How quality are the classic module PDFs?

[Sir Whiskers]

Neither SVGames nor RPGNow actually did the scans. They were done by WotC and a third party (I think I remember who but don't want to say in case I'm wrong). For the amount of money WotC put into the scanning, they come out as well as they could. It is unlikely that WotC will put up the money to rescan the bad ones any time soon unfortunately.

My bad, I didn't mean to imply otherwise. My point is that the earlier scans tend to be much better than the later ones. Who was responsible for this situation, I can't say. It's a pity I can't sort them by scan date before deciding which to get - as it is, after getting a few bad ones, I've mostly stopped ordering them altogether.

 

[diaglo]

do a google search i'm sure Jim Butler's explanation will come up somewhere.

 

[johnsemlak]

My bad, I didn't mean to imply otherwise. My point is that the earlier scans tend to be much better than the later ones. Who was responsible for this situation, I can't say. It's a pity I can't sort them by scan date before deciding which to get - as it is, after getting a few bad ones, I've mostly stopped ordering them altogether.

The better ones tend to be smaller files, so look at the file size.

 

[Staffan]

The good ones are the ones that were done in the first and second batches. The first was the Forgotten Realms stuff (though some of the later FR books weren't included in that, such as Faiths & Avatars IIRC), and the second was Dragonlance, Dark Sun, and Al-Qadim IIRC. Originally, the FR stuff was supposed to go on a CD-ROM but after the poor sales of the Dragon compilation that idea got axed, and they put them up for individual sales instead.

The first and second batch was very carefully done, with great care taken to make sure the OCR:ed text matched the one in the book (using the same fonts and so on). After a while, they decided that took too long, so they went with a faster technique, that put an image of the pages on top of the OCR:ed text. This doesn't look anywhere near as good.