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I want to be able to to add my own dungeons, quests and instances for my fellow players to play through. I don't mind if this is divorced from the character experience, as a mission editor would be the best way to do this. I'd love this too. There are always people who are creative and love that stuff, and other people who'd appreciate playing it. City of Heroes has such a feature, and EQ2 will have it soon. (Though in both it's not available for free.)
Ah yes, Mr. Tramarius. I recall your directions prior. My weakness was two-fold when I read you prior post (above). (1) DOS is not my forte and (2) I don't generally use MS-Word. So, I was hoping that someone could point out a relatively easy drag'n'drop freeware program or the like. However, not to look a gift horse in the mouth - when next I have some time to set aside to out your recommendations, I shall. I think I'll start with Knights of the Lich Queen. I've been wanting to get that on .pdf. OpenOffice is pretty good for drag-n-drop and freeware. I did a test just now, opened a new text document, dragged an image onto the page, then put a page break, then another image, etc., exported PDF, and got exactly what I expected.
The scans are super light, but text is selectable. Thanks. I guess it's the same as what I have then, that is, not really readable. IIRC the selectable text in products from around that time was badly OCRed text, not at all proof-read, so searching or copying it didn't work all that well.
Can you tell me if the Planescape Campaign Setting Boxed Set is the same unreadable scans I've bought in the past? If it's a better version, in particular one with real text instead of scans, I might consider buying it again. (I don't roleplay these days, but I have a soft spot for Planescape because my favourite computer RPG is Planescape: Torment.)
Well, at least if you solve the rights problem, the technical issue of providing PDFs won't be a problem for these Dragon issues. And I guess I must be thankful for getting these CDs on time.
Oops, hadn't see that it's about Dungeon and not Dragon. Still, you could make Dragon issues available this way, which you don't do now.
Once we work out the rights, we then have to construct the PDF. First, we try to track down electronic layouts. If it's a Paizo issue, that process is easy, as we have all of our files. If it's a Wizards issue, it's more difficult, and if it's a TSR issue, it's very very difficult. If no electronic files are available, then we have to go the scan-and-OCR route, and it takes a lot of time and effort to get an acceptable quality level there. What's the problem with PDFs? I have the Dragon Magazine Archive, which includes PDFs of the first 250 issues of Dragon. They're fully OCRed and indexed, too (well, the sample I checked now to make sure I don't write nonsense). Seems to me like someone's done all the work already. Shouldn't be a problem to make issue 84 or whatever other issue available. (If you've never seen the CDs and can't get access to them -- though I'd be surprised if that's the case -- I can send you a copy.)
I'm guessing that the first PDFs you're speaking of are the more recent publications that were generated from electronic layouts, and the newer PDFs are the earlier publications that were created from document scans with Optical Character Recognition. Layout files simply don't exist for the older ones - many of them predate desktop publishing - so scanning with OCR is pretty much the only path to keeping these alive. (However, the quality of scanning and OCR can vary pretty significantly, so there's potentially room for improvement there). I can't say offhand. I'll have to check. Though I see no good reason why that'd be the case, since most if not all of them were AD&D 2nd Ed (perhaps a few were 1st Ed) and IIRC Planescape was one of the newer of those. Actually, come to think of it, IIRC the first ones did have obvious OCR errors. Which suggests to me that TSR initially put someone to OCR and proofread, and create an e-copy, and later there was a move to simple scans and raw OCR, to save costs -- perhaps as the volume of work increased.
I took a gamble and bought the Dragonlance Bestiary, and I'm happy with the way it looks. I've bought TSR ESDs when they first came out, but later, especially when they were moved out of TSR, they started looking like simple scans, with the text being an image instead of a PDF rendered font, which made some of them unreadable (like the Planescape boxed set). The lowered quality coupled with a price hike made me stop buying them. But the book I bought now had font text and looks pretty good (though I wish personalisation was more subtle).
Looks very cool. I'm looking forward to it.
I guess I'll have to see it, which probably amounts to ordering the DVD from Amazon.co.uk. After the recommendations here and from the Slush God (F&SF's John Joseph Adams), it seems like I have no choice. If you saw my DVD list post, you might have noticed that I have the first season of Spaced but haven't watched it yet. I guess it's time for that, too. (Although my DVD player plays loud white noise on the menu screen, which is very annoying.)
Ah, a good opportunity to list the TV series *I* have on DVD. Just to prove to myself that I buy too many DVDs that I don't watch. Babylon 5, up to Series 3 (currently watching series 3)
I think that's all. I'd have bought some Star Trek: TOS if it were cheaper. A lot of the stuff above I bought on sale or found a place that sold them cheap (case in point, Battlestar Galactica -- 20 British Pounds for the entire series seemed like a good price). Star Trek is never on sale or cheap. |
