Regarding Error in October Chess Life

Careful readers of the October Chess Life print edition will note a deeply regrettable error. 

Two photographs of Louis “Lou” Giarrusso appear in a rotated and skewed format on Page 7.

Why did this happen?

As fate would have it, Lou passed away the night before we were to go to press. What was to have been a celebration of his life had to be quickly rewritten as an obituary.

In the process of editing and page-fitting, I made the final round of corrections to the file, did the output from InDesign to .pdf, and uploaded those files to our printer’s website.

What I did not know — but do now — is that there is a very specific issue with .heic image files (the native iPhone/ iOS image file format) and Adobe programs running in Windows. In layman’s terms, Adobe products do not reliably read / recognize elements of the image data on Windows machines.

When I looked at the updated page files in InDesign, all the images were rendered properly. But when I exported them to the pdfs our printer requires, the two .heic photos were rotated and stretched. I did not notice this problem when I did a final once-through on the printer’s proofing website.

Once we learned of the problem, we were able to correct the pages in the digital version, but it was too late to fix the print edition. For non-members, or for those who have not logged into their member accounts to access the digital edition, we also provide a corrected pdf for download.

We also reached out to Lou’s family and apologized to them for this oversight.

What are we doing to avoid this problem in the future?

We have made conversion of .heic images to .jpg or .psd (Adobe’s native image format) part of our workflow, removing one potential source of error from our process.

Conclusion

I apologize to our readers for this error. Any oversight of this nature is mortifying, but that the problem occurred in an obituary for such a respected member of our chess family... that makes it all the more unfortunate.

We’ll do our best to avoid such errors in the future.