The Pharos Press Edition of Lace and Steel made use of two sets of Master Pages. The first set blank, the second a set of right, left sidebar pages with a sword and rose emblem.
For some reason, inexplicable to me, this emblem art was saved as an EPS. Probably because it was the only vector format I had available to me 10 years ago when I set this up originally. pstoedit didn’t seem to like the EPS, so I threw it at The Gimp. Seemed to work okay, sorta. Imported it at a silly high DPS, then saved it as an uncompressed JPG. The GIMP image had a wacky kinda sawtooth look on it. So I took that into Inkscape and ran the bitmap trace with. This tool may or may not be in GIMP, I’m used to using it in Inkscape.
Now something I’ve never been able to ( and never really been annoyed enough to ) understand is the way that Inkscape sets up workspaces. I ended up manually editing the XML in order to convince the image it fit in the workspace. Once that was done, I did a binary export on the trace and saved the SVG just in case.
It was pointed out to me after I can find this on the Document->Properties, and so I did. There’s a Custom Size that even has a painfully convenient Resize to content button.
Turned out I needed that SVG because try as I might, GIMP would never finish loading the PNG. It shouldn’t have been too bad, even at 1200 dpi. The SVG had no trouble at all loading. After a couple of touch-ups due to the trace, I scaled down the image to what I needed and I think, that is that.
I won’t know for a bit if the end result is good enough to replace my original or if I’m going to have to break down and stick Photoshop 6 in that Virtualbox instance that has Pagemaker set up in it.
It didn’t take long to get the basic layout sorted out once I got back into Scribus, though I still have some issues like, how do I get the linking right and why on earth does the line color say black but draw brown?
Leave a Reply