tox - in spite of my penchant towards the science, there is a lot of art in composting. Compost is probably one of the most complex natural ecosystems on our planet, and will never be fully understood in the lifetime of either me or my children. Lloyd - to be fair, "whacko" is probably better reserved for what you are (or what you do) when you chase rats with your pitchfork; "wacko" is what geeks like me get called when we're being, well, geeks like me. So, maybe at times your a "whacko", and most of the time I'm a "wacko".

I am in the printing business and produce lots of catalogs each year. TriangleJohn is correct, the catalog has to be saved in a version that a printer can use. MS Publisher can be used, but at times can be a nightmare to output negatives from. It may end up costing you more to sort out the problems than to hire a good graphics person. If it's going to be straight copy like a price list without any photos, then an MS Word document would be fine. Just print out a laser copy of the sheet and have the printer shoot a negative with his camera. But if it involves multiple colors and photos, it's a whole different story. The best softwares to use would be Quark Express, In Design or Pagemaker. There are others that will work, but these three are the most readily accepted. And yes we are more and more accepting high resolution PDF files. But as stated earlier, it has to be saved using a better version of Adobe Acrobat, not what is normally packaged with your computer. I would suggest that you contact several graphic designers in your area and meet with them. Find out what their initial cost will be as well as what their changes will cost. From my experience, you could end up paying almost as much for your changes as you do to setup the initial catalog if you are disorganized and unsure of what will go into it. If you are on a tight budget, spend some time laying the catalog out before you give it to the graphic designer. For example you could put all of your seed on one page, fertilizer on another and handtools on still another page. Then once you feel good about it, hand it over to be typeset. Then it's just a matter of proof reading for typos and content. Once the catalog is finished, you can e-mail the file to any printer you choose. Don't be mislead by the graphic designer that only the printer he uses can produce the job properly. If that's the case, then you don't need to deal with a designer that is so limited. He is just looking for a slice of the printing pie. Remember, you want the file to be usable by any quality printer. Lastly, your initial setup costs will be high the first year. But each following year should be very low if you stay with the same theme, but just make minor changes like pricing. Good luck! I would be happy to discuss this further with you if needed.

Owbist, thanks for the suggestion of a new thread. The computer I am having problems with only has X-P. Due to a problem with my X-P machine, I have put the Ubuntu project on the back burner. Please allow me to tell you about my new problem. X-P SP3, 1024 MB memory. Due to a connection related problem I talked to the folks at ATT. They got me back on line but the computer is very slow, it has not crashed, but it takes forever for the pages to load. Sometimes I type faster than the computer can load the images of the type, and I am a very slow typer. When going from one web page to another is seems like forever. When I try to click back to the former page, also takes a long time. Also, the pages load small and I have to enlarge them, nothing seems to work like it should. I have run Malwarebytes, Ccleaner, Spyware Blaster and defragged the computer...nothing bad showed up. Steve

Now even I had to look up an acronym - SIL. ;-) Ok, so you have MS Works XLR & WPS files. The problems you are having - or going to have - is that Works is old, and the Office XP Pro your SIL gave you is also old, being actually Office 2002, version 10 of Office. If you don't have too many files, I think your best bet is to try an online file converter. Zamzar claims to be able to open and convert Works files. http://www.zamzar.com/ Save : XLR (spreadsheet) files to xlsx WPS (word) files to docx If you don't want to buy a new version of MS Office, try installing LibreOffice - the newer version of OpenOffice - and it will open xlsx and docx files [ If you want to stick with your SIL's MS Office XP Pro, then convert those files to xls & doc files, respectively. That version of Office is very old though. ] There are other ways of handling this, but probably if you you're going to try anything else, your best bet would be buy MS Works off Ebay or Amazon for $10 or so, open and convert all the files. Btw, you can't even open a .doc file in Office XP Pro ?? That's not a good sign - probably a sign of corruption. Btw #2 - When you say you can't open files, I take it they are on your current hard drive, and not within some compressed backup folder. That is, not within a zip file or the like. Re your backup cds : Can you load one of them, then rummage around in their files and tell us what you find ? (as in, names of files and extensions ?) Most likely they are proprietary formats, but if we know what they are, we could perhaps tell you how to retrieve them. Last, anyway you can get the hard drive back from the repair service ? Probably not, but it would be a second source of backup files. Let us know how it all works out.