Wow. That took a while!

So I've managed, in a little over two days, to complete the archiving of a single issue of the Bar Hill News. 40 pages. Suffice to say if it takes this long every time there's a good chance the "time left" to archive the 600+ issues will increase on a month-on-month-basis as I add new issues!

It was interesting going through a magazine I designed MYSELF in order to see what I had forgotten about the layout as I was writing the descriptive language necessary in order to get this to all work.

The first thing to say is that it took a LONG time to get started. I created a Numbers spreadsheet with the approximate layout - two columns 20 slots. For most pages this would be more than adequate. In fact it worked pretty well having this as the "default" for all the pages. From memory there was precisely two pages that caused me to have to deviate from the standard. 

The first thing was on the front of the cover page to the right it. You see all the boxes at the Botton left? It made sense to "group" things. Rather than listing them individually I grouped them into a single "contents"-object. It was either this or going from 2x20 to something like 2x40 or 2x60 to give me the granularity that I'd need to uniquely identify the boxes. It was just (in my judgement) wasn't worth the effort. Fundamentally though it adapted quite well to this, and this is an example where I compromised and went for content over accuracy. Hopefully this isn't the sort of thing that will bite me in the bottom down the line! We shall see ...

Moving on, the next page that caused an issue was this one. Can you spot the issue? Because this was a full-page article I had thought it would be easy - but when I tried to record the position of the photo in the middle it became difficult.

The get round this problem I decided to make this the first of the changes to the page layout. There was just no way to record this photo in a standard 20x2 layout and so, after a big of finger-in-the-air measurement I decided to go with 20x7.

Of course. I realise, now, as I write this that I could just have gone with 1x7 but I digress. Actually that's rubbish. No idea what I suddenly thought that. Back to the main point.

By using 20x7 I could then have the article (as object one) spanning everything. And the image could be something like column 3, row 6 height 6, and appear right in the middle. This worked well and was encouraging - the first challenge the layout faced was overcome!