"Advice from PDF Sellers/Buyers" Topic

Hi Guys!

After many years selling paper buildings I am thinking (THINKING!) about starting to sell some PDFs along with my pre-printed products. But I have no experience in either buying or selling PDFs. My on-line store does have a function for selling files, so I suppose I would use that. But what about file size? When you folks buy PDFs how large are the files? I've converted one of my standard village packs to PDF and the file is about 30mb. Is that excessive? Do I need to sell them in smaller batches? Any advice would be appreciated!

Scott Washburn
PaperTerrain
paperterrain.com

File sizes for reasonably large paper terrain kits ranged from 30 to about 100 mbs a few years ago. With connection speeds getting better and storage getting cheaper, even bigger files would be acceptable.

Be aware that, as with any digital product, piracy is real and since I believe your paper terrain is rather popular, you files WILL be found in random paper terrain collections available via torrent or whatever is used these days. At least, that's what has been said behind closed doors of another popular digital paper terrain manufacturer. If that has to bother you is up to you to decide; it's just a reality in this day and age.

30mb is the approximate size of some 2 page paper models I have bought from Europe, so nothing unusual there. 2 pages would get me a 1:87 tank model and a building for $2. USD A printed-on-card 2 page model costs about $5. USD

There are many pdf models by Dave Graffam available on wargamesvault/rpgnow, which I use a lot. (I haven't bought any so I don't know what they are like. There are free samples.)

There are issues with pdf's, but people seem to accept them although jpg's are easier to handle.

US paper sizes are different to the rest of the world e.g. B versus A sizes.

Getting correct color off a home printer can be a problem – too dark is a common occurrence. With a jpg, the color can be tested by printing just a small part of a page. Correction can be done by editing the image or printing lighter. With a pdf, it might be necessary to print a full page several times, which can lead to ink waste.

Many models I have acquired are 1:160 or smaller. I only play in 20mm (WW2) and 28mm (horse and musket) so models need to scaled up. To scale up usually means cut and paste of sections into into a new image. It also means the original image needs to be at a high enough resolution where scaling up is loss-less. So embedded image size and type are important.

Models tend to be crammed onto as few sheets as possible.

Supposedly, there's a way to compress them.

Watermark your pages in a way that's difficult to extract from the file. That should cut down on casual theft.

Watermarking will not help – all someone needs to do is print it out and scan it in with the watermarked portion covered up. I'd also be surprised if Scott's stuff has not already been pirated as is – all it takes is someone with a scanner.

As for file sizes, 30mb is nothing to an individual unless they are on a really crappy internet connection. A bigger problem would be worrying if your service provider will zap you with a fee for usage on your end.

Watermarking will not help

Watermarking will help keep the honest and lazy man honest. Use it.

As others have said, 30MB is not huge. I bought the LinKenecht Napleonic buildings . link Around 250MB uncompressed. I think they are around 70MB compressed.

> Watermarking will help keep the honest and lazy man honest. Use it.

The lazy perhaps, the honest would not need it in the first place. In this case they would have to be incredibly lazy though since a PDF of buildings is only a few pages (unlike a book that has 100+) which HAVE to be printed out to be used it is trivial to scan the printouts back in.

It certainly can't hurt to add a watermark, but don't expect it to "work" for more than the 5 seconds it takes to scan…

^In the end, as with all forms of copy protection, you have to weigh the effort it takes to implement it (and, if applicable, any negative effect on the honest consumer) versus the hindrance of piracy which can be reasonably expected.

the honest would not need it in the first place.

You'd be surprised.

Can't help with piracy, but I have concerns with formatting:
1. We do not use American paper sizes where I come from. That last phrase could indicate almost anywhere on the planet. The printable area should be chosen so as to remain the same whether using letter or A4 sizes, or, as some publishers have done, seperate files for both sizing systems. The printable area of the electrostatic colour MFPs I work with is limited to 4mm from the edge of the paper; this can be adjusted with mono engines and some colour brands, but the colour systems of the brands I work with have this set as the maximum printable area, so if a model is formatted for A4, it will work with either size paper in the tray; just leave it on letter size (switching to A4 can reset the zoom level in some brands' print drivers, rendering the final print the wrong size) and ensure the printer's A4/letter override function is set ON. It is no problem to have tabs going over the edge of the printable area, but if detail/textured parts which are meant to help form the shape as well as being seen on the outside are cut off, all manner of issues can arise.
2. Most of the brands I work with have a much higher resolution than 100dpi. Some publishers don't get this, so many battlemaps I have look like they were designed for 15mm and then formatted to end up at 28mm, with any curves or non-right angles looking particularly horrendous. It would be fine if it was still a vector drawing at that stage, but it usually gets to full colour artwork before then, and stored as a raster image. People pay us car prices to get printing systems capable of photo printing, not ASCII shapes.
3. Separate the instruction and parts files. This will make it more convenient to print the instructions on plain paper and save the heavy media to print the parts. Some users may not have the mindset that allows them to fiddle with the print dialog box in order to print the pages seperately from the computer if everything comes in a single file, while some may be printing from a storage device connected directly to the machine, and the controls may not allow one to control which pages of a file are printed on what, usually necessitating the whole file to be printed on the heavy media, instructions and all.
4. The idea of an optional .jpg copy is interesting, though it will have to be sized exactly right at the publisher's end; as the other thing about the memory device connected directly to the machine is that many larger MFPs, even 2-3 years ago, did not come with Postscript printing as standard, so if one installed PS drivers the machine wouldn't print at all, and while PDFs could be printed from the computer, they wouldn't print from the directly-attached memory device using the direct print function – it would only print .jpgs and certain other picture formats.
5. Size doesn't really bother me these days; I get quite a lot of stuff in massive bulk archives anyway, and the contents could be simple sets of single-layer tiles or battlemaps which could be anywhere from 25 to 80MB, with some one-piece, full-table maps in .tif format reaching almost 300MB – each. Modular sets such as Worldworks' Terrainlinx series average around 140MB.
Keep in mind, though, the size of RIP data that will be created upon hitting the Print button, which is often several times what the file size actually is, and is the actual data structure that will be sent to the printer; I usually use our mid-range MFP products which have large memories and often hard drives on board, but many desktop systems do not, and many have run out of memory on me while test-printing multi-page documents. Honestly, some inkjet MFPs have run out just printing more than one standardised test page via direct print. This can often be reduced by formatting the file in a certain way (or, some drivers have the appropriate function listed under the Advanced Options.

"With a jpg, the color can be tested by printing just a small part of a page. Correction can be done by editing the image or printing lighter. With a pdf, it might be necessary to print a full page several times, which can lead to ink waste. "
If you have an electrostatic printer/MFP at home, you will not save that much. Both options will still use a full page, which will still appear as a full page on the consumables counts; the drum, fuser etc. will still be counted through a whole page, while some brands actually have counts on the toner cartidges rather than rely on optoelectronic sensing of the amount of toner still inside.

Wow that ended up LOOOONG. Still, I have to voice my concerns as both a consumer of such products as well as working on the installation, maintenance, repair, and ultimately decomissioning of the equipment required to print them.

> You'd be surprised

Not really, we just have different definitions of the word honest.