So I was thinking about my mistake with missing a page out of the Rita 2 book and how to NEVER MAKE THE SAME MISTAKE AGAIN. I mean obviously I am now going to make sure to do multiple passes over my proofs, and get at least one set of eyes on them to make sanity checks for things like “there seems to be a page missing”. But the actual mistake was that I was manually editing a long list of files by hand:

Teczetherca Thur Uenu Chousun:Users:egypt:Documents:gfx:working: rita:books:2:working files:With Spot:105.ai,
Teczetherca Thur Uenu Chousun:Users:egypt:Documents:gfx:working: rita:books:2:working files:With Spot:106.ai,
Teczetherca Thur Uenu Chousun:Users:egypt:Documents:gfx:working: rita:books:2:working files:With Spot:107.ai,
Teczetherca Thur Uenu Chousun:Users:egypt:Documents:gfx:working: rita:books:2:working files:With Spot:108.ai,
Teczetherca Thur Uenu Chousun:Users:egypt:Documents:gfx:working: rita:books:2:working files:With Spot:110.ai,
Teczetherca Thur Uenu Chousun:Users:egypt:Documents:gfx:working: rita:books:2:working files:With Spot:111.ai,
Teczetherca Thur Uenu Chousun:Users:egypt:Documents:gfx:working: rita:books:2:working files:With Spot:112.ai,

I mean, can you tell at a glance that 109.ai is missing? Would you even bother to check? Making this list is a tedious thing that requires executing the same simple steps over and over without error. In other words, it’s the kind of thing that humans are really terrible at, and that computers are really good at.

Or in pictures and words…

99 of Cups: Recursion
Singing “99 Bottles Of Beer On The Wall” is a long and tedious task. Maybe it’d be better to automate it!

So I took my own advice and wrote a little Applescript to do this for the next book, then bundled it up into a tiny application and stuck it in the directory where all my working files for the books live. NEVER AGAIN WILL I MAKE THIS FILE BY HAND.

I mean it’s still possible for me to put the wrong files in there, but that’s a part of the process where I actually have my brain online, you know?

Here it is if you happen to want it. It pops up a file requestor to choose a directory, then outputs a CSV file with the full path to each file – exactly what InDesign wants when you use the Data Merge panel to build a book from a template.