Duke's scans

[Toxxus]

Thanks, Duke!

 

I've been winging it from what I can barely remember from that article 30 years ago.

 

Is there a place where we can view what you've already completed?

[Duke Bushido]

I'm afraid not:  time constraints keep me from bothering to put up a website (one of those "tell us what you want and we'll give you template") type sites, because knowledge constraints keep me from doing myself.  That, and everything I'm doing for this project is on someone else's copyright. 

 

It's my plan to turn them over to the copyright holder (in this case, Jason Waters) when they are complete for him to disseminate or not in the manner he sees fit.  I have no foreknowledge, but I suspect they will end up in the store on this site, priced as reasonably as the other 4e stuff (which is incredibly cheap, if you haven't looked there yet). 

 

 

Dukes is 

[Duke Bushido]

I posted in the hot thread right now that my copy of 6e Basic today.

 

I posted over here to promise all of you that I will _not_ start reading it until I've got the scanning project back on track.  Currently, I'm folding everything into a proofing PDF for the proofreaders, and _hope_ to get that out to you both no later than mid-week.  It will not have the corrected / repaired cover yet, because... well, guess what I'm going to be working on while you guys are looking for glaring issues?

 

 

Thanks for putting up with all the delays, etc.

 

(for the record, the font for Western HERO (the only way to repair those charts with the alternating shade bands was to literally rebuild them from scratch.  Otherwise they just printed awful, and the ink from the stippling and the letters had lost a lot of clarity over the years, so....   Rebuild from scratch in a couple of cases.  Problem is now I'm tempted to rebuild _all_ of them etc, etc, etc, and it will never get done like that, so just _stop_ right here and move on) thirty five bucks!  For a twenty-odd-year-old font!   It's ridiculous!)

 

 

Back to work.  Well, no work tonight.  Have to take my daughter to her "girls night out."  

 

 

[Duke Bushido]

Posting from the phone today.  

 

I should have just gone ahead and compiled the PDF and sent it out for proofing, but _nooooo_

 

Had to make those last few swipes.... 

 

I have managed to luck up the computer.  Easy enough given that it has a series of issues already.  Hope to get it worked out soon, but it puts an indefinate link in the plan... 

 

I am sorry for yet another delay, but I _swear_ to you,we are _close_.   Very very close. 

[Doc Democracy]

On the bright side, you have no good reason not to indulge in the mechanics thread. ?

[Duke Bushido]

Ha! 

 

Actually, I'm currently hunting some things I promised Todd Bannister m(since I have some downtime) and then I've got to read Basic. 

 

Though I think KS undermined his own argument on the validity of his 1"= 2m to 1"= 1m rebuttal. 

 

Granted, that wasn't something that bothered me, but as he pointed out, scale is something we change on the fly as we are playing.  Given that, changing the rule was neither good nor bad so much as it was- well, I'll say "fruitless," because, while that's not the most accurate descriptor, I don't want the insulting connotations of "pointless."

 

Crap! 

 

Not over here!  And not till I've read basic,dadgum it! 

[Toxxus]

Don't forget to take a whack at Adventurer's Club #3.

 

The Character Rating System article will save my soul. 

[Duke Bushido]

Not forgotten, I promise.

 

Though I don't know if it will still hold water using the more modern editions.  I'm not entirely sure how much water it held then, to be honest. 

But yes: at the moment, it will be the third project in line (second after Western HERO), right after AC 1

 

[Scott Ruggels]

You inspire me to dig out my copies of Aaron Alstons Rogues Gallery and scan them. However I only own the rights to my material. Though the writings by others made it a standout of the ‘zine age.   

[Duke Bushido]

I will have to keep an eye out for old copies of that.  Thanks, Scott! 

 

Good(ish) news, folks! 

 

When I got up this morning, the computer had finally stopped pinwheeling and appears to be ready for business.  Only lost progress on (I think; at four in the morning, I'm not looking really hard) four of the scans.  Didn't lose what I had prior to these accursed "last little thing," fortunately, so this setback is not as bad as I had feared. 

 

Have a thing tonight, so I won't know more until tomorrow night at the earliest, but still: it's something! 

 

You folks have a good day. 

 

 

 

Duke

[Duke Bushido]

Good news!

 

Completed the proofing PDF tonight.  Thought I'd get it sent out to our wonderful pair of volunteers, but I can't seem to get Google Drive to recognize the Zipped file....  As soon as it's done uploading (and it's big: about 148 megs-- like i said: I wanted high resolution so that changes and tiny edits here and there would not turn the entire thing into a chunky-looking mess.  If you print one of these pages, it _will_ look like it was actually typeset and pressed.  That was my goal from the outset), I get a "file type not supported" message, and then it isn't there.  I mean it really isn't there: there is no change before or after to my available storage on Google Drive.  Weird.  I suspect it might be the encryption I chose (as I mentioned, I really am against piracy; I hope you all feel the same, but even if you don't, I trust you will at least understand).

 

Got to get to bed, though.  Tomorrow I'm going to try to upload it in a different format and with different encryption and see what happens from there.

 

I know it's been a long time, guys, but I swear it's here.  It's right here, right now.  I just have to figure out how to get it to you to help me proof, and then to Jason for actual distribution (though I don't know what reservations he may have about the file size, given the current events here the last week or so).

 

 

While I hope you will examine everything as I am quite certain that there are certain flaws I am so used to seeing that I flat don't know if I'm overlooking some of them as being "right," there is one thing I'd like to point out, and a couple others I'd like you to pay particular attention to:

 

1) The art is either grainy or it's black blobs.  Believe it or not, that is _not_ the scanner.  I know: it's so common on low-quality scans that it would be my first assumption, too.  Unfortunately, the art in this book was... well, it was pretty bad.  Mostly it was (as best I can tell) old over-exposed sepia tones (for photos) converted to black and white with 1990 technology, and then set to be printed on a tight budget.  Other art includes what I can only guess are photos of hundred-year-old lithographs rendered the same way.  All in all, the art was pretty bad in the original book (the only downside to the original book, really), and it was done in real ink.  That was what?  Thirty years ago?  Heavy black ink on paper for thirty years....   Yeah, the art was bad.  Comparing the final results (I have gone through so much paper, printing comparison sheets to hold next to the originals) demonstrates that all but one are indeed accurate to the book I sacrificed to this cause.  Are there better copies out there?  Maybe.  I can't say, because I can only afford to buy and throw away so many antique books, ya know?  At any rate, there is one that I think is supposed to be a pair of bobcats.  It looks more like the black panther tattoo my 80-something year old father had done on his forearm in the 60s: it's just a blur with a line under it, instead of a panther with his name under it.

 

In fact, the art is _so_ bad even in the source book, that I spent _many_ nights cruising the web just on the off-chance I could find better copies.  I know that 150 and the rare 300 dpi image look like total crap at 1200 dpi (the PDF I put together for proofing has been dropped to 600 PDF to reduce the file size, believe it or not, while retaining excellent print quality), but seriously: there is a chance it would have been better.  I came up empty on pretty much every piece of art in the book.  And I understand: there's nothing there to really want to immortalize.   However, the PDF should print a perfect recreation of the blobbish glory of the originals.

 

Okay, that was the thing of which I wanted you to be aware.  Things I would like you to pay particular attention to:

 

As I mentioned way up-thread: 

 

The guy who decided to replace boxed entries or underlines with stippled gray bars on charts in books was a sadistic criminal who hated his fellow man.  Not only does that crap age horribly, smearing in with the actual letters and other characters on a printed page, it has never scanned as anything less than utter crap.  Reprints of those scans create all kinds of weird patterns, most typically variants of herringbone, which was a whole different crime against humanity.

 

Some of this scanned so badly that it had to be rebuilt manually.  Yes: new layers created, text rebuilt whole cloth (after I came to the conclusion that copy-and-pasting individual letters and words was for way, _way_ smaller jobs than this) and then re-stippling manually (let's talk about a fun thing to do!  Ugh).  Fortunately, my brother clued me in to some ways to do the stippling less manually; I just wish he had taught me that sooner!

 

"Did I hear you say 'retyping text'?"

 

Yes, you did.  Some of it simply couldn't be cleaned up enough in any reasonable amount of time.  Now you can tell I mean that, given the amount of time I've spent on this project.     If you recall, at one time I thought I would be done by Thanksgiving.  I hope the time and effort proves results that justify it, but you will be better able to judge that than will I.     The retyping went better than I could have ever hoped, simply because the author (publisher?  Printer?) was beyond-kind, and provided the name of the font that was used for the body text of the book, which was a _tremendous_ (as in a time savings of _weeks_ or _months_ !) help.  unfortunately, I could not afford that font.  I found an identically-themed and identically-weighted font of very similar name, from the same creator.  The only differences appear to be:  The asterisk for this font is five-pointed; the original is six-pointed.  There is a difference-- a very, very slight difference-- is the weight of the serifs (and on two letters, an almost-unnoticeable difference in the shape of the serifs), and the curvature of one leg of the "V" and the "W" (lowercase in each instance).  However, this font was only thirty-five bucks, and it was so incredibly close.....

 

Yes: I am almost positive I could have not mentioned that and no one would notice ( and I am still confident that even forewarned, you won't accurately find every place I did it without accidentally naming some that I didn't), but I would rather have honest feedback:

 

Was it something you noticed as you were reading?  Does it jar you in any way?  Does it alter the reading experience?  In short, should I remove the re-typed text and attempt to further-salvage the original images from those places I deemed "too far gone?"  I ask, because if this really does feel like cheating or provides an inferior experience, I am willing to try.  I would like to mention, however, that this was done only in places where the text would have taken literal _weeks_ to salvage any other way.  Still, I would rather have some damaged text here and there than a reading experience that is less than "authentic" to reading the original book.

 

And of course: noise.  The largest part of this project was cleaning noise-- random spots, blurriness or "trash" on the page that proved distracting or drew attention to the fact that "this is a scan, and not an actual book."  If you find any areas that need to be improved, let me know.  If you would be kind to an old man who has been drying his eyes cracked on this screen for several months now, please list page#, column 1 or two, and paragraph # relevant to that column.  If the page features a break, then list the columns as "1 upper" or "2 lower." This will help me find and eradicate it more quickly.  Also remember that there is some noise that simply won't print, and is related to the fact that I had to take a momentary step into converting the scans to jpg ("We hates it!") to more easily compile the PDF you will be proofing.  If you have doubts about whether some noise will print, then by all means: print that page and find out.  Seriously.  I think I have roughly eight copies of this book at this point, all stacked here on my desk waiting for the next bonfire.

 

At any rate, I hope to have the upload issue corrected tomorrow.  I'm going to take a quick tour around the board and go to bed.

 

 

Night, All.

 

 

 

Duke

 

 

 

[Chris Goodwin]

I think Google has a hard limit of 10 MB per file; that might just be for email attachments, but maybe not.  Can I recommend Dropbox?

 

I hear you on the retyping thing.  I hand corrected my OCR'd scans of 3rd edition, Champions II and III.  I have, as far as I can tell, perfect text for those three books.  That was a lot of work.

[Duke Bushido]

I think I mentioned it before, but I bought a "brand new" bootleg of 2e a while back.

 

I can't tell you how much I wish I had the scans those guys were using!!  Made my homemade scans of 2e look like absolute _crap_!    To be fair, it was my very first scanning project, but _still_....

 

To give you an idea of how good those scans were, I dumped my original scans and took apart the bootleg, and scanned _that_!  

[Chris Goodwin]

My 3rd edition scan was absolute crap as well.  My wish was to do with 3rd what you've done with Western Hero, more or less, but I gave up on that a while ago.

[Duke Bushido]

I've never done3e, simply because I have both the boxed set book (books and map; box and dice disappeared years ago) and the glue-bound all-in-one, but no "spares."  That, and I don't open either of them often enough to worry about damaging them into fragility, so....

 

I've got a _great_ scan of Champions III (though it's not up to my current standards; it was my second-ever scanning project.

 

_unfortunately_, my cover for that was becoming ink-bare, and I tried to make "repairs."  I have much more talent in the area now than I did then-- which is to say that now I have _almost_ no talent for it.   While the recoloring came out great (the majority of the cover), the areas that had to actually be _redrawn_....  Well, they're passable, but clearly not in the same style _at all_, and in one spot are just _wrong_  (the gray section of "computer wall" in the background really was so worn that I wasn't even certain what it was supposed to look like until years later, when I stumbled across an original replacement).  I might redo it, if I live long enough, but there are so many completely unscanned things out there still....

 

 

 

 

[Duke Bushido]

Okay, if our volunteer proofreaders will kindly PM me the e-mail to which I can send the drive link, we can get this party started.  It _seems_ to have uploaded.

 

I have been thinking on a method of keeping a log, and this is what I've come up with:

 

 

Post it right here.  I will start with a random example.  When you have a short list, simply quote the post above you and edit your find into the quote in page / column order.

 

This will make it a lot easier for me to keep track of.  As changes are made, I will quote the list and edit indicators as to repairs as they are addressed.  This should keep us all on track with each other.  When the list gets really long, I may post a new edit that removes older listings for repaired items.  I would prefer _not_ to do this so as to prevent redundant entries, but honestly, we have to be able to read it, too.

 

So, just as an example:

 

 

P400 c3L p 21: cloud of noise in right margin; two weird blobs in middle of paragraph between text lines

 

 

The format is Page #, column # including upper or lower indicator if page is divided (leave blank if page is not divided), and paragraph number, coating from top of column.

 

In the example, it would be page 400, third column on the lower section of a divided page, twenty-first paragraph of that page.  I found what's listed: a cloud of noise in the right margin and two weird blobs of ink I missed while doing final clean up.

 

Then, perhaps tomorrow, I decide to read a little more, and I find two new problems.  I will quote the most current post and edit into the quote what I found, thusly:

 

[Duke Bushido]

6 minutes ago, Duke Bushido said:

P368 c2 p7: hollow areas of letters filled with noise; creates blurred letters

P384 c1 p6 : shadow "crease" across page just above paragraph

P400 c3L p21: cloud of noise in right margin; two weird blobs in middle of paragraph between text lines

P419 C2U p4: noise in margin

 

 

 

 

That make sense?

 

Let's do us all a favor and use the quote box for edit notes only.  Any conversation, questions, etc-- put them outside the box like this one, or make a new box thusly:

 

Quote

Duke said: 

if our volunteer proofreaders will kindly PM me the e-mail to which I can send the drive link, we can get this party started.

 

Tedious, perhaps, but you guys did sign up for this.

 

Not too late to change your minds.  

 

 

 

Thanks!

 

 

Duke

[Duke Bushido]

EDIT LIST:

 

P001, c1U, p1: Under first "E" and "S" in Western Hero splash banner: noise that shows on printing

P006, c1, p3: under last paragraph: Noise.  Immediately under paragraph, then a spatter of three or four further below and to the left.  Ghost margin on LH side

 

[Toxxus]

Adventurer's Club #3 - Character Rating System.  I will email you actual character points. 

[Duke Bushido]

On February 9, 2019 at 11:39 PM, Chris Goodwin said:

I hand corrected my OCR'd scans of 3rd edition, Champions II and III.  I have, as far as I can tell, perfect text for those three books.  That was a lot of work.

 

 

Dude!

 

Compile them into a PDF and see if Jason will replace the current offering in the store with a better version.  It doesn't hurt to ask, and I promise: we _all_ want the best version of anything that we can get.  Human nature and all that.     It's the whole reason I'm being so ticky with this.

 

 

[Chris Goodwin]

Before you get too excited, it really is just the text.  Done in a Google doc; I have sent them to Jason though. 

 

My other hope was to replicate the original 3rd edition's layout.  I'm even further from getting that done, though.

[Amorkca]

On 2/10/2019 at 7:24 PM, Duke Bushido said:

EDIT LIST:

 

P001, c1U, p1: Under first "E" and "S" in Western Hero splash banner: noise that shows on printing

P006, c1, p3: under last paragraph: Noise.  Immediately under paragraph, then a spatter of three or four further below and to the left.  Ghost margin on LH side

P008, c1,p3: just left of the word "characters": Noise, slightly left of the letter "c"

P009, c2, p1: Just above the P of Promoting; Noise

 

Is this how you want the edits to go??  

It may take longer than I expected as reading this is FUN!!

 

Also, if we find a page that is fine, should we indicate that?

[Amorkca]

   On 2/10/2019 at 7:24 PM,  Duke Bushido said: 

EDIT LIST:

P012, c1, p5: Noise below paragraph 5 above and to the left of --- 12 ----

P012, c2, p2: Noise above the word protect on the last line of the paragraph

P016, c2, bottom: Noise three patches, about an inch above the bottom of the page 2.5" below the picture, right margin inside

 

[Duke Bushido]

Yes, Sir;

 

You've got the feel for the edit list. 

 

I'd rather not list pages that are acceptable, simply to avoid confusion as I find time to make the corrections. 

 

 

And I'm glad your enjoying the book.  While it wasn't the biggest one, I freely admit that the quality of the book was in itself a distraction to my work.

 

 

Duke 

[Duke Bushido]

On February 10, 2019 at 9:24 PM, Duke Bushido said:

EDIT LIST:

 

P001, c1U, p1: Under first "E" and "S" in Western Hero splash banner: noise that shows on printing

P003, c2, pLast: under second column and under right side of footer bar: noise

P006, C1, p1: over first column, just left of center: Noise: three dots over "you're familiar" in upper margin

P006, c1, p3: under last paragraph: Noise.  Immediately under paragraph, then a spatter of three or four further below and to the left.  Ghost margin on LH side

P007, C1 (art page): noise up and down margin on left side of image.

P008, (art page): noise in an arc around picture  and both margins of both columns.  Additional noise over "8" in footer bar

P009, c1, pLast: noise under footer bar, mostly in center under page number

p010, c2, p3: Noise in right margin near "see"

p010, cBOTH, pLast: noise under each column

P010, c1, pLast: noise directly to left of "If the"

p010, C1, Banner: "Characters Based on Fiction and Legend": noise directly to right and just above banner

p010, C2, pLast: noise directly under "rubbing shoulders."

P011, c2, p1&2: noise between paragraphs: directly under "resemblance"

p011, c2, p5: noise directly to the right of "surveyors for a"

p011, c2, pLast: noise directly under last word on page

p012, c1, p1: Noise directly to the right of "and entertainment." (last words of paragraph)

P012, c1, p5: Noise below paragraph 5 above and to the left of --- 12 ----

P012, c2, p4: Noise directly left of "they generally."

P012, c2, p2: Noise above the word protect on the last line of the paragraph

P016, c2, bottom: Noise three patches, about an inch above the bottom of the page 2.5" below the picture, right margin inside

 

Okay, after playing with this some, I am no longer as thrilled as I was when I compiled the PDF: i clearly wasn't ready to call this "archival quality."

 

Also, going forward:

 

I am going to edit this list back into the very post of this thread.  In that way, simply quote that post and deleted anything that isn't the List.  That will give you access to a version of the list that you can modify with your own additions to the list.  Post that.  When I get a minute, I will update that list in the first post, so we can continue using that as the current list.

 

Holler if you have any questions.