Printer-friendly PDFs

[Imajica]

Guys,

Love the books. I mean, artistically, they're gorgeous. I've just got the PDFs of the 2 Hawkmoon releases and they're just stunning. The level of detail in the page borders and background is fantastic.

But.

They suck for printing out! No offence but the Powers That Be will dispatch me to some dark corner of the Multiverse if I try and print one of these beasts out. Same with the Runequest PDFs I've seen!

Can you at least think about doing a print-friendly version without the page backgrounds and the borders - I know it won't look as good but several million gallons of black printer ink will be saved - and you've got to think of the carbon footprint for that stuff.

Maybe that's the angle - eco-friendly, printer-friendly PDFs! Save money and the planet! Just don't stop producing such great books.

 

[MongooseMatt]

Hi there,

Time is the main problem here - relatively few people want dressed down PDFs, and they would take a disproportionate amount of time to do. It is something we look at every now and again but, for now, I am afraid we cannot devote the time.

 

[Imajica]

Fair enough. If there isn't the demand, there isn't the incentive for you guys to devote your time to it (but the Savage Worlds guys do... Not that I'm suggesting you should match them..)

I shall just devote some Linux time to working out a way. pdftohtml should be a good starting point...

 

[nezeray]

I just wonder in general why the book margins have to be soooo artistic and gaudy. Something simple would suffice for me. Heck everything that I print for my self has a .5 or .25 margin so I can fit more on a page.

James / Nezeray

 

[Bostich]

If you have a full version of Acrobat you could try using the Crop tool to cut out all the borders, that's what I do with Signs&Portents to make it printer-friendly.

 

[Imajica]

Yep - tried that, but it leaves the backgrounds there, and they're still quite a drain. However, after some experimentation...

pdftohtml -c -i

strips out all the images - background and in-line - but preserves the formatting of the text.

Now if only I could get it to preserve the in-line art.

 

[AKAramis]

Hi there,

Time is the main problem here - relatively few people want dressed down PDFs, and they would take a disproportionate amount of time to do. It is something we look at every now and again but, for now, I am afraid we cannot devote the time.

judging from the nearly invariant nature of the backgrounds used, it could be as simple as making a copy of the source file, deleting the image on the master page, and making a quick trip through the thumbnails to remove the odd page out's BG image. so far, 5-15 minutes per publication. Then re-distill; another 5-30 minutes. Then reupload, another 5-15 minutes.

 

[BackdoorHero]

A little off this topic but are the PDFs of the latest books in colour or black & white only? I ask because the current release of RuneQuest books have black and white interiors where as the earlier ones were in colour ..... I miss the colour.

 

[BackdoorHero]

Rather than be lazy and wait for an answer I visited DriveThruRPG.com and looked at the current release of Mongoose books. The sample pages were in black and white only, no colour, so they mirror the current books.

Shame it would have been nice if the PDFs were in colour like the earlier books. Hint, hint. :wink: