revisions, revisions, REVISIONS oh, and more revisions

I'm beginning to understand why Marianne said this would be a 3-5 year endeavor total, yikes! Don't get me wrong, I AM getting SOMETHING accomplished, but I sort of feel like I'm trying to move an ocean with a drinking glass. I'll elaborate-

Last week from Monday to Thursday I buzzed along like a happy little hummingbird fixing the "Country Called Heaven" course Spanish, other than some cantankerous fonts, it's really going quite smoothly. So I said to myself, "this is GREAT I'll get this whole course done by the end of the month!" however a little thing called revisions came creeping over the horizon. The first book took about 3 revisions- which now means we can send it to the Spanish speaking people at our Kansas branch to proof read- hopefully they will like everything and we can go to print (please, oh pretty please!)

I say this because the "Life of Christ" course in Spanish was designed when my parents were graduating from high school with paper and glue- the dreaded "paste-up" my professors all spoke of with a sort of hushed demeanor when chastising us for complaining about some difficulty with our computer programs. Anywho- there are NO digital files of them ANYWHERE, nada- zip. Which brings us to:

Heather's 4 Step Method for Text Extraction:
1. Scan each page of the document (with a really quite noisy scanner, Marianne agrees)
2. Once saved as a .tiff file (which is done in one fell swoop upon scanning) I drag the file over to the Acrobat Reader icon (this is what I love about Macs- instant file opening!)
3. OCR- this stands for Optical Character Recognition- which I believe is an art rather than a science, as artful borders, very large illustrations, small squiggly text, and the assorted é, í, ñ, etc. characters all confuse it.
4. I select the text and paste it into a Word document where I compare the text on my screen to the text in the book and fix the weird hieroglyphics so a normal (Spanish-speaking) person can actually understand them. I can now alt+e, e; alt+e, i, and alt+n, n, with great speed (where was this knowledge when I had Spanish class?!)

Okay, at this point I sit back, take a deep breath and smile- I have all the text necessary for one lesson booklet- Hey, it's a big deal to me! Now I can play :)
The only trouble is, after 2+ days of looking at one booklet in-progress, I can be totally, 100% convinced I have it formated perfectly- only to print it out and have Marianne and myself locate 10-15 rather obvious errors in about 5 minutes *deep sigh* so it's back to the computer. I've been assured this is normal, and it is why it takes so long to get this stuff done, but I'm astounded that I can actually miss that much- I spent this afternoon staring at a booklet I had already been over about twice with eyeball wrenching intensity- and lo and behold! I found about 5 more errors*
*error- in graphics work this can be a weird hyphenation, inconsistent spacing between lines of text, awkward spacing in between words, automatic vs. manual ...'s and in Spanish punctuation rules are just different to begin with, so I have to remind myself that the period goes outside of the quotes.

This is just one course in Spanish mind you, we have at least 3 more really old Spanish courses to do. After that we will update the Portuguese and then I think about 5 other languages after that- though they may not have the scope of lessons the Spanish does.

So to wrap up, my greatest lesson learned thus far is that, much like in my Christian walk, graphic design on this scale is a constant process of incremental improvement. I cannot expect to get it right on the first try, though I should always strive to, and sometimes it just takes the experienced eye of someone other than me to see where I have fallen short and then go back and make it right. Yes, I do believe God is teaching me patience, persistence, and grace via 40- year old Bible lessons in Spanish.