For me it looks a bit weird to have the headlines on the contents page centralised and the main text pushed to the left. Would prefer everything either centralised or everything pushed to the left.
I saw on the forum that @Nicodemus had gotten ahold of the background for the book pages, will this be used for the contents page as well to make the book coherent?
Would it be possible to add the rules text for Hellcannon, Magma Cannon (fire thrower), Hobgoblin Bolt Thrower (Bolt Thrower) etc. from the Main Rules? It would be neat at least for the Chaos Dwarf list since that’s our main focus. ^^
Adding rules for the Black Orc choices as well might be overkill, but it would be on my wish list!
The page with both Magma cannon and Hobgoblin Bolt Thrower on it seems to have space enough for potential extra rules text. Would it be possible to format that page so one can add ones own text after both entries? (Maybe formatted to be compatible with the rules text from the main book)
Damn that sucks. You’ve put so much work into this, there has to be a way to make it work!
So where can we go from here? Maybe a quick recap on what the goal ist and what the problems are first.
flip every other page so it’s like a real book (meaning where the framing graphics and the page numbers are)
insert full-page artwork after certain PDFs to have them always start on the right page
edit the page numbers to have one coherent numbering from 1 - 190
add a table of contents in the front
Is that about right? I assume (2) and (4) are no issues as it’s literally just inserting additional pages into a PDF. The problems arise from (1) and (3), because we don’t have the fonts and so as soon as we do anything with the texts, those have to be converted into graphics themselves which (a) bloats the filesize to >1GB and, more importantly, (b) in the end there are too many graphics for the printing software to handle. Is that about correct?
I guess since we don’t have the fonts to begin with it’s not possible to convert all text into some other font, right? Meaning we would be stuck with the graphics and there’s maybe no solution around it. And it’s immediately a problem as soon as we flip every other page because the text blocks have to be moved, right? Would it be possible to put some kind of textbox over the existing page numbers to get coherent numbering while leaving the pages unflipped? Would that be able to print? Probably, right? It still sucks, because (1) was the most work and would be the greatest accomplishment for the book, just trying to gauge what is possible and what not.
These should all be trivial to address. We already have the table of contents and we have all of the fonts. There’s more to the formatting of the text than just the fonts. I’ve been overlaying recreations of the text in Photoshop and it’s not exact… not to mention some of the serif shapes still don’t quite match what appears in the pdfs (capital “C” for example). It would be easy to cover the existing page numberings in the pdfs and move our page numbers to that corner.
All this being said, I’m surprised these pdfs are so large given that most of each page is just a background graphic with text on top. I just submitted a 96 page manuscript with 600 DPI renderings and it only came in a ~4.6MB. Certainly seems like the GW ones are optimized, which would be expected given how much bandwidth they could save by reducing the sizes. There’s an insane number of pdf shrinking and optimizing sites out there, not to mention pdf merging services. I guarantee they all save and scrape your info on those sites, so as long as it’s not sensitive information it’s fine to use them. Some “optimize” pdf file sizes by just downgrading all the graphics until they look like absolute shite. I have a couple of pdf optimizers on my PC that will shrink pdfs down and they seem to do some other things within the files that I don’t quite understand.
Nevertheless, I’m making my own pdf for just CDs with all of the ancillary entries of interest added-on (Hellcannon, Black Orcs, and a couple of other WoC entries that are of interest). Just using the extracted backgrounds from the GW pdfs and re-typing everything myself, including the CD entries so I can play around with formatting and squeeze a few extra things into some of the pages where there’s room.
So, from what I understand, the text it not text anymore but also a graphic?! can’t be selected as text as well anymore. I assume this is due to the root of the problems (i.e. it’s all graphic which (a) crashes the software and (b) makes the large file?!
Status update: Jasko, pyroven and hotstuff has done days and days of work to get the most amazing book you have ever seen. I cannot stretch this enough. They should get medals on the forum and be treated as goddamn royalty from now on.
I have after many hours of trying failed to order it cause somehow it was corrupted
Dreamgang worked on it some more and after a day it worked!
BUT, post brexist doxdirect dont send to sweden.
So Jasko is ordering it now and will thereafter send it to me.
Hopefully we will all have the book in our hands within 30 days.
(p.s. hopefully the treachorous 9 fingered chaos dwarf, aka “where gone gone, is he dead” aka “shedbuilder” aka “betrayer” wont get his book tho)
Is it too late to request a copy (some copies*) of this book? Where did the price end up? Myself and potentially a couple of gaming buddies would be sooo happy
