Too smart for me

[talarubi]

So tonight, I was perusing some annoyingly table-y tech reference, and I wondered if it was feasible to print this out, four pages to a double-sided letter sheet, and bind it into bookish form. To my surprise, OpenOffice actually has some basic stuff documented, and I was able to get proper page headering and left/right page margins.

Time to print! I checked the Bookbinding Page Calculator, and got the following 2-up page orderings:

Front: 32,1,30,3,28,5,26,7,24,9,22,11,20,13,18,15,
1,33,1,35,1,37,1,39,1,41,54,43,52,45,50,47
Back: 2,31,4,29,6,27,8,25,10,23,12,21,14,19,16,17,
34,1,36,1,38,1,40,1,42,55,44,53,46,51,48,49

Feeling wary, I tried this first with the excellent PDFCreator. And fortunately so--can you guess what I got? Why, yes...!

1,3,5,7,9,11,13,15,18,20,22,24,26,28,30,32,33,35,37,39,41,43,45,47,50,52,54

So apparently some programmer thought he was ZOMG CLEVER!!@ and decided to "helpfully" union and sort the list. Except (nevermind, I think, that MS Word doesn't) that's not the purpose of this option at all! If anyone wanted foolproof consecutive numbers, they'd type a page range... yeah. Real smart.

*growls*

On another note, Windows Live Writer is still very sparse and beta, but actually kinda promising. For one thing, it works with LiveJournal (!) among others. I can take screenshots and paste them right in, and it uploads to Scrapbook without ever needing to save in between. They also try to grab your blog style and display it all WYSIWYG-like in the editor, although it doesn't completely work for me yet. Supposedly, it supports plugins.

Bah. I don't remember what else I wanted to say.