Public Announcement

[Rasputin]

Originally Posted by Evil Roy Slade

I would enthusiastically support a model of Pyramid which might look something like the Dungeon Fantasy Collected pdf that came out at the end of 2016. 160-odd pages with a score of articles on one line: if something like that came out once or twice a year (whether with updated old articles, new ones, or a mix), I would fight to give my money to SJG for it.

That's about what I was thinking. You'd want to do two: DFRPG/GURPS Dungeon Fantasy because it gets so many articles (and I presume relative sales), and another one that rotates each year. One year it's sci-fi, another it's modern, a third it's non-Dungeon Fantasy pre-modern. It would be new articles, maybe an update from Pyramid 1 or 2 that fits with the theme.

[Malleg]

Originally Posted by Kromm

The difference is that Volume 2 of Pyramid was not a series of discrete products with product numbers, sold individually; it was a horde of html documents that subscribers could see and non-subscribers could not see on an all-or-nothing basis. Just as issues of Volume 1 were sold individually on paper and are now available as individual PDFs, issues of Volume 3 were sold individually as PDFs and will continue to be sold that way. Volume 2 was a victim of its medium; Marshall McLuhan would feel vindicated.

is there a legal limit to that or a practical one? I mean it does seem trivial to convert HTML to pdf as a bundle or even as a collection of one PDF to one HTML page.

I wasn't even aware of gurps at the time of volume 2 so I don't know how much the layout changed and if the quality was on par with the present standards.

[Celti]

Originally Posted by Malleg

is there a legal limit to that or a practical one? I mean it does seem trivial to convert HTML to pdf as a bundle or even as a collection of one PDF to one HTML page.

Both, I believe — Practically speaking, Pyramid Vol. 2 articles used a much less strict style guide, while on the legal side I believe the licensing for Pyramid Vol. 2 might have precluded format-shifting.

Originally Posted by Malleg

I wasn't even aware of gurps at the time of volume 2 so I don't know how much the layout changed and if the quality was on par with the present standards.

You can still see free examples of complete Pyramid Vol. 2 articles here and there.

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Originally Posted by Malleg

is there a legal limit to that or a practical one? I mean it does seem trivial to convert HTML to pdf as a bundle or even as a collection of one PDF to one HTML page.

Practical. It's trivial to convert HTML to some sort of PDF. It is no doubt quite another matter to convert the HTML documents containing old Pyramid articles (which were originally all plain text and no doubt lovingly marked up by hand as HTML on the publisher's end, so assuming a clean and consistent HTML format over the ten years of Pyramid's on-line existence is likely a bad idea) to Word documents using SJ Games' house styles, which will eventually be converted to PDFs which fit SJ Games formatting and layout standards. And it's surely another thing altogether to do so for thousands of articles using the limited time and IT resources of a small publisher.

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by Malleg

is there a legal limit to that or a practical one? I mean it does seem trivial to convert HTML to pdf as a bundle or even as a collection of one PDF to one HTML page.

The limit is a practical one.

Volume 2 of Pyramid exists only as a pile (on the order of thousands) of numbered html files – and associated resources, such as images – in a bunch of directories. Because the material spans more than 10 years and the tenure of three editors, not all the html follows the same style rules, the directories aren't structured consistently, and the files aren't numbered in a useful way. That might be "our fault," but at the time the idea was to run Pyramid like a blog, not like a magazine that would have digests and "best of" volumes, so to meet the rapid release schedule, consistency took the back seat to haste.

Owing to all that, automating conversion from html to pdf would be anything but trivial. Somebody would still have to go in afterward and fix all the things that didn't translate . . . one article at a time.

Moreover, conversion to pdf wouldn't be direct. It would really be a conversion to Word so we could apply modern formatting, followed by layout in InDesign so it would actually look like a book, not just a bunch of random stuff dumped on a page. Only then would it go to pdf. And of course somebody would have to do the manual fixes I mentioned at each step of the way.

So yes, if we wanted to lazily dump html into pdf and sell a dog's breakfast of formatting that's hard to read on a standard book page, we could do so. Even then, though, there would be broken content. We're not interested in that because we have standards – we'd want the results to look like any other Pyramid or GURPS release.

[lachimba]

If I can make some outsider speculation.

Updating the Pyramid articles would also give an opportunity to update some rules -that might not meet our standards today, put in some art, add some things, take out some things, and so on.

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Originally Posted by Kromm

if we wanted to lazily dump html into pdf and sell a dog's breakfast of formatting

FWIW, I consulted my dogs about this, and they're very excited about breakfast, so I suppose you can count that as a vote in favor.

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by lachimba

Updating the Pyramid articles would also give an opportunity to update some rules -that might not meet our standards today, put in some art, add some things, take out some things, and so on.

Of course, and that's the objective of the Pyramid Dungeon Collection initiative. But to quote the linked Daily Illuminator:

Even we don't have all the articles in a handy, indexed form. We also don't have the staff resources to throw at updating the stats and formatting.

In short, this is well beyond what the subset of SJ Games staff who work on GURPS and related lines (Pyramid, Dungeon Fantasy Roleplaying Game, Powered by GURPS, etc.) has the person-hours for. So let's see whether the Pyramid Dungeon Collection (1) draws enough author interest, and (2) sells lots of copies. Popularity in these forums is one thing; people putting their money where their mouth is, that's quite another.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Kromm, per the Daily Illuminator

Even we don't have all the articles in a handy, indexed form. We also don't have the staff resources to throw at updating the stats and formatting

As someone with a copy of the archive (it was made available for download to people who had Pyramid#2 subscriptions) I can testify that it is not especially straightforward to use, and the Pyramid#2 layout was utterly different from the GURPS 4e style used for Pyramid#3.

I can see why you want the original authors to revise their articles for the Pyramid Dungeon Collection, but good articles are likely to go unrevised simply because their authors are no longer reading the Illuminator, and don't know about the project.

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Originally Posted by johndallman

I can see why you want the original authors to revise their articles for the Pyramid Dungeon Collection, but good articles are likely to go unrevised simply because their authors are no longer reading the Illuminator, and don't know about the project.

This is certainly an issue, though I have made one of the more-prolific-at-the-time-but-no-longer-in-this-space authors aware of it, so we'll see if that helps.