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Post by KaiLord on Jun 16, 2004 15:24:32 GMT
Okay, PA staffers...help me out here.
According to what I glean from the license and other pages on the site, the following is our mantra:
Personal use = good; redistribution = very bad...and rightly so.
Now my question: Are we allowed to print (for personal use) just the documents on the books page in the pdf drop-down menu, or can we also print the actual books?
I know there is no pdf for any of the gamebooks, but supposing there were one...or some equivalent of it...could it be legally done if only to sit on a bookshelf?
I think it'd be awesome to have a tome of all 5 Kai adventures, back to back. Sort of like a mega-omnibus.
KL, with lofty aspirations
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Post by Thomas Wolmer on Jun 16, 2004 16:30:51 GMT
Printing for personal use is OK.
We used to do PDF editions of the gamebooks as well! But it stopped since it does require some manual effort (the automated book generation process we use can more or less produce PDFs, but if you don't do some tweaking with page breaking around images and such, they will look crappy), and the guy who used to the main part of it no longer has the time.
So, any volunteers with more than single clue about LaTeX and PDF, you're welcome aboard...
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Post by outspaced on Jun 16, 2004 16:37:42 GMT
We have had PDF versions of a couple of the books available previously. The reason we don't have more is because our resident expert is rather too busy to work on them these days. One of the reasons (as I understand it) why the coordinator wanted the source files created from XML is the portability. From a single XML file you can output to both xHTML (i.e. the online editions) and LATEX, which is something to do with Acrobat files, and can be manipulated before the final PDF output. Or something like that. It's rather too technical for me. The upshot of the matter being that there is no reason why you can't print the books for personal use only . . . except that up until now, we haven't found anyone who can donate enough of their spare time to creating them. Of course, PDFs are harder to maintain than HTML. There are no page-size limitations in HTML, for example. So the PDFs apparently get very fiddly to work with. But the end results are very nice indeed. I doubt you'd fit five adventures in a book, though, because they usually come out at couple of hundred pages. The old copy of LW11 PDF I have on my machine comes out at 196 pages. Of course, to be legally conforming to the license, the printed versions must contain a copy of the Project Aon User License in full. On a side point, the reason the Newsletters went straight into PDF is because the layout would be impossible to replicate using vanilla HTML. The idea is to eventually make online versions of them . . . but that's WAAAAAAY off in the future. If ever.
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Post by KaiLord on Jun 16, 2004 23:54:25 GMT
Oh this is superb! Give me a few weeks, and I'll unveil a masterpiece. I have knowledge of hardcover bookbinding (self-taught, so it's not professional, but very good), plus before I asked I had worked out a semi-automated macro to help in the process of harvesting the individual sections and combining them into one long document. I'll read up on pdf and do a few test runs to see if I can help out. As for the size, going by my estimates, it'd be about 500 8.5x11 sheets. Thanks so much for giving me this information. KL, on a mission
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