Query on ESDs from SVgames
- Thread starter MerricB
- Start date
Azure Trance
First Post
IIRC from an older thread; the older ESDs were of much better quality then the newer ones. Don't know if it's changed yet though.
BiggusGeekus@Work
Community Supporter
They have a habit of breaking up big maps into standard sized paper chunks. This isn't necessarily good or bad, but it's nice to know before you buy a game with a big map insert.
Jeremy Ackerman-Yost
Explorer
I bought a half dozen Planescape products several months back, and I don't really know which were new and which were old, but all but one of them were completely unusable. Between blur and bad contrast, the vast majority of the text was unreadable.
I think I can safely say that they were a waste of money.
I think I can safely say that they were a waste of money.
I've bought several handfuls of the things, and they've all been readable. Some are higher quality than others, but I certainly don't think they're a waste of money.
Any OCR process will introduce errors into the text, and short of meticulously comparing the OCR output to the original text, those errors are likely to end up in the finished product. It's unlikely that a typo of this sort is going to seriously hinder your use of the product, though. Unless the phrase "you are given Lord Humphrey's swords" is OCR'd as "you are given Lord Humphrey's sword+5".
Any OCR process will introduce errors into the text, and short of meticulously comparing the OCR output to the original text, those errors are likely to end up in the finished product. It's unlikely that a typo of this sort is going to seriously hinder your use of the product, though. Unless the phrase "you are given Lord Humphrey's swords" is OCR'd as "you are given Lord Humphrey's sword+5".
johnsemlak
First Post
I've bought loads of them and am a big fan of the whole project.
Most of the ones I've bought fall in the following categories: 1e AD&D Adventures, D&D Adventures, D&D Supplements (the Gazatteers), World of Greyhawk, and Forgotten Realms (I'm no fan of the setting, but I wanted Ruins of the Undermountian).
All the ones I have bought are completely readable. They may not be ideal, but I consider myself fortunate that these products are available at all.
The main problem is that many products are missing pages. Three products I have bought have had these problems (G1-2-3, the 83 WoG box set, and I12). All these problems were eventually corrected, though it may take some time. You can send a message to SVgames, or post on Bastion's forum at www.mortality.net . Jim Butler is pretty good about responding to complaints there, IMO.
I would say the other big problem is dealing with large color maps. It is a major hassle to view them on the computer (at least on my computer) They load onto the screen slowly, so paging through them is slow and frustrating. the 83 WoG map is my prime example of this. Also, the large pull-out maps usually are scanned on 8 or more pages, and often no thought into a logical order of pages is made. Pages don't border each other logically.
I have always been satisfied with my purchase of ESDs.
Most of the ones I've bought fall in the following categories: 1e AD&D Adventures, D&D Adventures, D&D Supplements (the Gazatteers), World of Greyhawk, and Forgotten Realms (I'm no fan of the setting, but I wanted Ruins of the Undermountian).
All the ones I have bought are completely readable. They may not be ideal, but I consider myself fortunate that these products are available at all.
The main problem is that many products are missing pages. Three products I have bought have had these problems (G1-2-3, the 83 WoG box set, and I12). All these problems were eventually corrected, though it may take some time. You can send a message to SVgames, or post on Bastion's forum at www.mortality.net . Jim Butler is pretty good about responding to complaints there, IMO.
I would say the other big problem is dealing with large color maps. It is a major hassle to view them on the computer (at least on my computer) They load onto the screen slowly, so paging through them is slow and frustrating. the 83 WoG map is my prime example of this. Also, the large pull-out maps usually are scanned on 8 or more pages, and often no thought into a logical order of pages is made. Pages don't border each other logically.
I have always been satisfied with my purchase of ESDs.
Marius Delphus
Adventurer
While I am very glad the products are being made available (a) in their original form (b) at a superb price, with (c) the added advantage of being electronic so that one can print additional copies of, say, maps or character sheets...
I have purchased 3 (count 'em, 3) ESDs. One was an OCR type (an FR "splatbook") and the other two were bitmap-image type (PHBR "brown books"). None of my purchases included the large color maps. After about an hour of work, I had the OCR product wrangled into something I liked much better (page elements uniformly lined up on a grid, etc.). The other two took me about two hours of work apiece (improve contrast, make the pages a uniform size, straighten the images, etc.). In one product, the scanner introduced a vertical line (easily ignored) onto every page.
I'm lucky I own copies of the software needed to "freshen up" the files (Acrobat (full version) and Photoshop), because let's face it, I'm terribly picky. My edits did nearly double the (file) size of the documents... given the image-per-page ESDs are already pretty large (22 and 25 MB, IIRC), the even-larger files would be very annoying to download. I was happy to do it, don't get me wrong! I'm quite pleased that I now own (and paid so little for) electronic copies of the three documents in question. (In fact the OCRed product appears to have significant "collector's value" attached, because I couldn't find a print copy for less than 5x the cover price!)
I guess what I'm saying is that I *wish* SVGames had the time/money/whatever for the level of QC I'd *like* to see. I understand they very well may not. After all, there are hundreds of products already scanned. Regardless, I'm quite pleased with SVGames and thankful for the tremendous effort they're already putting into the ESDs, making these products available at a very low price.
YMMV.
I have purchased 3 (count 'em, 3) ESDs. One was an OCR type (an FR "splatbook") and the other two were bitmap-image type (PHBR "brown books"). None of my purchases included the large color maps. After about an hour of work, I had the OCR product wrangled into something I liked much better (page elements uniformly lined up on a grid, etc.). The other two took me about two hours of work apiece (improve contrast, make the pages a uniform size, straighten the images, etc.). In one product, the scanner introduced a vertical line (easily ignored) onto every page.
I'm lucky I own copies of the software needed to "freshen up" the files (Acrobat (full version) and Photoshop), because let's face it, I'm terribly picky.
My edits did nearly double the (file) size of the documents... given the image-per-page ESDs are already pretty large (22 and 25 MB, IIRC), the even-larger files would be very annoying to download. I was happy to do it, don't get me wrong! I'm quite pleased that I now own (and paid so little for) electronic copies of the three documents in question. (In fact the OCRed product appears to have significant "collector's value" attached, because I couldn't find a print copy for less than 5x the cover price!)I guess what I'm saying is that I *wish* SVGames had the time/money/whatever for the level of QC I'd *like* to see. I understand they very well may not. After all, there are hundreds of products already scanned. Regardless, I'm quite pleased with SVGames and thankful for the tremendous effort they're already putting into the ESDs, making these products available at a very low price.
YMMV.
Last edited:
Jeremy Ackerman-Yost
Explorer
TeeSeeJay said:
Allow me to clarify. The Bitmapped ESDs which use nonstandard fonts have a tendency to be competely illegible. All of the text was reduced to pale gray collections of dots that vaguely resembled letters. Simply adjusting the sharpness and contrast was insufficient because many of the letters became severely distorted.
I was eventually able to fix the problem on a couple of pages by rotating them slightly, converting them to picts, and importing them into Omnipage. I could then convert the text, but I lost all the images and borders and fun stuff. I also had MASSIVE need of editing and correction. And the process took an absurd amount of time per page. I did some quick math and realized that the number of man-hours involved to make the entire document legible was frightening. So they sit on my hard drive, waiting for me to have about 3 weeks worth of downtime. Which I should have sometime around retirement
To my mind, I shouldn't have to pay for products that require a couple solid DAYS of work EACH to be usable.
Granted, I'm probably talking about a minority of the total ESDs, but I'm not willing to give them any more money without seeing sample pages first.
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