Re: can you recommend a good book on the mysteries of Illustrator and graphic file formats in general?

Subject: Re: can you recommend a good book on the mysteries of Illustrator and graphic file formats in general?
From: Kat Nagel <mlists -at- masterworkconsulting -dot- com>
To: "Elizabeth O'Shea" <elizabeth -dot- oshea -at- virtualaccess -dot- com>, TECHWR-L <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2004 11:31:59 -0500

At 02:11 PM +0000 2004-02-12, Elizabeth O'Shea wrote:

What I don't want is a 'classroom in a book'. We have Adobe's book on
Illustrator, which I hate. For me it's useless. What I don't need is a
book that steps me through a hypothetical project. I need a book that
explains what everything is. For example, I can save an image for the
web, and I can choose different settings for the gif. What do those
settings mean? That's what I need to know.


<sigh>
What you need---and what many of us would kill for, for a wide variety of software applications---is a good, old-fashioned Reference manual. The kind of Reference manual that came with the mainframe and minicomputers that we pre-personal computer-era folks cut our teeth on.

<rant>
Remember them? They are very hard to find these days, when most software publishers shove their products out the door with minimalist User manuals full of recipes for a few simple tasks that aren't quite the same as the complicated things real users need to do, or---worse yet <snarl>---only context-sensitive online Help, with NO general Help TOC or search function, and therefore no way to find the answer to a question about a menu command or anything else that doesn't involve a specific data entry field.
</rant>

I suppose I shouldn't complain. After several lean years in the current nasty economic climate, my freelance business is beginning to pick up again with a slight change in focus. Where my former projects were mostly techwriting and editing, the majority of my new clients call for my computer coaching practice, to show them the things that used to be readily available in an application's reference manual.

--
K@
Kat Nagel, MasterWork Consulting
http://www.masterworkconsulting.com

585.820.4045
katnagel -at- masterworkconsulting -dot- com

.




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can you recommend a good book on the mysteries of Illustrator and graphic file formats in general?: From: Elizabeth O'Shea

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