After doing some screen printing for a local sports collectible shop and working at the copy center at the college bookstore, my first real printing job was hand burning plates.

Laying mask after mask and screen after screen, turning on the vacuum, closing the curtain and all that light exposure... ugh. I was burned out after a week or two. I got upgraded to typesetter and then to scanning artboards and vectorizing and coloring images with Adobe Streamline. That's the place where I got fired on day 89 for getting in a car accident.

I did like making the color keys, though.

Never used/heard of a plate cart before. Everyplace I've been we took large sheets of cardboard and folded them in half and taped. Then we labeled them A, B, C, etc. and marked it on the job ticket as such. We just stacked them in the press room, and when the ticket came up, the pressman went and grabbed the folder.

Ok. I feel like we've all had enough.

If you break out in hives, I wonder if it says anything interesting about you?

Quote from: David on May 13, 2025, 11:06:35 AMI Eye see what you did there

Feel the room, man

Eye carrumba

Can't help with braille, but when I lived in the Bay Area I did a lot of stuff in Chinese and I ended up having to buy a new font set (and you had to do a keyboard command to switch over to use it) and a translation service that would assist with typesetting. There are specialists, and based on my experience, it's worth using them.

Quote from: David on May 07, 2025, 09:00:43 AMI would at this point really think about taking photos with the phone camera...

I thought about that too. I've done it for some legal/tax documents and it was okay. Not sure if it's any slower or faster.

Yes, you can bend them up, but I think there's a special tool that does this. These are close to 100 years old, so it's real metal and not some alloy. It's not an easy task, and because it's archived for the library, it needs to be put back into it's original condition afterwards.

Yes, these hold the pages in place. Currently, we're just hand placing them on the flatbed and leaving them in place, but there are literally hundreds, if not thousands of these. Imagine scanning 100,000 records one at a time, instead of being able to drop them into a high speed multi-page scanner.

The backlog really has more to do with the vast volume of records.

One "customer," (yes we call them that) got an outside quote of $180,000 and 3 year turnaround time. We had to reject that job because we're already estimating we're 5 years out.

Our scanner had some also that were rings, but had already returned them to the library. But she offered these more rivet style ones as another example.

Yes, it is a big slow down because you have to fold these things over and hand position on the flatbed, instead of dropping the stack into the high speed volume scanners. And we literally have hundreds of, "bankers boxes," of stuff to scan, so speed is an issue.

No. Think more like a grommet on the corner of a banner... but 100 years old and for paper.

In addition to printing state materials for all of CalTrans, we also do archival scanning. We have something like a 5 year backlog of scanning to do (we hope to be expanding and at least doubling our capability in the next year). Some of the documents we recently received for scanning were plans hand drawn on an onion-skin like paper, and held together with... they're kind of like rivets, but they're rings... not grommets.... but grommets, I guess. They are not meant to be removed, but to best scan them, we need to remove them, and ideally replace them. I'll see if I can snap a picture in a bit. Has anyone come across these before and do you know where to get replacements, or how to remove them without damage?

Cooking a tri tip beyond medium rare is a felony in most states.

The key to tri tip is low and slow.

I like to get my grill up to about 175-200, and keep the heat (propane or charcoal) to one side, and put the tri tip on the cold side, FAT SIDE UP. Close the lid and use the grill like an oven for 2-3 hours. I like a dry rub, but some people will swear by a marinade.

Getting the smoker going is a good way, too, if you have one.

While looking for some paper to special order this morning, came across this. Now I ask you, honestly, as a manufacturer of paper for digital reproduction, is this what you want to name your company?

Also, econosource is a shitty brand, and I don't recommend it.