Stereotypically men have a “little black book”. Not me, it is my little green book. My book full of Renaissance Festival music. And each year I have a battle with the computer and printer to update the little green book.
Our music comes from several different period song books, from which we choose a selection to be the year’s repertoire. Some of my group carry all the books around to sing from. Others copy just the songs they need, putting them into one binder, often alphabetized. Some of those blow up the size of the copies as they make them for easier reading.
I shrink mine down.
I tore my books apart a few years ago, scanned in the pages, and arranged the songs alphabetically, then print the pages four to a sheet of paper. Last year, rather than the current repertoire only, I alphabetized all the songs we have ever sung, and printed them. The smaller size means I can do that without carrying about something the size of a dictionary.
The problem comes with Word. I arrange the scans in a Word document and then print. But all those images reach some sort of size or display limit in word. If I get much above 60 pages it wants to crash. So I arrange them into about 5 different small booklets that I fold and bind together.
Which leads to the second problem — the printer. It seems we have a different printer every year, and even this year, when the printer can actually print on two sides of the paper, getting the printer to print all the pages, on the right correct sides of the pages, in the correct orientation, is a chore. I usually spend hours feeding sheets of paper into the printer, only to have one of the critical pages jam.
Today I was lucky with the first stage. I had all the files from last year, only had to add one new song, add two pages to the one song last year that I managed to put in only part of the song, and then adjust pages back and forth between the five files so they all have about the same number of pages. Only about 2 hours for that.
It was the printing that was the problem. Every time I would tell the printer the settings I wanted, it always claimed there was a conflict in my options. I would select Portrait, and it would turn it back to Landscape, and when I let it print, the pages were turned the wrong way.
The solution, save the file as a PDF and print from Adobe. Figures. Once I got there, it was a simple half hour of printing. But before that it was over 2 hours of frustration, and the waste of a half ream of paper in failed attempts.
They say the definition of insanity is “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result”. What is it the definition of “to do the same thing and always get a different result”? Chaos? Frustration? No matter how closely I replicate what I did the year before, I never get the same result from the printer.
At The Rainbow 