Pore

pore
verb, intransive. Used as "pore over" or "pore through". To be absorbed in the reading or study of. To think intently. To ponder.

After she exchanged a couple of emails with the client who contacted her after being recommended by one of her few steady customers, Lorrie settled down to an afternoon of fact-finding.

The prospect wanted several labels printed for his product displaying a logo and descriptive text. After she asked for a high-quality digital version of his logo, he admitted that he didn't have one yet, then launched into a description of what he would like. Suddenly, the job had expanded into the creation of a corporate image. Additionally, he wanted his as-yet-nonexistent logo embossed and foil-stamped on the labels.

Lorrie had been in the printing business a long time, but had never designed anything for embossing and foil-stamping. She knew enough about it to know she needed to do research before she produced any work. She spent the bulk of the next day poring over tutorials that printers with websites had had the decency to post. It didn't matter what the subject was, she thought, if you knew what to type into a search engine, you could learn a lot about it in a few hours. Fortunately, she knew so much about the industry overall that the instructions for how to prepare the art were simply an extension to what she already knew.

"I can do this," Lorrie mused as she gazed at the illustrations she had downloaded from a couple of image banks. "I can put this and this together and simplify it enough to make a gorgeous emboss. It will look wonderful under the gold foil. It will look so elegant that my fee for setting it up will seem like a bargain!"

Definitions adapted from The New Oxford American Dictionary, Oxford University Press, Inc., 2005 (eBook Edition, copyright 2008), and from Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam Company, Publishers, Springfield, Massachusetts, USA, 1965, depending on which is more convenient to hand.