David Mabe's page

I don't understand why so many people here are talking about quick draw with deadly dealer feat.
The feat states that : You can throw a card as though it were a dart

The description of dart states that it is "ammunition"

You are allowed to draw ammunition as a free action; which is why you don't need quick draw to fire a bow or crossbow.

There are a lot of PDFs that I'd have bought by now if they worked on tablets.

The same is true of the guys I game with too.

Send me a non-copy protected pdf of something that I've already bought and I'll send it back to you with step by step instructions complete with screen captures of how to make it tablet friendly using acrobat pro and/or adobe illustrator.

If you don't have either one of those then I can do it for you and you can just let me keep what I fix.

David Mabe wrote:

The rendering problem is caused by the vector graphics.

Any PDF renderer worth anything should be good at rendering vector graphics—they *have* to be good at it, since fonts work pretty much the same way. Now, I realize that really, really big vector graphics could be a problem for some, but we don't tend to use big vector graphics. Even our logos, which are among the most complex vector graphics we use, are pretty small.

The size of vector graphics isn't what's at issue, it's the CPU resources required to draw them - especially where gradients are involved.

I'm not advocating for only raster graphics but those graphics that take minutes to redraw on an android tablet or e-reader would do far less harm if it only had to display the dots in the right color as opposed to having to scale, plot and render on the fly.

I'm also not advocating eschewing vector graphics - that is what any competent graphic artist would use to start with but much in the same way that you export your logos to gifs or png files for the web site you can do something similar for tablet friendly pdfs.

It would be possible to output mobile versions of the pdfs without compromising the artwork per se.

The rendering problem is caused by the vector graphics.

Vector graphics use mathematical formulas to allow the plotting of nodes to be drawn to any output devices resolution without compromise whereas raster graphics can't be enlarged without losing something.

Prior to distributing PDF files they could rasterize EPS files to 300 dpi in photoshop and then generate optimized for web versions of those same PDFs from acrobat pro which would then downsample to whatever you configure it to.

Of course you would NOT want to do this where text was part of the graphic or it would become unreadable and unsearchable however a compromise graphic with the text layered over rastered "art" should still improve rendering times.

I would pay for the mobile versions in order to have easy access from my phone.

Hopefully they consider this.

I also hope that they consider hybrid offerings where IF you buy the dead tree version you would be eligable for a discount on the pdf version or if you buy a high res version of the PDF you could get a discount on the mobile version.

The mobile version request could become moot once tablets get fast enough, but they're taking so long to come out that Paizo is leaving money on the table not selling the work around now while the need exists.

They should be able to automate this too such that no duplication of effort would be imposed on their graphic artist, if they need help with that hopefully they e-mail me ;)