On Tue, 1 Aug 2000 07:54:19 +1000, Geoffrey Heard, gheard@SURF.NET.AU, wrote: >Fast photocopiers with collaters were also "essential" in departments, >until we worked out the cost of having highly paid academics standing next >to them, doing $9/hr Administrative Assistant's work, and generally doing >it badly. Ho, ho, ho. Withdrawing those was fun! Students ended up with >much better manuals, academics ended up having to work a day ahead. I forgot I was going to write a response to this part too, Geoff. I'll gladly give over the duties of photocopying (although I used to say that was the only skill I aquired in college, having been a work-study student in the Dean's office), but I don't really think this is on a par with page-layout. The real time-sink is creating the graphics in the first place. I suppose that could be farmed out, but then you're talking more than $9/hr and it probably wouldn't actually save any time because we really don't know what we want a graphic to look like until we've played around with it a bit. Incorporating the graphics into the text takes hardly any time at all, but it seems like it should take even less time. Obviously, I'm not talking complicated page layout. I just want to get the graphic on the page where it is first referred to in the text (something that journals can get wrong occasionally, by the way), and have the text wrap correctly around the graphic. The problem is, before I knew what I was doing (and occasionally even now when I do know what I'm doing) I did it the wrong way in NW and suddenly the text was going right across the figure even though it was supposed to wrap around, switch two paragraphs around and suddenly there's a big gaping hole where the text is wrapping around some sort of ghost of the figure that's now on the next page, putting in figure captions takes some imagination because you can't format different words differently in a text object on the graphics layer. If these things worked properly I wouldn't have any complaints. Ben -- Benjamin Cramer Geological Sciences, Rutgers University Wright Geological Laboratory 610 Taylor Road Piscataway, NJ 08854 ph: (732)445-0688 / fax: (732)445-3374
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