troff output .... now there's a glimmer from a murky past. Even the
hard-coded error messages were witty.


"Margaret Aldis" wrote in
message ...
LOL - this thread certainly brought back some memories :-). In the 1970s
ICL
provided cans of rubber cement for the odd occasions when the authors did
their own CRC. I can remember a colleague literally falling over in
hysterics at the end of a long afternoon pasting in pictures of data entry
forms. (I also remember when the cleaners, searching for coins or snacks
in
someone's top drawer, left a poorly lidded can on its side ... ).

When we got into CRC in a big way here in the 80s we quickly found that
sticking graphics into hundreds of pages of troff output and meeting
printers' deadlines demanded a proper scalpel, wax roller kit and a
home-made light box.

By that stage we had an artist producing graphics on the Mac and had left
the Rotring and the Letraset behind - I think the Letraset finally got
thrown out when it started spattering tiny shards in the drawer with the
slide rule!

--
Margaret Aldis - Microsoft Word MVP
Syntagma partnership site: http://www.syntagma.co.uk
Word MVP FAQ site: http://www.word.mvps.org

"Suzanne S. Barnhill" wrote in message
...
I did this only in an amateurish sort of way. I used rubber cement, too,
though also flirted with glue sticks and spray adhesive and roll-on
adhesives of various sorts. It would have helped tremendously to have a
light box, something I acquired only after my need for it was largely
over
(I had to depend on eyeballing and windowpanes). But my paste-ups were
not
for CRC--just manuscripts.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup
so
all may benefit.

"Jezebel" wrote in message
...
Rubber cement was a buzz, indeed, (although I have grave doubts about
the
quality your cannabis!) ... but a waxing machine was what the pros all
used.

I'll bet your Letraset's lost all its serifs by now.




"Jay Freedman" wrote in message
...
You used wax? We used rubber cement -- almost as much fun as
cannabis!
We had a little photosetter for headlines, but we did use tons of
Letraset for labeling illustrations. I still have a box of it tucked
away under my desk (not far from the slide rule).

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org

On Wed, 23 Feb 2005 10:57:20 +1100, "Jezebel"
wrote:

Not nearly as much fun, though. Don't you miss the smell of wax, or
all
those hours spent Letrasetting the headings?



"Suzanne S. Barnhill" wrote in message
.. .
In the "olden days" when I created documents on a typewriter, CRC
was
routinely "shot down" because typewriter text was large and
ungainly
and
illustrations that weren't necessarily perfect were enhanced by
reduction.
In those days, graphs, drawings, photographs, etc., had to be
pasted
up
on
the CRC. If you'd ever visited a newspaper or an ad agency, you
would
have
seen people "making up pages" in this way. Creating a document
using
page
layout software (or even word processing software such as Word) is
exponentially easier than it was in those days!

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the
newsgroup
so
all may benefit.

"C Tate" wrote in message
...
Thank you both very much indeed for such helpful replies. Is there
anything
I can refer to to learn even more about this? (It sounds like just
making
sure your document is perfect for the camera though there are
sometimes
other considerations such as the CRC being a fixed percentage
larger
than
the ultimate output).

"Jay Freedman" wrote in message
...
C Tate wrote:
Hope this doesn't seem a slightly off the wall question! But if
somebody asks for 'camera ready copy' in Word what exactly do
they
mean?!!!!

In offset printing (the cheapest, easiest method), someone uses
a
press
camera to take a picture of each original page. Through several
steps
the
negative from that camera is used to make printing plates that
apply
ink
to
sheets of paper. The original page is "camera ready" when it
contains
all
the text and graphics that should be in the final printing, and
nothing
else. (Technically, since the film in the press camera is
insensitive
to
light blue, it's possible to write comments on camera ready
pages
with
light
blue pencil. This is usually allowed only in the margins,
though.)
It
means
a spell-check has been done, all corrections have been made, all
fonts
and
formatting are in place, headers and footers are included, etc.

This isn't exclusively a Word thing -- in fact, once you've used
the
computer printer to put a Word document on paper, it doesn't
matter
whether
the pages came from Word or from Mars. In fact, I would never
say
that
a
document is "camera ready" while it exists only as an electronic
document.

The amount of work needed to convert camera ready copy into
printing
plates,
and the extra work and expense that may be needed to fix errors
after
that
stage, mean that you have to be very sure that everything is
right
before
you say the pages are "camera ready".

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org