Wednesday, March 28, 2007

150 years of the Mayan-Aztec calendar

12.19.14.3.5 2 Chicchan 18 Cumhu
Technically, my vast undertaking, of documenting the Mayan-Aztec calendar correspondences for 150 years, is finished. I made the PDF this morning in hopes of putting it online tonight.
I make PDFs all the time at work. A full-color full page (11"x17") pdf takes 90-120 seconds (1 1/2-2 minutes) to distill (make into a PDF from the source file). I knew this would take some time. I had 15 documents (10 years each) plus a cover page.
Distilling this monster took over an hour. And because Acrobat repeatedly asked me questions, I had to sit there and babysit.
The final document was....drumroll please....1013 pages. Yes, ONE THOUSAND THIRTEEN pages. It's a 6 mb PDF. I can't possibly put that online. And that's as small as I can make it--each day is reduced to 1 line of 9 point landscape text. But 150 years, that's something like 55,000 lines.
So I'm going to have to make a series of smaller PDFs (probably 10 years each). That means I lose the ability to link between the decades. But what else can I do? Who wants to wait for a 6 mb PDF to load just to look up one date?
So it will be a couple more days before it's up and searchable.

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