[projectaon] Re: Do we need PDF editions of the books? If yes, why?

  • From: Ingo Kloecker <projectaon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <projectaon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Tue, 4 Nov 2014 23:44:11 +0100

[I reply to my own message, but I quote Jon's reply from the "Create A 
Font" thread because I want to keep the PDF discussion in this thread.]

On Monday 03 November 2014 14:56:53 Jonathan Blake wrote:
> This has been a helpful discussion for me. I agree, Ingo, that
> publishing a format designed for printing makes very little sense.
> I've got a reputation with my coworkers as the guy who never uses
> paper. That's not wholly true, but there's almost never a single piece
> of paper on my desk. What I'm saying is that someone printing out
> their own books seems like something we don't necessarily want to
> support.
> 
> On the other hand, PDF is nearly ubiquitous in a way that EPUB and
> other eBook formats are not, it would be a lot more convenient for
> non-savvy readers who wanted to download the books for offline reading
> than our current ZIP files, and it could showcase high-res versions
> of the illustrations (assuming we can effectively vectorize them).
> 
> I think the biggest barrier to implementation of PDF has been the
> original desire to produce print-ready files with hand-corrected
> pagination. If we relax that requirement and simply publish them the
> way LaTeX generates them, would that remove our biggest obstacle?

It would make publishing a bit easier, but the PDFs still need some 
love.


> What are the technical obstacles?

The main obstacle is setting everything up. But that needs to be done 
only once (unless an OS upgrade breaks something). Once the setup is 
done it's mostly a lot of little details that need to be done for every 
book, like replacing the images of the weapons and equipment with 
scalable images, rotating and positioning some of the large images 
(which originally have been two page images), optimizing the layout of 
the map, some page break optimization, illustration caption optimization 
(the hardcoded line breaks in the captions don't really work that good 
for the PDFs), etc.


BTW, if we want to put the focus of the PDFs on offline reading rather 
than printing then we could think about using a different layout for the 
numbered sections. I had the idea to put each numbered section on a 
different page. This would make the look and feel of the PDFs more like 
the multi-page HTML version. This layout has the advantage that reading 
one numbered section does not spoil other numbered sections that also 
happen to be on the same page. This layout would also avoid most 
problems with suboptimal page breaks in the numbered section part of the 
books because most numbered sections are too short to be affected by a 
page break. OTOH, this layout would give the PDFs a very different look 
and feel than the actual books. Anyway, that was just an idea for the 
PDFs that crossed my mind. I'm not really sure whether it's a useful 
idea.


Regards,
Ingo



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