As a DM I need to be able to share online some of the awesome information you have in the backmatter of each AP. IN Adobe that's called page extraction - in the security settings you guys have it turned off. Please give me a pass key for these PDFs or allow full accessibility in the future. Thanks!
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Also, while I'm not a Paizo employee, I'd garner that they are not going to give out the pass key for the PDFs as well as not securing them. This is their measure against stealing, and I would believe it works fairly well. If you need to give people the information that you can save the pages themselves as jpegs and send along, or simply copy-paste the text. While they won't get the tables or pictures, they at least get the information.
As Robert said Acrobat 8.0 is actually better than 9.0 for many user functions. I'd suggest finding an install for it and using that.
Chief Technical Officer
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Are you using Adobe Reader 8 or Adobe Reader 9? Try using 8 if you are not already. I believe the extraction issue is a problem with Reader 9.
Close... *image* extraction is a problem with Reader 9, though it works in Reader 8.
As for *page* extraction, that is explicitly turned off. Sadly, the security controls provided for PDFs are very coarse, and the same setting that would allow page extraction would also make it far too easy to remove our watermarks.
Thanks Vic - we have a web site for our campaign and I need to find a way to give them some of the cool player material that comes with the AP, but simply taking a snapshot is a huge file and it would simply be easier to save out a page range form the PDFs and then email or upload through a YouSendIt.
Along those lines -would you guys consider breaking out all nonspoiler player material for each AP book in a separate way in our Downloads? LOL - probably too much work.
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You can always copy the text out of the PDF and take screen grabs of the images. I use Foxit Reader and it allows to both select and copy the text and make screenshots of the images.
That is what I usually do, just copy and past the text.
When I ran a Game I used to copy and paste the relevant text and art into a journal for the players after the game so they can remember what happened. worked like a charm, though it may require some formatting of the text in the word document to get it the way you like it.
I totally agree, making players' handouts with critical bits is way too difficult. I did it recently for Second Darkness and it was super painful. You realize the watermarks get removed anyway, it only takes one guy to do that and torrent it. Please consider making it more useful for the rest of us...
I note the recent GM screen came with separate pages as one of the two download options. Would it be possible to simply do this with all the books, so there are watermarked copies of all the pages individually available? That would solve the extraction problem with handouts, and the load issues with a number of older computers as well.
Close... *image* extraction is a problem with Reader 9, though it works in Reader 8.
And I can't even begin to imagine why they did it. It's not as if you cannot extract images in Adobe 9 - you just have to extract everything.
Removing a useful option is very weird.
I note the recent GM screen came with separate pages as one of the two download options. Would it be possible to simply do this with all the books, so there are watermarked copies of all the pages individually available? That would solve the extraction problem with handouts, and the load issues with a number of older computers as well.
That would probably be a nightmare for whoever has to put the stuff together (or not). Books already come in single file and one-file-per-chapter versions. I don't know whether there are tools or automation options for "each page as its own file" operations.
you could install something like this printer driver which lets you 'print' to a PDF file. Instead of printing it creates a file.
you could install something like this printer driver which lets you 'print' to a PDF file. Instead of printing it creates a file.
The security settings on the Paizo PDFs disallow this function.
Errr.. Works for me. I just "printed" page 2 (the map of Westcrown) from the latest AP.
-- david
Papa.DRB
you could install something like this printer driver which lets you 'print' to a PDF file. Instead of printing it creates a file.The security settings on the Paizo PDFs disallow this function.
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Really depends on the PDF editing software you're using. The most common, Adobe READER, is the most limited because it's not editing software, it's viewing software.
I got Adobe Acrobat a few years because with a student discount and I can say that even with the full blown suite of tools, without the password what you can and can't do between the different versions differ.
There are ways around it.. but well, I won't get into that discussion nor will I answer questions about it. Two things I have done is combine the 6 adventures per AP into a single PDF (minus the other stuff) and made one super PDF with all the bestiarys. Though to be honest, the adventure compendiums are starting to become more trouble then they're worth, but the 1 stop ap bestiary is very nice. One of these days I'll figure out of to strip the background image out of the pages to make it look alittle more uniform. :)
Though to be fair, I don't play with a laptop, I play with a binder and a book and if I can get away with it, I PRINT out the pages I need if I only need 3-4 pages from a single book (hence the binder.)
That said, Paizo is very generous on what you can do with the content of the PDFs. My suggestions is to copy and paste the text into Microsoft word and then extract out the image of the monster you need.. then just insert the image into the page in word. It would probably come out nicer then the mismatch I have going now since it's much more editable.
Errr.. Works for me. I just "printed" page 2 (the map of Westcrown) from the latest AP.
-- david
Papa.DRByou could install something like this printer driver which lets you 'print' to a PDF file. Instead of printing it creates a file.The security settings on the Paizo PDFs disallow this function.
I have tried the same thing with CutePDF and it doesn't work for me...
you could install something like this printer driver which lets you 'print' to a PDF file. Instead of printing it creates a file.The security settings on the Paizo PDFs disallow this function.
I'm not sure how the security on the PDFs could prevent something happening with your print driver but I'll take your word for it since I don't run Windows and have other ways to do this... plan B requires a little tech saavy but works.
Go here and get ghostscript. The windows exe is at the bottom of the page.
Go here and follow the instructions for using ghostscript to extract a single page of a PDF to a PNG file. The example converts it to monochrome. On my computer the monochrome file was 212kb.
I've never tested this on windows but it should work.
gs -q -sDEVICE=png256 -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -dFirstPage=2 -dLastPage=2 -r90 -sOutputFile=test.png yourpdf.pdf
creates a 256color 90dpi version of page2 of yourpdf.pdf.
Use the results responsibly.
Hmmm.. I use Foxit 3.1. Maybe it is an Adobe thing?
-- david
Papa.DRB
I have tried the same thing with CutePDF and it doesn't work for me...
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I have tried the same thing with CutePDF and it doesn't work for me...Errr.. Works for me. I just "printed" page 2 (the map of Westcrown) from the latest AP.
-- david
Papa.DRByou could install something like this printer driver which lets you 'print' to a PDF file. Instead of printing it creates a file.The security settings on the Paizo PDFs disallow this function.
. I use the one that dell installs with student laptops sold through universities and the free version of acrobat reader. Works fine there when I get home from my girlfriend's I will try with my acer netbook and download the driver ogre linked ot
Just export the pages you want with Foxit PDFedit and you'll have a new pdf that you can do what you want to.
Please don't post the file anywhere, and only use for your own games.