Dear Wizards of the Coast blog post...

[Lalato]

Yep, I have the 2e World Builder's Guidebook that I bought as a PDF. The quality is pretty bad, and I would never waste money on printing it. Pages are crooked and it's obviously a scan. I still got use out of it, but higher quality would have been nicer.

 

[fjw70]

TBH, I'm not exactly sure how much of the older stuff got scanned, but, considering the metric buttload of material for 2e, I doubt it was even close to most of it. Not if the scans had any quality.

It wasn't everything, but it was the vast majority of stuff. The Conan adventures from 1e were not on there and neither were the BX books, but I would estimate at least 95% of the stuff was available as PDFs.

 

[Nellisir]

Yep, I have the 2e World Builder's Guidebook that I bought as a PDF. The quality is pretty bad, and I would never waste money on printing it. Pages are crooked and it's obviously a scan. I still got use out of it, but higher quality would have been nicer.

I'm a grad student, and I get a fair number of pdfs as reading homework. I print most of them, and I've found it takes less than 10 minutes to drop a pdf (or several) into Adobe and straighten them out and clean up the appearance (I'm using CS3, which is about 4-5 years old, and that's the only thing I use Acrobat for. Not an expert) so I'm not wasting paper and ink. Now, you still get a scan at the end. It's not a "new" document. But it's not a 40-hour job either, particuarly if it's already been scanned and you're just putting a polish on it.

 

[Lalato]

Nellisir, that's all fine and good, but I'm not spending any time (whether it's 5 minutes or 5 hours) fixing a PDF that I paid money for. I paid money so that I wouldn't have to fix the PDF.

 

[Fifth Element]

Nellisir, that's all fine and good, but I'm not spending any time (whether it's 5 minutes or 5 hours) fixing a PDF that I paid money for. I paid money so that I wouldn't have to fix the PDF.

Might he have been saying that it wouldn't take much effort for WotC to clean up the existing scans?

 

[Lalato]

Might he have been saying that it wouldn't take much effort for WotC to clean up the existing scans?

Possibly, but if that was implied, it went way over my head.

 

[Rogue Agent]

Right, I thought there was a lot of older stuff, but Hussar says: , which implies not a lot of older material.

Hussar has his facts wrong. He usually does. You'll get used to it.


Comments like this one add nothing to the discussion and are plain out rude. Please keep it civil.

Lwaxy

 

[Hussar]

I do stand corrected.

Now, how much of those scans were OCR'd, indexed and done properly and not just some raw scan?

/edit to add

I was curious, because I really didn't remember a lot of earlier books included in the scans. So, I sauntered over to the less polite side of the Internet and looked at what is available on Torrent.

And, lo and behold, even things like the Complete Ninja (which is hardly an obscure book) is an amateur scan.

There were THOUSANDS of titles for 2e. There are almost as many titles for 2e as there are for 3e including OGL material. It's a close race. I'd be very surprised if a majority of those titles were scanned. Never mind the hundreds of 2e Boxed sets. And, yup, it's a couple of HUNDRED boxed sets.

I believe it's [MENTION=60075]Windjammer[/MENTION] who has compiled the lists of publications. It's FREAKING huge.

 

[IanB]

I have a ton of the old ESD pdfs so I can talk about them some.

They're... semi-OCRed. I can cut and paste some text in some of them but it frequently skips lines/words/etc. when I try to select sections. They do also have section bookmarks... mostly. These are very uneven in granularity/usefulness from PDF to PDF. Some lack them entirely.

The worst thing though, is maps, whether on the inside covers or poster-sized stuff. The poster sized stuff is all cut up page by page so you couldn't do a large format print even if you wanted, stuff wouldn't line up even if you tried to tape it all together because some pages are scanned crookedly and edges are missing, etc., etc.

For the most part, they're effectively useless for printing; even the 'good' ones look pretty bad.

A vaguely-passable quality product would mean redoing the scanning process entirely from scratch, there's no question about that. A good quality product would mean redoing the type and layout entirely using modern publishing tools.

Were I WotC I would feel pretty iffy about putting out anything as a branded product that wasn't at the "good" quality level I mention above, like they're doing with the 3 1e rulebooks.

EDIT: And yes there are several products missing, the most important of which is probably City of Greyhawk (he said with no bias at all...) Orcs of Thar was also unavailable, which I always chalked up to it being probably the most racist product TSR ever put out.

 

[Dire Bare]

I do stand corrected.

Now, how much of those scans were OCR'd, indexed and done properly and not just some raw scan?

/edit to add

I was curious, because I really didn't remember a lot of earlier books included in the scans. So, I sauntered over to the less polite side of the Internet and looked at what is available on Torrent.

And, lo and behold, even things like the Complete Ninja (which is hardly an obscure book) is an amateur scan.

There were THOUSANDS of titles for 2e. There are almost as many titles for 2e as there are for 3e including OGL material. It's a close race. I'd be very surprised if a majority of those titles were scanned. Never mind the hundreds of 2e Boxed sets. And, yup, it's a couple of HUNDRED boxed sets.

I believe it's [MENTION=60075]Windjammer[/MENTION] who has compiled the lists of publications. It's FREAKING huge.

I'm pretty sure that most of the back catalog was scanned in, and only a relative handful were missed . . . . but I'd have to go research that, and I'm waaaaay too lazy.

But, yeah, for the most part, the quality was crap. WotC began scanning the physical books in house, not with equipment any better than your average home PC scanner and accompanying software, and it certainly was never made a priority for better equipment, software, or serious manpower. After a time, WotC outsourced it to a former employee who was running his own d20 business (can't remember the guys name or the company name) and the quality dropped even further. I don't really blame the guy WotC outsourced it too, he did the best he could with the resources given. Remember this was actually BEFORE the sale of game PDFs became "standard", WotC was ahead of the curve. And the value of taking the time to do it right wasn't the priority, it was being done simply for fan service and received very little resources.

The outsourced guy even asked the fans to contribute hard copies of back catalog items WotC didn't give him, I know because I contributed. The outsourced guy and the fans involved knew what kind of quality we were getting into, but felt a crappy quality digital record was better than none. Kinda odd, considering the recent announcement that WotC just had a rather complete (sounding) archive shipped from Wisconsin to Washington.

I have a ton of the old ESD pdfs so I can talk about them some.

They're... semi-OCRed. I can cut and paste some text in some of them but it frequently skips lines/words/etc. when I try to select sections. They do also have section bookmarks... mostly. These are very uneven in granularity/usefulness from PDF to PDF. Some lack them entirely.

The worst thing though, is maps, whether on the inside covers or poster-sized stuff. The poster sized stuff is all cut up page by page so you couldn't do a large format print even if you wanted, stuff wouldn't line up even if you tried to tape it all together because some pages are scanned crookedly and edges are missing, etc., etc.

For the most part, they're effectively useless for printing; even the 'good' ones look pretty bad.

A vaguely-passable quality product would mean redoing the scanning process entirely from scratch, there's no question about that. A good quality product would mean redoing the type and layout entirely using modern publishing tools.

Were I WotC I would feel pretty iffy about putting out anything as a branded product that wasn't at the "good" quality level I mention above, like they're doing with the 3 1e rulebooks.

EDIT: And yes there are several products missing, the most important of which is probably City of Greyhawk (he said with no bias at all...) Orcs of Thar was also unavailable, which I always chalked up to it being probably the most racist product TSR ever put out.

Yup. If WotC took the existing pre-3E scans to sell now, the would get reamed for pushing a poor quality product, they are most definitely the company that cannot win to a certain segment of their customer base, of D&D fans.

My hope is that WotC is taking the time now to do it right. Good quality reproductions or scans made available digitally, either individually or as part of a DDI subscription deal, or perhaps even both. I doubt the format will be PDF, but we'll see . . . . well, hopefully we'll see, at some point, that is.