Quality, price, and the place for PDFs in the print industry

Mark said:
(You oughta give Anna a hand with her project. She needs the help, very much, and it serves the whole community in the long run. I'd bet a number of pubs might take you up on some of your pipedream extras if they see you involved at that sort of grassroots level. I might also be wrong, but it's worth a shot, I think.) :)
I do give anna a hand with her projects from time to time. I've even written a column for her periodical, at no pay. I also designed and built her website (see my sig) also for free. However I'm a part time college student, full time programmer and full time step father to a 6 year old. I'm surprised I find four hours to game on sundays let alone help out with anything right now. My writting is done only during semester breaks. Oh and on top of all that I have my first commercial piece of software coming out in July. I'm affraid that I havn't the time to help anna right now. OTOH, if publishers would like to see me involved at a grass roots level they could check out backara over on the mortality forums.
 

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Yes, Drawmack has been very helpful.

I was just in an irritated mood when I was reading the latest posts. (spring means more work outside than the winter. Ick. Which means less hours for working on products, etc.) I swear, I just can't win sometimes.

I really need a clone.

:D
 

Drawmack said:
Tomorrow I'll upload a free one to my web-site and post a link here. It's a 700+ page pdf on javascript with an extensive, hyperlinked, index and cross references. As far a pointing to resources the ones I know of are mailing lists that I highly doubt a non-programer would want to become a member of.
I want to see the PDF in its natural habitat. I am a programmer so I'm happy hearing about mailing lists for javascript. Lay it on me. Email me personally if you prefer. I do intend to join such mailing lists and ask others who post there whether there is this required level of cross linking to be considered professional.
Anyone, I repeat anyone, who is professionally producing a product cannot hide behind a lack of knowledge about the tools to create that product and sill maintain professionalism. It is impossible.
I haven't said anything about lack of knowledge. I said lack of time per unit payoff. Remeber I edit the postscript. When I'm really into it I can hand edit the postscript to do things. Whoever said they were incapable of making crosslinks? We said it takes too long to include them.
You're right and guess what, I've just made an excutive decision. I will purchase no more pdfs until this cross linking happens. Your industry made $600.00 off of me last year and will make nothing off of me until this becomes a standard.
*boggle*
I will continue my subscription to dire kobold though as their xenogenic publishing is really amazing. However that's about it.
*double boggle*

The gods of irony are going to get you. Someone will release a PDF with animations, forms and full sound support and it will lack necessary cross-links. What will you do? :)

Fellow PDF publishers: I apologize for driving this man off.
 

jmucchiello said:
I want to see the PDF in its natural habitat. I am a programmer so I'm happy hearing about mailing lists for javascript. Lay it on me. Email me personally if you prefer. I do intend to join such mailing lists and ask others who post there whether there is this required level of cross linking to be considered professional.
I will dig up some mailing lists from home tomorrow. Also I do not remember exactly where I got this pdf since I've had it a couple of years. Though I will also dig up some places where pdfs like this can be purchased.

I haven't said anything about lack of knowledge. I said lack of time per unit payoff. Remeber I edit the postscript. When I'm really into it I can hand edit the postscript to do things. Whoever said they were incapable of making crosslinks?

from an earlier post by jmucchiello
I'm going to speculate now, but I'll bet the "programming" ones are made by people with programming backgrounds who know their way arounf the PDF specification.
The insiuation is that the pdf publishers for role playing games do not know their way around the PDF specification, and you're probably right, but they don't have to they just need to know how to use the tools to interact with that specification.

The gods of irony are going to get you. Someone will release a PDF with animations, forms and full sound support and it will lack necessary cross-links. What will you do? :)
Go insane from an alarming amount of irony and begin killing d20 pdf publishers :)
 

I have a question for all the pdf publishers, both posting and lurking here, if there were a web-site where you could upload your pdf document along with a plain text list of words to index and then this site chugged along and created a linked index that it appended to the end of your pdf, then it would either email or ftp the file to you - would you be willing to pay $5.00 for each pdf you indexed using it and would you use it.

The main arguments that I'm seeing from the publishers are:
1) It takes too long
2) It's cost prohibitve

So this would mean that 1 extra sale would pay for the index and it would only take you as long as it takes you to create the list of words to index, which shouldn't be too hard. Heck it could even ignore words that are not used so you could start with a base list everytime. It would also sort the list so that you don't have too.

If enough publishers would use this then I'll program it.

I think it's a win/win/win situation

Publishers win - because they get an easy, cheap way to index their pdfs.

I win because if 20 pdfs get run through the system a month, and that's a surprisingly small portion of the gaming pdf market, then I make $100.00 a month.

Fans win because the get a linked index, that also includes page numbers for the print em out group.
 



Drawmack said:
I have a question for all the pdf publishers, both posting and lurking here, if there were a web-site where you could upload your pdf document along with a plain text list of words to index and then this site chugged along and created a linked index that it appended to the end of your pdf, then it would either email or ftp the file to you - would you be willing to pay $5.00 for each pdf you indexed using it and would you use it.
^$%$#@ #& ^ $&#& $^ #%# ^$^$ # %^^ #@**^!!!!!!!!!!

I was going to suggest this to you but I figured the tone would be taken in a "put up or shut up" way so I took it out of my last post.

My version would also scan for "page ##" and turn that into a link as well. You also have to allow phrases and multiple words that have the same index entry (for plurals mostly).
 

Drawmack said:
so we've got one publisher that's on board, any others?
Unfortunately, this is not the kind of thing I need. I can generate an index in Word no problem. All the page numbers are correct. It's just the PDF links that I find a hassle. But I also don't think a 60-70 page PDF needs an index. A good outline of bookmarks should be good enough (which I can also generate in Word). I would want something that takes the existing TOC and Index and makes the page numbers links to the headings/entries and something that takes a "see FOO on page 29" and turns it into a link directly to FOO on page 29.
 

jmucchiello said:
Unfortunately, this is not the kind of thing I need. I can generate an index in Word no problem. All the page numbers are correct. It's just the PDF links that I find a hassle. But I also don't think a 60-70 page PDF needs an index. A good outline of bookmarks should be good enough (which I can also generate in Word). I would want something that takes the existing TOC and Index and makes the page numbers links to the headings/entries and something that takes a "see FOO on page 29" and turns it into a link directly to FOO on page 29.

So how about a program that does all of those and lets the publisher choose which to turn on and off? And it will generate the links if you generate the index? If that program existed what would be you willing to pay per pdf to use it?
 

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