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Show This week, it was a natural disaster the editor's column By MARC HADDOCK When anybody tries to make me promise that something will appear in the newspaper, I try to tell them just how precarious this business is. I'll do it," I tell them, barring flood, fire or natural disaster." What I mean by that is, if the typesetting machine doesn't break down. In the four years I've been here, we've had remarkable luck with our typesetter, a dinosaur dino-saur that keeps putting out machine typeset copy with a consistency which could be termed remarkable. Repairs have been minor, and have never held us up or put us out until today. Monday night, just about in the middle of production for this week's edition of the newspaper, newspap-er, the world as we at this newspaper news-paper know it, ended. The typesetting machine stopped stop-ped setting type. Oh, it made the same old noises. Bells rang, gears turned and whatever happens inside that mysterious old machine seemed to be happening. But when the photographic paper on which our news copy is typeset was processed, there was nothing on it. This was about 9 p.m., our time. That 11 p.m. where the people who help us fix these things over the telephone live and they were all in bed. We have a backup typesetter typeset-ter even older than the machine which produces this paper each week. We hadn't fire -that baby up for months. Now . as we opened up the mysterious machine to try and find out what had gone wrong. We found a blown fuse, and figured our troubles were over. It would take a little extra time, but we could still make it to press. We replaced the fuse, turned on the machine and then quickly quick-ly turned it off again as smoke started to spill out of the machine. Clearly, our problem was not a blown fuse that was just a symptom. It will take a real technician to cure this disease. And one would not be available until Tuesday night, at the earliest, or more likely Wednesday morning morn-ing - when the newspaper has to be in the mail. We could wait. But we were lucky, because we didn't have to. The fact you are reading this at all is a tribute to the advances made in computer typesetting recently. Tuesday morning we were able to take our floppy disks over to Scientific Transcribers in Pleasant Grove and, with a few code changes, they typeset the new columns from the computer com-puter disks. At least, that's what they are doing as I write this column col-umn on my portable computer. The ads that didn't get typeset before our machine died were also typeset there. And late copy, like this column, col-umn, were written on the computer com-puter and sent through the process. pro-cess. The finished product was brought over to our American Fork production plant, the newspaper was pasted up and then the pages were hauled to Orem, where they were printed, stuffed, addressed and bundled bun-dled all to be delivered to you today. So if the paper looks a little different, that's because it is. We had to use a different typeface for some of the stories, because Scientific Transcribers couldn't match our old News 3 typeface. And the headlines were produced pro-duced on a truly ancient piece of typesetting equipment a Com-pugraphic Com-pugraphic headliner that dates back to the days when most newspaper still used hot lead. And some stories will be left out as well, I'm afraid. Especially Especial-ly the stories about many of the politicans you will be voting on next Tuesday. I'm sorry about that, but between be-tween trying to find ways to get our copy typeset and actually doing so, there just wasn't time to write some of those stories and still get the paper to press. We've been able to push our deadlines back pretty far recently re-cently because of computers and other modern equipment. The untimely demise of the typesetter type-setter ended all that, at least for this week. These are the experiences that pepper our past with excitement, ex-citement, adventure and precious pre-cious memories. But frankly, it's been hell getting get-ting this newspaper out, and I'm glad it's over. that it was time for it to serve the purpose for which it exists, it could not perform for us either. It seems it kept putting esses and any other letter in the same spot on the page. As a result the columns were justified, the copy was garbles and the product was simply not fit to print. About that time we started to panic. A good amount of our news had already been written on computer but was waiting to be transferred over to the typesetter. typeset-ter. That meant it wouldn't have to be typed again if we could find a typesetting firm that would let us bring in a lot of electronic elec-tronic copy on short notice. Tuesday morning we finally made contact with the typeset-; typeset-; ting machine repair people and they coached us over the phone |