[projectaon] Re: PDF Comment Period
- From: Ingo Kloecker <projectaon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: projectaon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 01 Jul 2010 22:51:37 +0200
Hi,
On Thursday 01 July 2010, David Davis wrote:
> > 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.
This could be changed easily.
> - 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.
Hmm. In the German editions the numbered section numbers are definitely
bigger than the body text. (They are even set in a sans-serif font while
the body text is set in a serif font.)
> - 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.
The illustrations used for the PDFs are identical to the once used for
the HTML version. Therefore their resolution is pretty low. I would
appreciate putting higher resolution illustrations into the PDF.
> -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 front covers are usually copyright by the publisher. The artwork
used for the cover is of course copyright by the illustrator. We would
have to create our own covers. The problem is that we probably do not
have the cover artwork without any text etc.
> -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 :)
In the HTML version (and in the XML all versions are created from) it's
part of the backmatter. To me it feels more logical to put it next to
the combat ratio table.
> - 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.
See above.
> 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?
Hmm. I have no idea. :-)
> 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.
True.
> 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.
Hmm. I can have a look.
> 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.
I use the version that came with my distribution.
> 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)).
Not sure what to do about this. I'm using the standard way for using a
PostScript font with LaTeX.
> 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!
Thanks for the feedback!
Regards,
Ingo
> --------------------------------------------------
> 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
> >
> > ~~~~~~
> > Manage your subscription at
> > //www.freelists.org/list/projectaon
>
> ~~~~~~
> Manage your subscription at //www.freelists.org/list/projectaon
~~~~~~
Manage your subscription at //www.freelists.org/list/projectaon
Other related posts:
