22×34 (D size), with 13×19 added. Then came the photographic sizes: 8×10, 11×14, 16×20, 20×24, and so on. Now, at least in the case of 22×30, we’re seeing the inkjet paper suppliers winnow out some of their watercolor sizes.
I needed a plan B. I scrounged around and found 50 sheets of 24×36 Hahnemuele Photo Rag that I’d bought for a project that never happened. I called up Eric and asked if I could print the show on that. He said that he thought it would fit (we might have to leave one or two images out), and that he thought he could get the glass we’d need. I breathed a sigh of relief, and started printing, leaving a 4 inch margin on the top and sides, and 4 1/2 on the bottom of the wide images. I tried printing the squarish pictures with four inch side margins, but the image looked to small, so I went with three inch side margins. I set the top margin to three inches less than the bottom margin to lift the squarish images by that much on the portrait-mode background.
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