PDF Quality (i.e. choices)

[Exmortis]

Afternoon,

First I want to say I absolutely love that you sell the PDFs for the books you publish with the Pathfinder system. As a lover of Hardcover books for just sitting back and reading, the PDFs are invaluable for game play and DM prep work. I own a PDF for every book I own.

How ever, the PDFs are really too high of quality to be of use in many in game situations. Even on my 8GB 6-core system they chug, not to mention my laptops or my ICONIA tablet. Acrobat isn't yet in the 20th century and multi-threaded, so performance is a serious concern.

I have a Acer ICONIA win7 tablet that actually works like a dream for game play, no books no sheets I run it all from Reader X and Office 2010. Soon ToS+ when its updated to APG.

The issue is, the PDFs are a struggle to use, really we need a low quality download option, your security does not allow optimization so a Black and white low quality version even with striped images would be really cool. I love the high quality ones, don't get me wrong, but for ease of use on netbooks, small laptops, and Tablets, we really need low quality versions, the smaller by chapter pieces do not help, its pruely the PDF it self must be optimized.

Coudl this a be future option? a little extr ato make the greatness of PDF books a little better.

Thanks,
Scott

[Pyrrhic Victory]

I used to feel the same way but my Ipad has solved that problem. The "pdf-notes" app which is free with adds or costs like $4 is awesome. When you open a pdf it takes a minute or two to "pre-load" but after that navigation through any pdf is like lightning. Literally you can turn pages as fast as you can or use the bar at the bottom to instantly move around the document. Pretty cool.

PS since I do lot of gaming with my group online, the high quality pdfs are a must for maps, etc.

[Chris Lambertz]

Unfortunately, what happens with allowing PDF optimization through Acrobat is that the file size tends to be bigger than it originally was. At least with our PDF files. This was actually covered in this thread.

[Evil Lincoln]

Weirdly, I experience the opposite problem. I wish I had access to the digital resources (i.e. art) in a much higher resolution. I know that paizo has some of these in higher res than is available in the PDF, but there's no way for me to buy them.

I mention this here because maybe there's a solution for both of us... but it seems impractical to allow users to choose a fidelity to download. That would probably require three different flavors of a single PDF release. Not exactly practical.