Last week was an odd week. I had almost no motivation to get anything done and I had to pick my battles. As it turns out, I probably picked the wrong ones. Having to choose between blogging and some freelance work, I chose the freelance work (freelancing is better paying for the time spent, after all).
Well, after working on that project for a week, I got to the point of checking for quality to make sure everything looked right. Well it did, and it didn’t. It looked fine. But it read horribly. The source document I was given had the content all jumbled around. Things that should have been in one chapter were in another. All of the tip boxes for an entire chapter were mashed together at the end. I’d like to say that this is another reason I don’t trust machine converters, but I don’t see how software could even mess things up this bad. Don’t get me wrong, software made a mess of things and added over 200KB of duplicate coding. But I’ve never seen a machine converter rearrange entire pages of content.
The PDF that I was sent as reference looks flawless. Both for the styling and design and also for the content. But the source document I was given has fundamental flaws. When I was told that there was an ebook file that had been done with the pdf but it just didn’t look right, I thought I had it easy. The work was half done for me!
Now I’m going back and asking for the original manuscript and starting from scratch. Going forward, I’m not going to make that mistake again. I’ll always ask for the source document instead of an intermediary step. Except for on Fiverr. For only $5, they are on their own for making sure their content is in the right order.
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