Must … update … blog.

After about five or six hours coding this layout, from 12 pm (an hour after I woke up) on, I have to say I don’t like this layout as much as I’d hoped. I couldn’t do it the way I’d wanted (background images on top and bottom), so there’s lots of extra space around the boxes. murrr.

Now the colors are looking funny to me, not as nice and soft and pretty as they first were. I also just realized that I forgot to check the colors on my desktop (colors on my laptop look waaaay different from any desktop), so I don’t know how funky they really are.

But meh. No more ugly pink color and tiny box area to scroll through.

Group presentation yesterday in art was all right. Eddie Izzard was nicely received. (Her Engelbert Humperdinck bit was used to illustrate idea selection.)

The earlier part of the day was spent uninstalling and reinstalling my printer, in an attempt to get back my ability to print InDesign documents with the Composite CMYK setting. I don’t know why it takes so long to install a printer. Rather, I don’t know why it takes so long for the installer to realize that there’s just no way the website is going to be found to self-register the product, so just move on in the process already! But whatever. It didn’t work. Still can only print in Composite Grey or Composite RGB. I have no freakin’ clue why.

The HP website (I have a Deskjet 4160) has a support page about printer settings not available in InDesign, but for Macs. (Funny, I never thought of hooking Macs up to regular printers. All the ones I’ve dealt with as of late were hooked up to fancy printers with RIPs, if any.) I don’t even want to fashion that “help” to my own situation, because they suggest overriding InDesign print settings and going through the HP print settings dialogue. Ouch! No way!

The Adobe website has a topic in the InDesign support forum for Macs, but that was about an Epson printer, and a somewhat fancy one, not my dinky $60 one. The response there is that a lot of inkjet printers print with RGB or something, which I find truly odd, so might as well go with the Composite RGB. Or buy a really fancy RIP that’ll convert to CMYK for you. Right.

A couple weeks ago when trying to find a solution through Google I saw this page, an entry in a blog with a similar situation but also involving Illustrator. I can’t seem to find it now though. Someone commented saying he’s had that problem, and that he always just … does something involving the printer. I can’t remember. Removes the printer from the settings, I don’t know. Which is why I went through that whole mess this morning. But it didn’t work.

I think, I’m not sure, that this problem occurred after I changed color settings or color profiles or something in InDesign. I don’t know how or what to change the settings back to. I did synchronize color settings in Adobe Bridge though. I don’t know what that did really, but hey I got a little note about it so I did it hoping it would fix my problem. It didn’t. So I am stuck saving files as PDFs and printing through there.

(I don’t know why I don’t want to print RGB. It’s stuck in my mind that if it’s for print, I should stay away from RGB. Apparently the CMYK color gamut is smaller than the RGB gamut. I experienced that when I didn’t realize the picture for my movie poster was in RGB. Augh. But tha’s neither here nor there. What I want to say is that if I’ve designed something in CMYK [technically; I set up colors in the program using CMYK, but I am looking at the colors in RGB on the monitor], I feel that it would be just plain weird to print with Composite RGB to a printer that uses cyan, magenta, yellow, and black.)

Hmm … just read more topics at the Adobe InDesign support forum, and it was explicitly spelled out that only postscript printers accept CMYK. So what was I doing before? O_o

Another note: the funky colors are probably a result of me tilting my screen more than I had earlier this morning or last night. XD;; Wow, I really need sleep.

10:04pm The dawning light! (After looking up “inkjet printer cmyk rgb.”) Inkjet printers expect RGB since that’s what the general public would work in, and has a driver in the printer to convert to CMYK. But that brings up the question … how was I able to print CMYK?