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Anybody else having trouble with the first FFoD volume? It's loading up for me with a lot of what look like layout artifacts, I guess? And I can't select or search the text.
And this is in addition to the ongoing issue of file size creep -- while not as bad as Devastation Ark, it's still nearly 80mb for the 64-page-plus-cover volume, which is almost twice as much as any of the Alien Archives or Armory and over half the size of the core book PDF, last I checked. Some of us need to find space for these on tablets.
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Also, if you extract images, you get an explosion of more than 4,460 files. Every image has been carved into tiny slices. It's the most brutally unusable file for VTT purposes I've seen Paizo put out (aside from the unknown glitch that makes it impossible to efficiently extract images at all from PF2 products) since their earliest days of publication.
Between what appears to be layout artifacts and a noticeable number of typos in the PDF, I'm actually wondering if someone uploaded an in-progress version of the file by accident.
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We are working on it. I found out about this myself only yesterday, but I checked with folks above me in the chain and they already knew and were working on solutions. I know this is a hassle, but I really appreciate your patience. We got you fam.
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We are working on it. I found out about this myself only yesterday, but I checked with folks above me in the chain and they already knew and were working on solutions. I know this is a hassle, but I really appreciate your patience. We got you fam.
Thank you. I was kinda freaking out.
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We are working on it. I found out about this myself only yesterday, but I checked with folks above me in the chain and they already knew and were working on solutions. I know this is a hassle, but I really appreciate your patience. We got you fam.
Thanks, Jason!
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We are working on it. I found out about this myself only yesterday, but I checked with folks above me in the chain and they already knew and were working on solutions. I know this is a hassle, but I really appreciate your patience. We got you fam.
OMG! This is good to hear. My group wants to play it via VTT and... it is unusable on Roll20, as is.
@Jason How will it be announced? Email to all owners? DM? This thread?
Oh thank the gods, I thought it was me.
We are working on it. I found out about this myself only yesterday, but I checked with folks above me in the chain and they already knew and were working on solutions. I know this is a hassle, but I really appreciate your patience. We got you fam.OMG! This is good to hear. My group wants to play it via VTT and... it is unusable on Roll20, as is.
@Jason How will it be announced? Email to all owners? DM? This thread?
Someone will probably post in this thread again but every time they've updated a PDF that I bought from them I've gotten an email alerting to the update.
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@Jason How will it be announced? Email to all owners? DM? This thread?
I don’t know, but when the fix is in, I’ll tell y’all about it here, in addition to whatever official channels it goes out on.
Since #34 is being fixed, would it be possible to find out if the sizing issue of the other Starfinder APs will be fixed sometime in the future? A few months back, customer service said they will get someone to have a look, but so far I have heard nothing about a fix.
The problems seem to have started with #25. Previously the AP sizes were between 14 MB to 26 MB. Here is a list that summarizes the PDF sizes:
[NORMAL PDF SIZES]
#22 - 23 MB
#23 - 21 MB
#24 - 23 MB
[LARGE PDF SIZES]
#25 - 77 MB
#26 - 75 MB
#27 - 94 MB
#28 - 96 MB
#29 - 73 MB
#30 - 102 MB
#31 - 347 MB
#32 - 340 MB
#33 - 296 MB
#34 - 78 MB << Unusable
I guess I'll hold on until it's fixed before purchasing it, then.
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The problems seem to have started with #25.
You could add to this list the "double pages" on the rulebooks, that mess up reading the file on a phone. I usually remove those pages, but then lose the bookmarking... it's a pain.
I hope Pathfinder 2 pdfs don't have this problem as well.
I suppose physical books are the biggest sellers, but PDFs should make for a reasonable amount of the revenue...
Its funny because I thought there was a Paizo Blog not too long ago that said they were going to do exactly that, or something like that.
Only the map products at first: https://paizo.com/community/blog/v5748dyo6shcy?Changes-to-Digital-Map-Asset s
APs would be next.
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I'm very happy to report that these problems have been addressed. If you have already purchased Starfinder Adventure Path Fly Free or Die, volume 1: We're No Heroes, download an updated copy. The text is now searchable and selectable, and you will get a separate PDF with all the maps in high resolution.
We'll keep this format through the rest of Fly Free or Die.
Enjoy everyone! And thank you for your patience.
Sincerely,
Tondro
I'm grabbing it right now!
Just going to echo some advice regarding the CRB errata.
Be sure to hit the 'problems downloading this file?' button first to refresh the file you're downloading. No idea if that is required here, but it was for the CRB pdf errata.
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I'm very happy to report that these problems have been addressed. If you have already purchased Starfinder Adventure Path Fly Free or Die, volume 1: We're No Heroes, download an updated copy. The text is now searchable and selectable, and you will get a separate PDF with all the maps in high resolution.
We'll keep this format through the rest of Fly Free or Die.
Enjoy everyone! And thank you for your patience.
Sincerely,
Tondro
Thanks to the Starfinder team for a quick fix and awesome map bonus!
I'm very happy to report that these problems have been addressed. If you have already purchased Starfinder Adventure Path Fly Free or Die, volume 1: We're No Heroes, download an updated copy. The text is now searchable and selectable, and you will get a separate PDF with all the maps in high resolution.
Noticed that all the images are multi-part images. So you need to stitch them together before they are usable. This goes for the revised #34 as well as revised #31, #32 and #33.
Is this a deliberate change?
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If this is deliberate, it's devastating news, personally.
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I'm very happy to report that these problems have been addressed. If you have already purchased Starfinder Adventure Path Fly Free or Die, volume 1: We're No Heroes, download an updated copy. The text is now searchable and selectable, and you will get a separate PDF with all the maps in high resolution.
We'll keep this format through the rest of Fly Free or Die.
Enjoy everyone! And thank you for your patience.
Sincerely,
Tondro
are we going to get separate map files for prior APs... like, say THREEFOLD CONSPIRACY?
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I'm very happy to report that these problems have been addressed. If you have already purchased Starfinder Adventure Path Fly Free or Die, volume 1: We're No Heroes, download an updated copy. The text is now searchable and selectable, and you will get a separate PDF with all the maps in high resolution.Noticed that all the images are multi-part images. So you need to stitch them together before they are usable. This goes for the revised #34 as well as revised #31, #32 and #33.
Is this a deliberate change?
Yeah, it makes it hard to throw pictures up on Roll20.
Jason? Any word?
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I'll see what I can find out for y'all.
Thank you.
I dunno if this is a problem in anyone else's downloads, but for the third volume I'm only given the "one file per chapter" option.
I dunno if this is a problem in anyone else's downloads, but for the third volume I'm only given the "one file per chapter" option.
The full PDF is included in that download.
I dunno if this is a problem in anyone else's downloads, but for the third volume I'm only given the "one file per chapter" option.The full PDF is included in that download.
So it is. I just saw the multiple files and didn't look closer. Whoops.
Thanks for pointing that out.
PDF Candy Desktop can extract the maps from the Interactive Maps file just fine. As for the rest, well, those images don't really exist as "images," rather than slivers of such, so there's nothing for a PDF reader to work with there.
I check the map tags off and print the map page as a PDF, then extract it using GIMP as a 300 dpi image.
It looks alright.
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I'm very happy to report that these problems have been addressed. If you have already purchased Starfinder Adventure Path Fly Free or Die, volume 1: We're No Heroes, download an updated copy. The text is now searchable and selectable, and you will get a separate PDF with all the maps in high resolution.
We'll keep this format through the rest of Fly Free or Die.
Enjoy everyone! And thank you for your patience.
Sincerely,
Tondro
The problem is, this doesn't address the other underlying issues within the PDFs themselves.
You are doing something within these PDFs that you are not doing within Pathfinder Adventure Path to break up and slice apart all of the images within the PDF so that thay cannot be extracted and used in a VTT.
I have not seen this sort of backhand copy protection in a Paizo product since the days of the magazines and WotC.
To ask the Starfinder PDFs made at Paizo to NOT do something different, and instead do the same thing that is being done for Pathfinder Adventure Path should not be a problem. That should be solvable within a few minutes.
The reality is, I'm a full subscriber (and have been since the start of Starfinder) and I have ALWAYS played online. With Covid, all of your customer are -- or at the very least -- most of them.
This approach of carving apart the PDFs in attempt to scramble them makes this unusable for VTT play. There's a pandemic going on. That is NOT okay.
Please fix this and re-export your PDFs in Fly Free or Die using the same layer style as is used in PF Adv Path. That is not asking for too much nor is it an unreasonable expectation.
Even if you extract the image pieces and puzzle them together to form a full pictures, you still have the edge stationary decorations overlying them. Previously each image was its own layer. It's really sad that this has happened. I wonder why only the Starfinder APs are affected and none of the other Starfinder of Pathfinder products. Is there a different person creating these PDFs?
My theory is that each product line is built using its own InDesign template (assuming for sake of argument that this is the software they're using). Which makes sense; each product line generally has its own set page count, has similar formatting, etc. Then the contents of individual books are entered in and they go from there.
Each time Paizo starts a new AP, they tweak the formatting for those books (different background images, headers fonts, etc.). Again, makes sense.
I think the problem is that the Starfinder AP template slowly filled up with junk from one iteration to the next. I don't have my main PC handy, so I can't easily demonstrate this with specifics right now, but to offer an example of what I mean:
As of late (the last two years or so) I've been using a small program called PDF Candy to extract images from the PDFs (prior to that I used an venerable version of Adobe Acrobat). Select one or more files, click "Extract Images," tell it where to send 'em and boom, done. Easy to use, preserves transparency layers, works flawlessly*. But, when you take the one-click extract-everything route, you notice all the idiosyncrasies buried in the files. Paizo's "backmatter" pages are -- and have always been -- a massive car crash of miniscule files, tracing all the way back to the very first PDFs Paizo put out. Those pages' templates have just *never* been significantly modified (but who cares).
But, particularly starting with The Three-Fold Conspiracy, I started noticing more occurrences of "junk" images invisibly buried in the files. The maps and images from the covers (including the inside cover maps) are always duplicated for some reason. An illustration from one book was included, unseen, in the PDF for a later book. It was just "papered over," not removed.
I'm thinking that this kind of sloppiness is what eventually resulted in the ballooning file sizes, which then resulted in the disastrous current state of affairs.
At this rate I'm rapidly giving up hope. We're four months in - with the previous three months' worth of PDFs having been retroactively dragged into this mess -- and not only is the situation not improving, I feel like we're still at the stage of trying to explain that something is wrong to begin with.
* PDF Candy actually doesn't really work at all with any of the Pathfinder 2E books. But I reported that problem long ago and it's never going to be fixed, so I cancelled my subscription to the rulebooks and only keep the Pathfinder AP for subscription discounting reasons.)