People in Edmonton are frickin' crazy, I often say.

I run into this on a professional basis far more than I do on a personal one. So it's possible that on an interpersonal level, Edmontonians are the same as anyone, and it's only at their jobs that they lose their damn minds. But somehow I doubt it.

I have run into a lot of instances where Edmontonians seem to slip a cog when they sit down at their desks, and here's today's.

At work we strongly prefer art be sent to us in vector format. Preferably Illustrator, though I'll take CorelDraw, and I've been known to mine through PDFs for things. Illustrator's better for our purposes, as Illustrator art can be edited, resized and colour separated far more easily than Photoshop art. Any professional art person would know this.

Non-professionals send me Photoshop art because they don't know any better. And Illustrator's tricky. I'm good-natured about tracing it out; I'm just happy when it doesn't show up in Word. Or Publisher.

This morning I received two TIFFs from someone in Edmonton who at least claims to be a professional. The front is a haze of blurred text (which is going to look even more hazy and blurry on a shirt) that pretty much had to be in Photoshop. The back was an arrangement of text that shouldn't ever have been created in Photoshop--not by anyone who knows what they're doing.

Still: not a big deal. I do this all day.

I e-mailed him:

I received your files for the --------------; thanks. What fonts did you use for the back? I'll be rebuilding it in Illustrator and it would save me hunting for them.

A normal person would then reply with the names of the fonts. And possibly a query as to what the hell I was talking about, if they didn't happen to understand it. Again, a professional production person SHOULD understand it. However, he sent back:

Why are you rebuilding this file?

It can output and printed in the same fashion as the front.

This was my intent, I do not see a need to rebuild.

We ship tiffs often for t-shirt art and they are not rebuilt.

Do you need higher resolution?

Let me know.

Why do I care what you do often, dude? Does it matter that you make the same mistake a lot? --And it appears that the font choice is a secret. Fine: I flipped through my Large Binder Of Fonts (something ATM Deluxe on OS 9 used to do, that I sorely miss in OS X's Font Book) and determined that they were Eviscerate and GenXCrumble. In the interests of explaining myself, I replied:

I need a vectored EPS. Otherwise the image will halftone, which we really try to avoid. That's why I rebuild bitmap images in Illustrator. (Obviously that isn't possible for the front.)

At the time I sent the message, I was already halfway through the rebuild, but diplomacy prevented me from adding "I found the fonts on my own and am already halfway through it. Thanks for the help, dipstick."

Said dipstick wrote back:

Seeing that it is all a solid black output, how much 1/2 toning will take place?

I would rather not rebuild, and the client would like to avoid being charged for it.

Okay, for one thing, the fonts are still apparently a closely-guarded secret. Second, I certainly don't want HIM to rebuild it, and who said anything about a charge? Third, why do I have to persuade someone who does not print shirts that I know how shirts are printed?

Since I'd finished the trace and I don't need anything from this idiot anymore, happily I am free to not reply to his e-mail at all.

I deal with a lot of art-monkeys at our various suppliers. Sometimes they want me to send them files in Freehand 5 or as a 300 dpi JPEG or something, and when that happens I send that. I don't dig in my heels and argue with them about how they do their jobs, and demand that they explain to me why they use the software they use. (Unless it's mister_sable and his spot-colour-ignoring, no-same-colour-selecting clearly-inferior CorelDraw.) After all, maybe they know something I don't! Besides, I try to be professional.

And I don't live in Edmonton.