[projectaon] Re: PDF Comment Period
- From: "David Davis" <feline1@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <projectaon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 1 Jul 2010 20:46:03 +0100
Let's have a comment period on the PDF format (not
necessarily the text of the book itself since we're trying to evaluate
the presentation more than the content) that ends this Sunday, July 4.
Please take a look in the meantime.
--
Jon
OK you asked for it ;)
I haven't been following the discussion leading to the creation of this PDF
too closely,
so forgive me if I raise anything that was already discussed.....
I'm viewing the PDF in Adobe Acrobat Professional 8.2.2 on Windows XP SP3.
I'm comparing it with my Sparrow Books 1st edition 2nd printing paperback
copy of Flight From the Dark
Generally, the PDF page layout looks very good, and I could certainly enjoy
using this PDF in it's current state.
I'd give it 9 marks out 10, perhaps? ;) Maybe 8½ ;)
Here are some nitpicks:
- in the paperback, for the player choices for each section, only the
section number is in bold,
whereas in this PDF, the whole phrase "turn to XX" is bold. I think I prefer
just the number being bold
(although I can appreciate the whole phrase being a clickable hyperlink).
This is a minor issue.
- In the paperpack, the numbered section numbers are the same point size as
the body text
(simply bold): in this PDF they are a good few point sizes bigger: they look
a bit too big to me. Again, a minor aesthetic issue.
- The illustrations look fairly good and seem fairly free of compression
artefacts, however
their DPI resolution looks a little low to... any zooming in at all and they
are revealed as very jaggy.
Is this a limitation of the original scanning resolution? Or has the PDF
creation downsampled them
to a lower DPI? (the default settings in Adobe Distiller do this unless you
go and stop them! Bad bad bad!
I do not know how this Linux workflow behaves, however) Either way, can they
be made a little higher?
Look for example at the tree house above section 14: on my paperback, I can
see individual leaves
and a little pattern on the clothes hanging out: the DPI is too low to show
this properly in the PDF.
I would consider this more of an important issue, although if the only fix
would be to re-scan all the original
artwork, then I wouldn't suggest not releasing the PDF as is on account of
it.
-No colour front cover? Do we not have the rights for this? (it is by Gary
Chalk, so surely we do?)
It seems a shame to omit it, its very iconic and atmospheric.
-The Action Chart is at the back of the PDF, but at the front of the
paperback. Not sure if this
really matters, although not sure why it was changed either :)
- The colour reproduction of the Map of the Lastlands is good, although
again the DPI is rather low,
making the text much less crisp than in my paperback.
On a technical note: it would be better to change the page size here, and
have the map display as
a single PDF page (twice the width of all the rest of the pages: ditto for
the action chart, actually).
It should be fairly trivial to do this in LaTex? PDF certainly supports
multiple page sizes in one document.
Otherwise, unless I have my Acrobat viewer set to "View > Page Display > Two
Up", I only see half the map
at a time, which looks very strange.
The PDF file format version is 1.4 (which requires Acrobat 5.x and above to
view).
As Acrobat is now up to version 9, it could well do no harm to produce a PDF
of a higher version of the PDF specification,
as these support more efficient compression (amongst other things) which
could usefully reduce the file size further.
I notice in the metadata that the PDF was generated using
"This is pdfTeX using libpoppler, Version 3.1415926-1.40.9-2.2 (Web2C 7.5.7)
kpathsea version 3.5.7"
There is a 1.40.10 of the pdfTex available online, although I don't know if
this offers any significant fixes as it's
only a single minor point version more.
My single biggest concern is about the Souvenir font.
It is NOT displaying well in my Adobe Acrobat: most of the letter stems are
too thin and spindly,
making it hard to read and the glyphs of uneven thickness.
I did post about this before: in the PDF metadata, Acrobat does not list
Souvenir as being present:
instead it lists a series of fonts labelled "F27", "F28", "F37"..., given as
"Type: Type 3, Encoding: Custom".
This suggests to me that the pdfTex library has converted the PostScript
Souvenir font to a
PostScript Type3 font, and embedded it that way.
Type 3 fonts do NOT support hinting
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostScript_fonts#Type_3
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Font_hinting
Hinting is VITAL for stopping fonts looking awful on screen. This is almost
certainly why Souvenir is not
looking as nice as it should do in that PDF.
Googling 'PDF generation from Latex "font hinting" support' seems to give a
fair few hits but I haven't had time to read them now...
If you were doing this on Windows I would be full of suggestions as to how
to set your Distiller job options,
but my hands a bit tired here since you are on linux.
I think either you need to get a better version of the Souvenir font, or get
a better PDF creation library (that will encode
the Souvenir so that Hinting information is retained - which probably means
PostScript Type1, or TrueType (or and OpenType wrapper round either)).
Hope that all doesn't sound too picky, because there's clearly a lot of
splendid work already gone into this
and it is in large part a very well laid-out recreation of the original
paperback!
cheers
David
--------------------------------------------------
From: "Jonathan Blake" <blake.jon@xxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, July 01, 2010 7:23 PM
To: "Project Aon List" <projectaon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [projectaon] PDF Comment Period
I think Ingo's PDF is ready to publish (and I'm eager to be back to
providing PDFs!) but I would like to allow any last minute comments
before we proceed. Let's have a comment period on the PDF format (not
necessarily the text of the book itself since we're trying to evaluate
the presentation more than the content) that ends this Sunday, July 4.
Please take a look in the meantime.
http://www.projectaon.org/staff/ingo/01fftd.pdf
--
Jon
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