Books, books, books

Preparing books to sell at an upcoming craft fair at the end of the month. May nor may not even be accepted to the event, but ramping up for this one show in particular, and for others during this craft fair season. With this mad bookmaking dash, my illustrating is on hold, albeit I'll soon be printing some already completed ones. I've already been making some into book covers. Soon to share in a later post.

Also, my report on how I set up my iMac G5 to dual boot OSX and Xubuntu will be on hold, and maybe never materialize as each day that passes, my recollection of what I did to do so grows dimmer. Getting it set up required going into what was a foreign world to me, and I really just pieced together information from others and finally got it to work. Haven't even been using it, though, as I set it up to see how much faster Inkscape would be while running natively, and since then haven't been using it heavily enough to justify rebooting into Xubuntu.

The Canon Pixma Pro9000 Mark II is doing me pretty well. There does seem to be some bug that sometimes allows the printer driver to change the page set up. Edit: not a bug, exactly, but if I set up a custom size of 4x6, then the printer driver when it goes to print, switches to its own 4x6, which has three different versions, and it chooses a version that doesn't print as I want it It chooses borderless, which also prints with colors waaay off. But, when choosing the pre-set 4x6 page set up, it works as expected. Happened on two different prints (very frustrating), but I finally was able to print them correctly. Still, it made no sense to me why it persistently switched my chosen page setup to a different page set up on these particular images. Even so, it makes some pretty prints. Not having time to really figure out color management yet, I've just done some trial and error in printing to get good images, but don't yet have it set up to produce a print that matches (as much as can be expected) the onscreen image. Which may be dumb, as it may have taken as much time to get the color management in order as it has to do my trial and error on individual images. I dunno. I'd already put a few hours into learning color management, and my initial efforts left me scratching my head. I have loved the results from printing on Mohawk Superfine, though, and would like to try it on some cover weight stock, instead of the 80 lb weight I have on hand. I like Mohawk's high standard for paper permanence, even if the best my current Canon ink can get me is 100 years in dark storage (before noticeable fading), or somewhere around sixty on display if under glass or treated with a protective UV spray.