Hi Pathfinder Team:

I have a major problem with the Pathfinder Adventure Path resources I'm hoping you can solve.

I had been a long-time subscriber to Dungeon Magazine, as pubished by Paizo. What I most liked about how Paizo published Dungeon, and the adventure paths like Age of Worms, was that each magazine had an accompanying set of PDF resources.

The PDF resources were divided into two types: one for GM's, one for Players. The set for players had been scrubbed of GM info, like room numbers, hidden doors, etc. This was a GREAT resource of a GM, since I could simple print out the player version, and have an instant map for the players.

Now that I have purchased the Pathfinder RPG core rules and the first two volumes of Council of Thieves, I am disappointed. Paizo has for some reason discontinued the PDF resources that enhanced the Adventure Path.

I have tried to "make my own" by purchasing the PDFs, but since they are SECURED, Acrobat won't let me extract pages, save as images, or edit the maps to delete the GM room numbers, etc. In short, the PDF is worthless as compared to Paizo's previous practice when you published Dungeon Magazine.

I realize you are planning to publish maps of Westcrown, but since you are months behind on your development, can't you at least allow those of us with poster printers to be able to "make our own?"

We are just starting Council of Thieves now, but without the map of the city as a large scale reference, this is a major disappointment.

Please let me know if I've missed something. I really want to be able to use your PDFs like I did when you published Dungeon Magazine!

A previous and hopeful fan,
David

Take a screenshot of the PDF page, then paste it into Paint or you favorite graphic program and edit whatever you want. This is how I printed the sewer maps from The Bastards of Erebus.

I agree that it was easier with Dungeon magazine. I could have just copied and pasted the exact map. Still had to airbrush many things though. It would be nice to have a set of maps specifically for the players (without having to buy the separate map packs).

I don't know if this will be helpful, but if you do Alt-Prt Scr (the Prt Scr button is often by the insert, delete buttons). This will take a picture of what is on your screen at the time and put it on the clipboard. You can then open a program like paint and paste it. Then you could edit the image. Of course, one needs to be careful that one only uses such a method for legal purposes.

I have tried to "make my own" by purchasing the PDFs, but since they are SECURED, Acrobat won't let me extract pages, save as images, or edit the maps to delete the GM room numbers, etc. In short, the PDF is worthless as compared to Paizo's previous practice when you published Dungeon Magazine.

Hey David:

I just grabbed a secure PDF of Bastards of Erebus and had no problem doing the things you mention above. I am using Adobe Reader 8.1.7 for the Mac and I was able to select both pictures and maps and drag them to my desktop or to a folder. Yes, you can't do a Save As function, but selecting and dragging works just fine and you can rename them once they are on your computer. The Westcrown map on page 56 came out just great, with the name Westcrown coming over but none of the tags. And it extracted as a TIFF file. I was also able to do the same thing with any of the images in the PDF.

-Lisa

seasthyday wrote:

I have tried to "make my own" by purchasing the PDFs, but since they are SECURED, Acrobat won't let me extract pages, save as images, or edit the maps to delete the GM room numbers, etc. In short, the PDF is worthless as compared to Paizo's previous practice when you published Dungeon Magazine.

Hey David:

I just grabbed a secure PDF of Bastards of Erebus and had no problem doing the things you mention above. I am using Adobe Reader 8.1.7 for the Mac and I was able to select both pictures and maps and drag them to my desktop or to a folder. Yes, you can't do a Save As function, but selecting and dragging works just fine and you can rename them once they are on your computer. The Westcrown map on page 56 came out just great, with the name Westcrown coming over but none of the tags. And it extracted as a TIFF file. I was also able to do the same thing with any of the images in the PDF.

-Lisa

Hi Lisa. It doesn't work for me with Acrobat Reader 9.0.0 under Windows Vista.

Lisa Stevens wrote:

seasthyday wrote:

I have tried to "make my own" by purchasing the PDFs, but since they are SECURED, Acrobat won't let me extract pages, save as images, or edit the maps to delete the GM room numbers, etc. In short, the PDF is worthless as compared to Paizo's previous practice when you published Dungeon Magazine.

Hey David:

I just grabbed a secure PDF of Bastards of Erebus and had no problem doing the things you mention above. I am using Adobe Reader 8.1.7 for the Mac and I was able to select both pictures and maps and drag them to my desktop or to a folder. Yes, you can't do a Save As function, but selecting and dragging works just fine and you can rename them once they are on your computer. The Westcrown map on page 56 came out just great, with the name Westcrown coming over but none of the tags. And it extracted as a TIFF file. I was also able to do the same thing with any of the images in the PDF.

-Lisa

Hi Lisa. It doesn't work for me with Acrobat Reader 9.0.0 under Windows Vista.

If you can find a copy of Adobe 8 it works. But the functionality in 9 is pure snapshot rather than digging into the actual files pictures itself. It's a pain. I tend to use Some PDF Image Extractor to pull the images out and then print them from the images it produces.

For some reason Adobe killed a bunch of useful functionality in version 9 of their reader. It is possible "downgrade" back to version 8. Some people also like using Foxit reader for pdfs instead of acrobat.

Just confirming that our PDF document security hasn't changed—it's exactly the same now as it was when we did the magazines. It's Adobe Reader that has changed—and I personally can't fathom why they removed that functionality.

seasthyday-

Evince is an open source PDF reader that is available for Windows. It allows one to extract any resources from a PDF by dragging them.

You can grab the installer here:
http://live.gnome.org/Evince/Downloads

Cheers,
Twings

As already mentioned, the version 9+ of Adobe Reader killed some of the tools/functionality to extract images. You need to "downgrade" to an older 8.x version. By "downgrade" I mean download and install the older version. You can actually have v8 & v9 installed at the same time (I've done that on my home PC and one of my work computers).

Adobe 8.x can be hard to get to. Try this:
1) Go to Adobe's website.
2) Selected "downloads" from their navigation bar (at the top) and then "Get Adobe Reader" from the drop-down menu.
3) Next to the big, red Reader symbol under "Download the latest version of Adobe Reader," click the link for "Different language or operating system."
4) Select your OS from the drop-down menu (and assuming your language is English), click "Continue."
5) With any luck, v8.1.3 is available as an option under your OS of choice. I think the v7.1.0 has the functionality your looking for too.

When you download v8, be sure to save the whole installation executable to your harddisk; that way, if Adobe decides to stop offering older downloads or something, you'll have a copy squirreled away if your system crashes.

Happy hunting.

-Skeld

You can also download any previous version of Adobe through the following site:

http://www.oldversion.com/Acrobat-Reader.html

I'd be nervous about using any older Adobe products due the vulnerabilities they have. I suspect that may have something to do with the missing functionality. I suggest you if you need this you try the open source solution someone already posted or run the older version of Adobe in a sand boxed environment with no internet access. You could using VMware to do that or put it on PC that isn't connected to the internet.

I'd be nervous about using any older Adobe products due the vulnerabilities they have.

Adobe is still providing security updates for Acrobat and Reader 7 and newer—7.1.4, 8.1.7, and 9.2 were all released on October 15.

voska66 wrote:

I'd be nervous about using any older Adobe products due the vulnerabilities they have.

Adobe is still providing security updates for Acrobat and Reader 7 and newer—7.1.4, 8.1.7, and 9.2 were all released on October 15.

True enough but I find the older version don't auto patch and it's just all too easy to install and neglect to apply said patches. I'm not sure about 8.1.7 though it might auto patch for you but I know older versions don't. I've got a version Adobe acrobat 3.1 because it's required for our for some enterprise software to run. So patch and be safe.

All the D&D 4E PDFs work great with Adobe 9 - you can copy and paste specific images. So it's not really a problem with Adobe 9, it's a problem with how you folks at Pazio generate the PDFs. The WotC's PDFs (while they were still releasting them) were also extremely fast to page through. The Pazio ones are painfully slow, even when the file is small (e.g. the new Advanced Player's Guide Playtest) and even on very powerful machines. It defeats to purpose of having a PDF - I want something I can page and search through quickly during my game session, but the Pazio PDFs make it so slow, I just end up looking up things on online websites in HTML form. I think one of the problems might be the background image on each and every page in your PDFs. It would be great if Pazio can start releasing optimized PDFs that are fast; just do whatever WotC did to achieve such PDFs.

Adobe is still providing security updates for Acrobat and Reader 7 and newer—7.1.4, 8.1.7, and 9.2 were all released on October 15.

I downloaded a couple versions of Adobe 8 and tried installing them, however each time a warning popped up on the screen stating that I had a better functioning version (9.2), and that the installation would be canceled. My only option was the "ok" button (which it certainly wasn't) at which time it closed down. Any idea how to bypass that?

It would be great if Pazio can start releasing optimized PDFs that are fast; just do whatever WotC did to achieve such PDFs.

Totally agree. There is definitely something wrong with Paizo's PDFs - they are extremely big, bloated, and slow.

Especially painful when you see PDFs from other companies (WotC, Goodman Games) whose PDFs open and can be paged through lickety-split.

Acrobat Reader blows major time. I use FoxIt and never ever had any performance issue with Paizo PDFs.

I downloaded a couple versions of Adobe 8 and tried installing them, however each time a warning popped up on the screen stating that I had a better functioning version (9.2), and that the installation would be canceled. My only option was the "ok" button (which it certainly wasn't) at which time it closed down. Any idea how to bypass that?

Try uninstalling Reader 9 before installing Reader 8.

encorus wrote:

It would be great if Pazio can start releasing optimized PDFs that are fast; just do whatever WotC did to achieve such PDFs.

Totally agree. There is definitely something wrong with Paizo's PDFs - they are extremely big, bloated, and slow.

Especially painful when you see PDFs from other companies (WotC, Goodman Games) whose PDFs open and can be paged through lickety-split.

I can't speak to Wizards PDFs, as I've never actually seen one from 3rd Edition or newer, but the difference between our PDFs and Goodman Games' PDFs is that we have full-color artwork and page backgrounds throughout. Also, if you're comparing, say, one of their 32-page adventures to our all-in-one 100-page AP, that also makes for a big difference in both file size and performance.

You do have another option if you use Firefox as your browser. You can right click a pdf and choose to open with Firefox. Then, if you have an add-on called Aviary, you can save just about anything on your screen as an image. Then you can go and edit it however you want.

As for slow loading pdf's, the only one from Paizo that always seems to go slowly for me is the Core Rulebook. I always thought that was because of it's size, though pages with art do load a little slower than pages with just text.

Arnwyn wrote:

encorus wrote:

It would be great if Pazio can start releasing optimized PDFs that are fast; just do whatever WotC did to achieve such PDFs.

Totally agree. There is definitely something wrong with Paizo's PDFs - they are extremely big, bloated, and slow.

Especially painful when you see PDFs from other companies (WotC, Goodman Games) whose PDFs open and can be paged through lickety-split.

I can't speak to Wizards PDFs, as I've never actually seen one from 3rd Edition or newer, but the difference between our PDFs and Goodman Games' PDFs is that we have full-color artwork and page backgrounds throughout. Also, if you're comparing, say, one of their 32-page adventures to our all-in-one 100-page AP, that also makes for a big difference in both file size and performance.

I find the PDF's on this site to be incredibly slow, to the point that they interfere with using them. Even the small player's guides turn pages slowly. Is there anyway to turn off features like the background art or something to speed them up? Full length players guides from Wizards turn pages instantly and the ones from here have a noticeable lag.