How to act during summer internship?

This thread is making me laugh at all the hours I spent back in the day at Kinkos, cutting and pasting and trying in vain to make a six-column story with a jump and a photo fit on a standard 8.5x11 piece of paper. It was like a puzzle.

 

There's no strict scale, but if people can't look through articles and figure out who might be* better than someone else, then those people should find something else to do.

* -- I say might be because clips alone aren't going to tell the story.

 

I don't think you can look at two average writers and say "This guy is definitely better than that guy." It's all a matter of taste unless they are awesome or brilliant.

 

I think you're wrong. It can be done. I know someone whose current task is to do precisely that. Is it absolutely scientific? No. But it does set up certain standards.

In fact, his project uses the statistical analysis I referred to in another thread. I won't attempt to explain it to you again, though.

 

I know a little bit about photoshop, but I didn't know it could alter a pdf. I'm guessing you have to save it as something else, first?

 

I'm guessing you're right. I'm at a computer without PhotoShop right now, or I'd just go into the program and confirm.

 

Much like the looks younger reporters give me when I tell young reporters one of the perks of being sports editor at the college paper was getting an electric typewriter!

 

It can. The easiest thing is to flatten the .pdf, but that's not necessary to cut and paste.

 

I passed this thread along to someone who's putting together a portfolio. He laughed and said something about the continued marginalization of writing.

He is going to use one of the tips here, though -- not sure which one.

 

A regular PDF made from Acrobat uses text and fonts the way Quark, InDesign or Word would. It generates it on the fly when you open the page and zooming in doesn't cause the text to pixelate. It produces very compact files.

A Photoshop PDF is basically just an image that can be opened with any PDF reader. Opening a regular PDF in Photoshop changes all that text to graphics so you could lose resolution if you didn't save it big enough. You can crop or cut and paste like any other image. The result is bigger files and text that can't be edited anymore.

 

Cool. Thanks for the tips.

 

So InDesign is a good alternative? Because I'm definitely going that route if that's true.