Dragon 339 SJ Article a Black Background / White Text Mess

[ahzad]

Some postives first, I like seeing a return to the 'dead' campaign world articles. They tickle my fancy especially the SJ ones, and Erik has done a great job w/ the magazines since taking the helm, good enough that I'll be renewing my subscriptions to them.

The bad w/ this SJ article is the black background and the white text. Just quit using it everytime you put that combo in the magazine it's terrible. The first two pages are fine, the next 3 pages are a mess, and the last page is fine. The 3 pages that are a mess the white text has turned gray and the text is kind of fuzzy, and it's happened in every article that you've used the black background/white text option. It gives you a headache to try and read, and you need to be under really good lighting to even begin to make out the messed up pages. Other than that I liked the article I just wish I could read it w/o a headache.

Terry
"Imagination is more important than knowledge". - A. Einstein
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[somnamancer]

I personally have no trouble with the white text on black background. I actually like it. In truth, I use the same "format" (for lack of a better word) with my IM screens, and any other computer screen/interface that will let me set it like that. It's more comfortable for me.

I guess my eyes just process it better in print because of that. Of course, it probably also means that I'll be guaranteed to have blindness issues in my old age...

[Stebehil]

I remedied that in the past by scanning the pages in high resolution, inverting the colours and printing them out. I got acceptable results, although it is not perfect.

[ahzad]

Ph0eNiX wrote:

I personally have no trouble with the white text on black background. I actually like it. In truth, I use the same "format" (for lack of a better word) with my IM screens, and any other computer screen/interface that will let me set it like that. It's more comfortable for me.

I wouldn't mind it b/c i use the same scheme for a lot of my IMs as well, but every time Dragon has done a good 80% of the article is a mess with the white text graying to gray and getting fuzzy. Which makes it almost unreadable except under the best of lighting conditions.

[Sean Halloran]

I agree with ahzad on this one. I'm not usually one to complain about color problems, but this particular article was also very difficult for me to read. For best comparison, look at pages 30 and 31 right next to each other in good lighting. You can see a big difference between them as page 30 is very blurry and then 31 becomes very bold and clear. I don't know what exactly causes this, but its not the first time I can recall it happening.

[Jester]

I actually prefer dark backgrounds with light text over light backgrounds with dark text. I've never had a problem reading or parsing a single Dragon article using a dark background since I started reading again at issue #274. I also use this same format for my computer screens and various desktop publishing software routinely without issues.

[Sean Glenn]

The problem is caused due to misregistration on press, something which we can't control, other than to avoid the use of reversed out text (which is the direction we're moving in). The real problem with misregistration is that not every copy of the magazine is affected the same. As the color plates drift on press, the press operator will correct it, and then a bunch of pages will print just fine, until the color plates drift out of alignment again. The press runs so fast however, that it's easy to get a few hundred pages printed that are out of alignment.

We've seen both extremes (perfect and horrible mess) in seperate issues here at the office, and we don't like it either, so we're going to avoid it as much as possible.