Shannon A. ([info]shannon_a) wrote,
@ 2008-11-17 23:51:00
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Vale of Flowers: Complete at Last
I finally* finished up the article on the Vale of Flowers which had been eating my brain for way too long. It's a very extensive description of the Gloranthan area, complete with tons of HQ info to make it into a very playable location. It's, in fact, one of the most playable pieces that I've ever written for Glorantha. I expect it'll appear in TT #17 or TT #18.

Of course, before I could send it off I had one last hurdle. Stupid, stupid, stupid Microsoft** Word had created a 45 Meg file out of my 10,000 words of text. How very stupid is that? I finally figured out that Word was managing this (somehow) through my decision to box some of the text. I unboxed the text and it sank down to 120k or something, where it belongs.

Of course, I can never let good enough alone when I finish a project. Not only did I just send out two new pitches for short articles for Mongoose's RuneQuest, but I'm also now considering writing paired articles to this one for the other two forests of the area: the Redwood and the Stinking Forest.



* And I do mean finally. I've done work on this article in three different periods: a couple of years ago, over the summer, and over the last month. It took AGES to write.

** Microsoft is not in my good graces lately, as I think they also killed my Mac last week when I upgraded Microsoft Word for the Mac and afterward any program that made extensive use of fonts started crashing on startup.



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[info]viktor_haag
2008-11-18 12:08 pm UTC (link)
Shannon, I also ran into a similar problem with Office 2008 and fonts. Here's what I did:

* Stop all applications except Finder. Backup all fonts in /Library/Fonts and ~/Library/Fonts elsewhere so they wouldn't be in the font path.

* Remove my MS user data directory and the MS Office dir in /Applications.

* Reinstall new version of Office.

* Use Font Book utility to validate and reinstall the fonts from their backed up locations.

For some reason, this seemed to work and I've had no issues with Office and fonts since. Nor issues with other apps and fonts.

It's possible that the Office install actually corrupts installed Font packages somehow (or the Font caches maybe)? I never did figure out the root cause, but this attempt to wipe the playing field and re-build it worked for me.

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