I hadn't totally lost touch as there has been the odd job preparing papers for conference proceedings/handouts and for LPG-Liquid-Inject Limited's fund raising. And most of my paid work this past decade has been for businesses whose main business centred on print publishing. One of those jobs continues to underline just how much hinges around production of that final PDF. So I needed to relearn how best to do that in todays OS X environment.

After all these years RagTime (now at version 6) still gives me the detailed control I rely on for the main run of content as well as for any pages where conventional layout is central. But there will always be special pages that are best created as whole PDFs from the likes of even quite old versions of OmniGraffle or Corel Draw. So how to combine them without paying the ridiculous price of Acrobat Pro, or even Standard especially seeing the latter does not appear to be being updated for Mac, for a for now one off requirement. The sufficient answer turned out to be to pay $A60 for PDFpen, which does a first rate job of combining PDFs, though I haven't yet found reason to explore its other features.

The one concern I finished up with was that while PDFpen and Apple's Preview are both happy to display PDFs two up (PDFpen with the first page a right orphan and Preview with it on the left of a pair, each apparently permanent "features"), I could not find a sane way to get either to print two A5 pages two up on an A4 sheet. In frustration, I tried the freely distributed Acrobat Reader and eventually discovered the combination of settings that I needed, though not (yet?) how to stop it forcing another layer of printable area margins on pages which already had such margins built in, so my learning curve-delayed two-up draft print of pages 0-19 remains slightly shrunken though good enough to provoke opinions on some recent layout decisions.

All this is on the rapidly shortening road to our imprint appearing on a, for a few more days untitled, book near you in April.