you never know when this shit is going to be useful

[chronovore]

When I was in college, in 1989 I took a class on bookmaking in the digital age. This seemed like it was going to be an easy "A" for me (though my school had no grades...) because I'd been working in pre-press using QuarkExpress and PageMaker for ages, and was a fair hand at various versions of MS Word, going back to the DOS version. Mainly I wanted to know the proper, technical terms for work that I'd already been doing.

Instead, what happened was I got stuck with a computer engineering teacher who had been doing this for longer than I had, meaning his preferred toolset had nothing to do with a GUI. He used LaTex, an old-old-old school text formatting utility. In view of his status as a tenured academic (and I hope mckitterick will not be put off by the utter disdain with which I commonly use the term; I just don't grok people who want to live in school forever) I should not have been surprised at how utterly out of touch he was with the common practices of the time, and I should have been thankful that he at least acknowledged the existence of tools such as PageMaker and QuarkExpress, and only required that 50% of our assignments be executed in LaTex, and the other 50% in the tools of our choice.

But I was young, stupid, overly confident that I knew more than he did about the "real world" of publishing, layout, and pre-press. I'd made a big, conscious choice to get away from my DOS machine and command lines, and had a little Mac SE that did everything I wanted, and I worked at a design house with a bunch of Mac IIcx machines; I had left command lines and batch files behind me, and LaTex looked a lot like integrating batch files into text documents. "Do this left margin" and then "you're done with the left margin!"

I went about my LaTex assignments with a scowl on my face determined to just do the bare minimum on them, and only shine on the assignments where I could use the full tools I'd been familiar with. I thought, "Hey, LaTex is a markup language -- who the hell is ever going to hand-code a layout in a markup language?"

...ahem.

Several years later, just prior to the "dot bomb" I was doing HTML work at a 'net startup during a half-year sabbatical from the games industry. Hand-coding was the order of the day, of course. At this point in my life I generally will make up a page with a minimalist GUI tool, but when things go wrong I have to troubleshoot by hand; part of this is that HTML editors have never evolved to the bulletproof place that page editors and postscript editors have -- I've had HTML files get so screwed up by GUI editors that I've just scrapped and restarted. But nowadays I don't just have to grok HTML, but wiki markup, and even that varies between type of wiki; wikipedia uses one, and the PukiWiki I'm trying to learn at work is different from that. I could probably learn LaTex, and do it gleefully, in a day.

So I look back at those days, and my reaction to them, and have to think "Man, who knows what's next?"

And I've got my own Luddite tendencies: I am full of sadness that I'm probably of the last generation who knows what chocolate pudding skin is, since all they sell is instant anymore.

Comments

[captainblack.livejournal.com]

You can cook chocolate pudding for your kids, and when they are old they can reminisce that their papa taught them an old recipe from the last days of the romantic, nearly forgotten, vanished American Empire. The kids who hear them saying this (born in the mid 2100's) will not understand why a protectorate of China has German style food recipes.

[chronovore.livejournal.com]

You're depressing me.

[evil-genius.livejournal.com]

I love this comment.