• Mood: confused

I can't make this stuff up.

Working a job tonight that is flabbergasting in its ugliness. The job was duped from a job that originally told us to follow the client's hard copy for style and page breaks. We are no replacing whole sections of the document with new data. Never mind that the dupe source is wildly inconsistent, we've come to expect that, particularly when following hard copy for style. In this case, however, it goes far beyond the pale.

Our standard is to produce footnote references full size, in parens, closed up to the text. Like this(1). In this document, not only is the client inconsistent in how they do this. They vary it within the same table!

Another wild inconsistency you wouldn't believe if I wrote it in a piece of fiction: A financial table has text reduced in point size to fit on to a page. The footnote following the table is the same size as the text of the table. This is all fine and good until you turn the page and find that the second half of the footnote is printed at our full size! (We're talking going from 8/10 to 10/12 here!)

And then, the ultimate. I had to go show fredcritter, because no one would believe me. For a list of exhibits attached to this document, there are a number of different footnotes. Not only has the client decided to mark these footnotes with everything from a single asterisk to no fewer than six daggers, but when producing the list of notes at the end of the table, they don't produce them in any rational order. There'll be "*," followed by "††," followed by "####," followed by "**." It's madness!