Making PDFs

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Nvision
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Making PDFs

Post by Nvision » Fri Apr 12, 2013 3:00 pm

I've got a decent scenario that I've playtested and refined, and think others might like. I've got some cool maps and accompanying illustrations, as well. What I don't have is a good method of getting it out to the public at large. I can technically make PDFs using Photoshop, which I work with on a daily basis, but for some reason they are either bloated in size, or an acceptable size with a serious loss of visual fidelity. Also, Photoshop sucks brain cylinders when it comes to handling large batches of text.

Does anyone out there know a good, hopefully free, program for laying out PDFs?

Dr. Gerard
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Re: Making PDFs

Post by Dr. Gerard » Fri Apr 12, 2013 3:47 pm

Try Scribus!
Keeper of the Cthulhu Dark "Secret Everest Expedition" PbP scenario
Rip Wheeler in the Call of Cthulhu "No Man's Land" scenario
Plays for Keepers

Nvision
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Re: Making PDFs

Post by Nvision » Fri Apr 12, 2013 5:25 pm

This looks like it will do nicely! Many thanks! :bow:

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fox01313
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Re: Making PDFs

Post by fox01313 » Fri Oct 18, 2013 12:17 pm

Another set of tips for those making pdfs (as I'm constantly doing this with work in graphic design), hope these help & you'll still want a program like the one listed above to assemble the pdfs in order.

+scan the pages in as black & white but be sure to go with 300 dpi (or scan at 450-600 if colour)
+if the scanner isn't clean there might be some dust spots or whatnot on the page which if you're using photoshop, clone stamp with a hard edge will usually fix these if they're in the open & easy to fix
+once the page looks spot free or just happy with it, make sure it get's changed to grayscale (or cymk for colour pages)
+go into the Image > Adjustment > Auto level
+lastly set the crop tool (save these settings btw) to 8.5"x11"* with a dpi of 150
+crop the page to these settings & save it as a pdf
+happy printing at this point

Any questions feel free to ask & this should make the pdf pages looking nice & fitting nice on a printed page. Most printed stuff you see tends to be 150-300 dpi so as long as the stuff you crop is scanned in at a high dpi (I usually double the dpi number for the scans, so scan at 600 dpi for color images cropped to 300 dpi) then resized to 150/300, print out a test page on one page & go from there to print more if it looks good or go back to rescan/resize at the higher dpi. Also be sure to send it off to a good printer unless people are looking at it on a screen to print it out where they're at, a great pdf still looks like mud if the printer isn't that great. Save yourself the headache & just go with 1-3 good representative/complex pages to start so if it doesn't work you're not stuck waiting on a lot of paper to print.

*unless you're working with a special paper size like tabloid size
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Riq
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Re: Making PDFs

Post by Riq » Fri Oct 25, 2013 2:55 pm

The quick and dirty way I create PDFs is in MS Word. Layout the text etc as you see fit... Then insert images wherever you need, cropping and scaling down to fit the page size you've chosen. Then save the document as a PDF. There shouldn't be too much loss of fidelity etc, and is good fir combining large amounts of text with big graphics.

Nvision
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Re: Making PDFs

Post by Nvision » Mon Nov 11, 2013 6:22 pm

I've got another question for you folks regarding layout... When reading a scenario, do you prefer having statistics for characters in-line with text associated with them, collected at the end of the scenario, or both? What about handouts? I've finally finished writing out an adventure I've had good responses to (about 11,000 words, with pre-gens included), and I'm in the process of laying it out and making it look nice.

trevlix
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Re: Making PDFs

Post by trevlix » Tue Nov 12, 2013 1:31 pm

My preference is to have full stats at the end of the scenario in stat blocks, but if something is relevant to the current description I don't mind it being included somehow so I don't have to flip back and forth. As for handouts, I'm good either way, as long as it doesn't interrupt the flow of the scenario.
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