Merism Monday

merism ~ rhetorical device of contrasting two parts of a whole

Once upon a time I had two printers. I had one of those three in one deals that was capable of printing photos (provided you could afford the special ink and photopaper) and a huge, heavy duty colour laser printer for printing up big jobs. I honestly can't remember what happened with the three in one printer, other than the ink drying up in it, but the toner for the laser printer was super expensive.

I ended up replacing the pair of them with a Canon Pixma printer whose selling point was that I could print labels directly onto CDs or DVDs with it. My hubby records his own music and also downloads a lot of music from iTunes that he burns onto CDs.

Now I also have a Lightscribe drive, which is a CD/DVD burner that will etch a label right onto the disc, but it takes forever and it doesn't do colour. And quite honestly, the Lightscribe CDs are getting near impossible to find.

So I'm in my office on Saturday, finally taking care of the massive pile of paper that needed shredding, and I had about ten CDs that needed labels. My shredder will only do about three bucketfuls of paper before it needs to cool down, and I figured I could make good use of the waiting time by running the CDs through the printer.

Now despite the fact that I can (and have in the past) print labels with pictures as well as text on them, the hubby only wanted the band name and the CD title on them. No problem. The problem was that the program that comes with the printer does not allow you to change the size/shape of the boxes the text goes in. I wanted to make the text bigger so you could read it easier. There had to be a way to do it.

The manual built into the program was no help whatsoever. Google wasn't any help either because it mostly referred back to the manual. By this time I was finished the shredding, but not ready to give up on the printing.

One of the other drawbacks to the printer's program is that when you're selecting the font for your label all you see is the name, you don't see what the actual font looks like. So when I was still thinking I could get the program to do what I wanted it to, I had a Word document open so I could see what the different fonts looked like.

It occurred to me at this point that it would almost be easier to download the CD cover image to use as the label. All I'd have to do is import the image into the printer program and do a label that was all image without any text.

That's when I got the brilliant idea of using Word to make my labels. I typed out the band's name and the CD title, then made the font size, shape, and colour the way I wanted it, and positioned it approximately where I wanted it to appear on the CD. Then I used the Windows snipping tool to crop it to CD size and save it as an image file. Easy peasy!

From there it was a simple matter of loading the image into the printer program and creating my label. I was even able to match the fonts from the covers onto the CDs.

Carol - 1; Canon - 0

Next time I'm going to learn how to print pictures using the pre-cut photo paper I have way too much of. :-)