What is Printer Friendly?

[Wizard]

Not sure what everyone else would prefer from the printer friendly PDFs. For me I would prefer that only the page background (grey hexes) be removed, leaving all the colour and images in.

For those pages with a black background it would be nice if those backgrounds could also be removed and the white text made black.

 

[TriOpticon]

I would prefer they put things in layers. Put everything on separate layers: background, illustrations, text. That way I can hide what I want before printing. Sometimes removing the text to get a clearer image of a background/illustration is nice for maps, etc.

 

[Nobby-W]

It depends on what type of printer. Inkjets can render colour very well on coated paper but the consumables are quite expensive.

For a B&W laser printer, the main problem is that the fuser assembly will squash the toner out slightly from the original image on the drum. This means that fine detail - halftones in particular - are prone to filling in. Halftones are very difficult to get to come out well on laser printers, which makes greyscale images like rendered 3D models render poorly in the medium. You also need to be careful with grey backgrounds, as light (5-10%) greys are also hard to get to come out nicely, often rendering too dark.

Fine greys are also subject to the toner flaking around the edges of the dots and may look a bit rough. Printer-friendly matt-art papers can help with this a bit, but (in my experience) the coating tends to actually be harder for the toner to stick to than ordinary uncoated photocopy paper so images on this type of paper are prone to degradation through wear.

Old-school pen-and-ink (or CG) line art renders well on B&W laser media, and I strongly suggest this type of artwork for games intended to be published in this medium. It works fine on PDFs, although it looks a bit odd on a web page as this style of artwork is almost never used on the web.

 

[AndrewW]

Printer-friendly matt-art papers can help with this a bit, but (in my experience) the coating tends to actually be harder for the toner to stick to than ordinary uncoated photocopy paper so images on this type of paper are prone to degradation through wear.

Note when using a laser printer, don't use coated papers intended for an inkjet printer as the coating can come off inside the printer due to the high heat.

 

[Tenacious-Techhunter]

Start with an outright ban on raster graphics. Use vector graphics exclusively. Vector graphics always scale; no matter what scale your players printing at, the image will always be perfect; that’s precisely what vector graphics does; scale mathematically, not digitally.

With raster graphics, you end up with disasters like the Mongoose Traveller 1 Mercenary Cruiser deckplan; it’s a complete and total abomination unfit for publishing.

I would recommend that Mongoose start with developing an in-house set of SVG half-dTon deckplan tiles for all the ships to be made from, internal and external; release the set with a Creative Commons Attribution license (you can use it for free, but you have to attribute the tile set to Mongoose and Traveller), or just plain open-source.

 

[AndrewW]

Start with an outright ban on raster graphics. Use vector graphics exclusively. Vector graphics always scale; no matter what scale your players printing at, the image will always be perfect; that’s precisely what vector graphics does; scale mathematically, not digitally.

Really depends on what. Vector graphics are really good for some stuff such as deck plans, but raster has it's place as well. Though vector graphics don't solve everything.

 

[Tenacious-Techhunter]

Andrew, ordinarily I would agree with you, but Mongoose hardly has a reliable track record when it comes to making the right decision of raster vs. vector. All artistic messages *can* be conveyed in vector, at any scale; the inverse is *not* true. Therefore, we should *start* with demanding *vector only*, and then once they get things right for a while, allow them to do raster again at about, say, Mongoose Traveller 3.

 

[Nobby-W]

Printer-friendly matt-art papers can help with this a bit, but (in my experience) the coating tends to actually be harder for the toner to stick to than ordinary uncoated photocopy paper so images on this type of paper are prone to degradation through wear.

Note when using a laser printer, don't use coated papers intended for an inkjet printer as the coating can come off inside the printer due to the high heat.

You can actually get laser-friendly matt art papers, which is what I was talking about. They're something different from coated ink-jet papers and somewhat useful for printing out originals that will subsequently get used for plate making. These days, however, you're more likely to be using a direct-to-plate system for short-run offset work.

 

[Nobby-W]

Andrew, ordinarily I would agree with you, but Mongoose hardly has a reliable track record when it comes to making the right decision of raster vs. vector. All artistic messages *can* be conveyed in vector, at any scale; the inverse is *not* true. Therefore, we should *start* with demanding *vector only*, and then once they get things right for a while, allow them to do raster again at about, say, Mongoose Traveller 3.

This is quite wrong. If you want to see why, try running a trace application on a complex pen-and ink image, and watch your imagesetter refuse to render the resulting image because you've got shapes in the image with more than 1,500 line segments. This limit was quite common on imagesetting equipment within living memory, particularly kit that used older versions of PostScript. Imagesetters aren't cheap, so this kit was often kept running for a very long time. In addition, even when you do spend 5 hours manually simplifying it down so it does render (and manually colour separating and trapping it if it uses spot colours), watch the client moan because the output looks visibly different to the original.

Raster graphics will render just fine if you scan them at a high enough resolution. For a pen-and-ink image this starts somewhere around 600 dpi on the final output for line-art, and twice the pitch of the halftone for continuous-tone images. Continuous tone images, however, will tend to render poorly on cheap processes (both offset and hagiographic) using uncoated paper. The resolution isn't the issue with Mongoose's artwork; the issue was a poor match of the type of artwork to the output medium and failing to pay attention to how the contrast curves on continuous-tone CG rendered images (and other artwork) would come out in print. Thus, a lot of the CG stuff comes out too dark and with poor contrast.

Getting continuous-tone images to come out right in print is not a trivial undertaking. In today's world of automatic-focus DSLR cameras we leave it up to A.I. to come up with a colour balance and adjust the output curves to the medium, but it's not so long ago that this process was quite fraught. Even with modern compositing software it's something that you ignore at your peril.