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Old 11-30-2016, 11:49 AM   #31
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Default Re: GURPS Reprints - Magic, Thaumatology, and Ultra-Tech

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Originally Posted by roguebfl View Post
No they can only handled SMALL tables ok. epub will NEVER be possible to handed tables well because the lack of side scrolling will always break them, and side scroll would break there flow purpose of epub.
"epub" is HTML in a pretty hat, an index, and a zip file.

So with that said, I am here to tell you that it is 100% possible to automatically decompose a properly set up HTML table of arbitrary width into a "narration" style of format that would work perfectly well in e-readers aimed at novels.

It's not the greatest way to read a table, but it works. It's also the recommended way to do enormously wide tables for braille, which you may think I'm joking about but I've had to deal with 20+ columns on combined cable/cellphone statements and stock reports :P

As an example, I'm going to use the first few entries of the first Melee Weapon Table, the AXE/MACE table. There's a couple of different ways to approach this for print (rather than braille), but this is one example. It can all be implemented via stylesheets, or via a preprocessing pass after generating the epub.

Spoiler:  


This format is also very friendly to text-to-speech, for blind customers, or just for hands-free reading.

The awesome thing about living in the future is that document transformation is a hell of a lot easier than it used to be.
EDIT NOTE: For a braille table, you would put the notes about melee weapons after the title "Melee Weapon Table" but before all the actual tables. And print them only once, but SJG does that part already for pagecount reasons. You put it first so you can learn the footnotes and have them mean something when you see them. IT's harder to flip back and forth in braille, and in e-readers - but in an e-reader you should be able to put a bookmark.
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Old 11-30-2016, 12:12 PM   #32
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Default Re: GURPS Reprints - Magic, Thaumatology, and Ultra-Tech

Sorry Bruno that not a table, that's a stat block. Which takes of way more space than than a table so more expensive to print, and exaggerate that page reference problem. and yes I know epub is just a subset wrapper for HTML which is why I know how they behave.

Remember other books have to reference these eBooks, AND they have to be able reference print book too.
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Old 11-30-2016, 01:30 PM   #33
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Default Re: GURPS Reprints - Magic, Thaumatology, and Ultra-Tech

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Originally Posted by roguebfl View Post
Sorry Bruno that not a table, that's a stat block.
No, it's a table. It's just not a presentation you're familiar with. There's a large number of table presentations you've never seen, because they're not for people who can see. I believe there's eight formal versions in the BANA standards books alone. Never mind the highly-biased-for-visual-readers versions of tables, called graphs (yes, they're a specialty format for numbers - doesn't change that they're a presentation of tabular data).

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Which takes of way more space than than a table so more expensive to print, and exaggerate that page reference problem. and yes I know epub is just a subset wrapper for HTML which is why I know how they behave.
Yes, it does take more space than a traditional table, and if this were for a physical product would be a problem with printing. It's an enormous problem for braille - but when you have a choice between "Can't read it at all" and "has to be shipped in a box", and it's your stock reports, you pick "shipped in a box". The last company I worked for got a very strong positive response about legibility even from our Large Print customers and the standard-format design groups for this format for big fat wide tables. Not good on compactness, but easy to read.

But we aren't talking about a physical product, we're talking about trying to get the book to work on a phone.

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Remember other books have to reference these eBooks, AND they have to be able reference print book too.
This is a problem also faced by large print and braille - textbooks for school need for you to be able to find the page referenced by the teacher, and it just is not possible to keep the pages physically in sync.

The way this is handled is to have two page numbers - one counting physical pages, and one as part of the page header listing which page of the original manuscript this corresponds to. When you hit a page break in the original manuscript, you put a marker in the text advising which page you are turning to.

Accessible formats for the blind: Solving a surprising number of new media problems decades before new media existed.
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Old 11-30-2016, 01:56 PM   #34
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Default Re: GURPS Reprints - Magic, Thaumatology, and Ultra-Tech

Discussion of file formatting does not help this thread. Please take the discussion to Facebook or somewhere else.
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Old 11-30-2016, 03:02 PM   #35
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Default Re: GURPS Reprints - Magic, Thaumatology, and Ultra-Tech

Perhaps it is worth bearing in mind that it is not the first time that 4e books are reprinted in black-and-white: my copies of Fantasy (softcover, 3rd ed. 3rd printing) and Horror (hardcover, 4th ed. 1st printing) are both BW only. It helps with the price, and the result is very pretty nonetheless.
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Old 11-30-2016, 03:07 PM   #36
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Default Re: GURPS Reprints - Magic, Thaumatology, and Ultra-Tech

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Will the eBooks be PDFs, or ePUB/MOBI-formatted?
GURPS ebooks are always PDF. We are not currently even considering any other formats, as they all have significant drawbacks when it comes to displaying GURPS layout.

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Originally Posted by scimon View Post
Is this a case of "If it goes well we'll do more?" because I'd really like to see a reprint of High Tech.
Of course. Whether we do more is based on a number of factors, but the success and popularity of these three reprints will be a major datum in that decision.

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Originally Posted by Armin View Post
I understand optimizing for CreateSpace, but I don't understand why these books weren't made available in color. Weren't they originally done in color, so color assets are already available for them? CreateSpace offers full color bleed, so I'm missing why these reprints are in black and white.
Cost, mainly. POD is more expensive per unit than a full print run, so it's crucial to have a price point that doesn't scare everyone away.
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Old 11-30-2016, 03:16 PM   #37
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Default Re: GURPS Reprints - Magic, Thaumatology, and Ultra-Tech

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Originally Posted by kracht View Post
Perhaps it is worth bearing in mind that it is not the first time that 4e books are reprinted in black-and-white: my copies of Fantasy (softcover, 3rd ed. 3rd printing) and Horror (hardcover, 4th ed. 1st printing) are both BW only. It helps with the price, and the result is very pretty nonetheless.
Horror was always Black and White, as you say First Printing. Probably the most appropriate book for Black and White.

I think it's fair to say B&W is a compromise though.
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Old 11-30-2016, 04:58 PM   #38
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Default Re: GURPS Reprints - Magic, Thaumatology, and Ultra-Tech

<MOD>

I just deleted a handful of posts. Please try to stay on topic. This thread is stickied so that it can act as a resource for those looking for more information about these reprints (and related things, like CreateSpace, printing decisions, etc.). We don't want it cluttered with joke posts, etc.

No apologies needed; let's just minimize unrelated tangents. Thanks.

</MOD>
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Old 11-30-2016, 05:31 PM   #39
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Default Re: GURPS Reprints - Magic, Thaumatology, and Ultra-Tech

Just out of curiosity, why were these particular 3 books chosen as "test" subjects?
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Old 12-01-2016, 08:33 AM   #40
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Default Re: GURPS Reprints - Magic, Thaumatology, and Ultra-Tech

I'm super-excited about the possibly of print-on-demand books for GURPS in future. Hard copies of GURPS books! Could there be anything better?
Surely not!

Quote:
Originally Posted by philreed View Post
We're collecting data on GURPS and will review things in early 2017. We've put a lot of staff resources into the line over the last three to four months, and every scrap of info we collect is going into one big pool that we'll swim in and explore soon enough.
No doubt I'm being paranoid, and I know the good people at SJGames are easily brilliant enough to have figured all this out - but since I love GURPS so much, and would desperately love to be able to get future books in hard copies, I just wanted to point out that this...

Quote:
Originally Posted by ericbsmith View Post
It looks like they can be purchased through Amazon's regular website as well. This is notable because Amazon free shipping, gift cards, and promotional codes may be used with them.
... means that the actual sales of the new POD versions of Magic, Thaumatology, and Ultra-Tech are obviously not going to be very representative of the promise of POD as a whole.

I'm strongly tempted to buy Ultra-Tech via the POD service, just to support the whole POD GURPS initiative - I think it's really exciting. But since Ultra-Tech happens to be available on Amazon right now, that's obviously the better option on paper, for me, due to free shipping, etc.

Now, if hard copies of other books were available via POD - books that we couldn't get hard copies of any more convenient way - then that would be a real test of the promise of POD for gurps.

Again, I feel silly pointing this out, since it's so obvious, and I have full confidence in everyone at SJGames' ability to have thought all this through far, far more deeply than I have. But I thought I'd point it out anyway, just because I'm so eager for POD GURPS to succeed, and want to remove every possible obstacle in the way of that happening!

Thanks
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