I’ve never been a big fan of using the telephone and will do most things to avoid using it, walk a couple of miles on the off-chance someone might be in. I’m worse still at answering it, though the advent of the caller i.d. – or lack of i.d. – does help somewhat. Especially after buying a domain name. I never really knew what nuisance calls were until now. But this morning’s ‘number withheld’ was a very nice man from QuarkXpress.
QuarkXpress was the state of the art Desktop Publishing software back in the 1990’s, and jolly expensive. It was what both the late Cliff McLucas and I used in the Brith Gof office, and by default what I used for Das Wunden and early gcbc design.
After parting company with Brith Gof in 1997, shortly before Brith Gof parted with Brith Gof, I was also estranged from QuarkXpress, most people had moved away from it to InDesign leaving me with no access to the files. Over the years i’ve attempted to crack the files with no luck. Last week I found a free 7 day trial online.
I’ve spent the last few evenings laboriously unlocking, and sometimes double unlocking these old files and saving them as PDF’s. Some of these PDF’s are faithful reproductions of the originals. Others, due to missing font sets / missing images / altered page flow / etc less so. I thought it more important to get a snapshot of as much of the archive as possible rather than spend time now trying to search out fonts and put things back as they were.
Yesterday evening as i realised that even this process was unlikely to be achieved within the 7 days I e-mailed asking for an extended 30 day trial. This morning I’m very glad I answered the phone, the very nice man was telling me that our request for the extended trial has been approved, which will mean that I will be able to try and update a proportion of the digital archive, gcbc, Das Wunden, Brith Gof and more, with a view to putting it up here.
Hopefully at some point in the future this can progress even further…
good cop bad cop 