At work I’m doing a lot more stuff. Which means that now is the time that I kinda need to fill out my dance card of skills – at least a bit more.
Yesterday I threw on the demo of Planet Press, and I’ve been going through the learning examples. It’s a monster of an interface when I’m coming from InDesign and SmartStream, but it makes sense in a way. Since it, and the majority of it’s competition, are built on top of XML, complaining about it’s page layout is a bit of a mistake. Rather than the InDesign pages and layers you have a lot more of master elements with streamed in sections of content. This is nice for half the things I do, but it looks to be ugly as f-bomb for one off jobs. A lot of this is me visualizing how the jobs we have can be built.
Things to do:
- Multiple backgrounds
- Find my JavaScript Cookbook
- Look into error checking for a given data file (because this is never an issue)
- Build a workflow
- Automate the workflow
Should I build a holiday letter? It’s be a good trial run. I could have a list of addresses and interests. If a given person likes cats, they get the full cat stuff, otherwise they only get a blurb. On the PostScript I could add a custom URL to change how they get their holiday letter. I should also think about using whitespace as well as sending out the letter as an email.
To the prep cave!