ESD Quality

[ninthcouncil]

With my ADSL connection imminent, I'm considering downloading some old AD&D stuff from SVGames. However, the free stuff I've taken from the WotC site has left me wondering about the quality of the scans. In "Vilhon Reach", for example, the body text is acceptable - but the interior maps are very poorly reproduced, to the extent that the on-map text is barely legible.

Those of you who have purchased ESD material, how have you found the quality? Is my caution justified, or is "Vilhon Reach" unusual?

 

[Henry]

I purchased "Forgotten Realms revised boxed set" "Aurora's Whole Realms Catalog," and "Forgotten Realms Hardcover for 2nd edition" - the quality of these three I can vouch for. All three are excellent works. In truth, you will find the quality vary somewhat between products, but you will also find that the later released PDF's are better than the early, free ones.

 

[johnsemlak]

ESD quality varies but has always been acceptable to me. Whether its acceptable depends on what you mean by that.

The only exception is some have pages missing, which eventully get corrected and you get to download it again for free. That happened to me with the 83 World of Greyhawk ESD

I've bought loads (IIRC, G123, D1-2, S1, X1, X2, B1-9, T1-4, 1e DMG, among others) aside from teh above instance above the quality has always been fine.

Again, if you're really dissatisfied--e.g. a page is missing or torn or just plain lllegible-- (Again, in my experience ESD quality has been fine) you might send svgames and email and ask for it to be corrected. It might take ages, but if they do it, you get it for free.

 

[JacktheRabbit]

I downloaded one item and regretted it. It was a DL composite and the large poster map came as 12 separate pages in the PDF. No effort was made the scan it in intelligently. It made the map totally useless.

 

[johnsemlak]

I downloaded one item and regretted it. It was a DL composite and the large poster map came as 12 separate pages in the PDF. No effort was made the scan it in intelligently. It made the map totally useless.

I do agree that large maps are a problem.

however, I'm just happy to get some of these products at all, let alone for $5 a shot. I think that needs to be taken into account here.

However, if your looking for first rate quality, ESDs probably won't be it.

 

[Fast Learner]

I've purchased some decent ESDs (none that were well-scanned and cleaned up, but at least decent) and some truly awful ESDs. Much of the time the person doing the scanning:

1. Made little or no effort to fix rotation problems, so everything is several degrees off in some direction,

2. Made no effort at all to find the correct white balance, resulting in pages that are gray in the background and that burn a ton of exstra ink/toner to print and look like garbage,

3. Made no effort to reduce the number of colors or grays to something that will make the ESD a reasonable file size without reducing the quality (and commonly black-and-white interior pages are scanned as color, dramatically increasing their sizes),

4. Made no effort to crop the scans reasonable, leaving scanned book-edges and such in place, again making them look terrible and wasting ink/toner, and

5. Made very little effort to use the tools Acrobat provides for easy on-screen reading (like linked text flows).

Frankly, I find it execusable. I don't know how much the people who scanned some of them were paid, but they ripped off whoever did the paying, in turn ripping me off.

That said, I will still probably purchase another ESD or two in the future because there's simply no other way to get the material (legally), but I'll still be pissed about it.

 

[The Sigil]

I have purchased nearly 200 of them, and here are some of my observations (in addition to those already made):

1.) ESDs that were released earlier are, in general, much higher quality - they made an effort to reproduce the original in top-notch quality, by putting in text plus graphics on each page. This makes the file size MUCH smaller. Usually the OCRs were checked for spelling, pagination, and so on so they come out well in terms of copy/paste picking up the actual text. That's products that were released early as ESDs, not products that were printed early in print.

2.) Later ESD's are basically an OCR rendition with a scan of each page slapped on top of it. This makes the file size jump from "reasonable" to "frickin' huge" - and at no increase in quality. There was no editing of the OCR so the text has a TON of errors and garbage characters. As mentioned, the scans include dog-ears, torn pages, and sometimes are not rotated correctly or have scans of the "edges" of multiple pages where the original was not lined up well for scanning. Nice for a collector who's going to read it off his screen or has the money to print a lot of them, I guess, but the quality is very poor compared to earlier ESDs.

I like them as a collector because they take up much less shelf space, but the newer ones are EXCEEDINGLY limited in utility. It's disappointing given that early ones were given love and TLC and later ones seem like they're just doing them to be done with them and don't give a darn about quality (or lack thereof).

Oh yeah - the fact that nothing new has been released in three months kind of upsets me (I want my Elves of Alfheim and Dwarves of Rockhome, dammit!)

--The Sigil

 

[cimerians]

Not good and not bad

I agree for the most part although I have stopped buying them as the last two I bought were really bad. B4 The Lost City and Curse of the Azure Bonds.

 

[Laslo Tremaine]

There are two kinds of ESD...

1) They had access to the original Quark or PageMaker files and could create a PDF from those. These are usually products are relatively recent and/or never made it to print. These files are usually of excellent quality.

2) For these, they did not have access to the original digital files. So they take a physical, paper copy, cut it into individual pages, and feed it through an automatic, sheet-fed scanner. They then take those scans and run them through the Acrobat OCR program and combine the pages back into a single .pdf file. These files are a scan (72dpi, 24bit RGB) with the OCR'ed text sitting behind the scanned image. They do virtually no touch-up and the files usually look like hell.

Click on the following URL to see a screen shot of a page for the Planescape boxed set.

http://www.criminy.net/images/planescapeesd.jpg

All that being said. I will avoid scanned ESDs if possible, but if I really want access to a product and can't find it on eBay for a reasonable price... Well, there's not much of an alternative...

 

[Hardhead]

There was no editing of the OCR so the text has a TON of errors and garbage characters.

I downloaded the Factol's Manifesto ESD, and I can say that the OCR is absolutely horrendous. The number of garbage characters and misspelled words are staggering. The word "Factol" is usually spelled, Facto1, for instance. And it being the Factol's Manifesto, the word is in there a lot.

Plus, the book was full color, and often had images behind the text. Generally, these are not OCR'd at all, leaving about 1/4 of the book completly without OCR. Of course, what is OCR'd is so nearly intelligable that it's barely useful.

Here's the bit on Factol Ambar, for instance:

4 i
In a place on the Outlands named Faydl to
some, Fayrie to others, and unknown to
most, an elf gave birth to a half-
human son. This woman,
Galina, found herself ostracized
by her kin - not for her choice
of father for her child, but for her
refusaltoshapeherdemeanorto H E A R +HE C A L L
the stiff formality customary
for those of the Quybier, her
clan. Galina loved to dance, @ @ @ RAWS
sing, laugh, and
play the harp. Not A SONG
fAC+OL AmBAR too unusual for an
elf, right? But then,
all Galina knew was
her own rigid family.
Fortunately for her and
her child, she also knew which plants
she could eat and how to weave shelter
from fallen pine boughs.
Her son, Ambar, never knew he was poor. He slept on
BECK@NS.
LE+ L l f f S H
- f m m "THE feRGE,"