Yesterday I was working on updating the flyers for our farm. The stuff we have on the website is okay for quick prints but I would like to tweak the flyers to take advantage of the print format. This led me on another diversion. Sometime ago I had created the flyers in WordPerfect because it had the ability to export PDF files. So when I went back to work on the old flyers I realized that I have not installed WordPerfect anywhere. The support for WordPerfect file format is practically non-existent in Word. Since I was curious I looked at OpenOffice. It had a WordPerfect filter and I knew it had the ability to export PDF files. So I installed OpenOffice on my beta machine. Technically everything worked as expected. My problem was that I needed to replace almost all of the text and pictures. So I was back to square one. Since I had Writer open I went ahead, copied the web data into the flyer, and reformatted it to my liking. I then exported the document as a PDF. That was quick and accurate but not exactly what I wanted. I wanted the export to subset the font I used for the title. Instead it substituted another font. Not a big problem but I like the font I was using so I saved the document in Word97 format and opened it in Word 2003 on my main computer. Everything looked okay except the margins and the page breaks. I printed the document to PDFCreator and got the Acrobat I file I was looking for. I knew from previous experience that PDFCreator does subset the fonts. For kicks I went back to Writer and tried to print to PDFCreator but PDFCreator failed with an error message. Since both PDFCreator and Writer use Ghostscript as their engine someday I will probably go back and try to figure out why Writer did not subset the font.
After looking at the first flyer for a bit I noticed that I had used drop shadows on one of the photos. I like the look of drop shadowns so I decided to put drop shadows on the other photo. I went to Corel PhotoPaint because I was familiar with how I used to do it in PhotoPaint. I put the Drop Shadows on but I did not get the 3D effect I wanted. I tried changing several things but it wasn’t coming together fast enough for me. So I went to Photoshop Elements and read the Help file. Despite my best effort to try and make it different than PhotoPaint the procedure was almost the same. The effect was better but not quite right. Expanding the canvas helped but I was guessing at how much to expand it. I tried the Reveal All in the Resize menu and finally got the effect I wanted. I realize now that the canvas size was probably the same problem I had with making realistic drop shadows in PhotoPaint.