CT Only: Continuing down the LBB recreation rabbit hole.

[plazman30]

Now that I finished recreating Book 3, I dove into Book 1 and Book 2. Book 1 is with proofreaders now. And Book 2 is about 75% done.

So, why am I doing this?

Well for a few reasons:

1. I find stuff like this fun to do. I'm a professional IT guy, and I have always loved typography. I find working on stuff like this relaxing.
2. I'm trying to learn how to use my desktop publishing software better. This was my first attempt at doing anything longer than a few pages. I learned a lot of new things.
3. With Book 2, I switched from Scribus to Affinity, which allowed me to learn something new.

One challenge in doing these is font licensing. The LBBs used Univers and Optima, which are owned by Monotype and now carry a rather expensive yearly, per book, per year font rental fee for PDFs. Obviously, this is a personal project, so that doesn't impact me. But if I am going through the effort, it would be nice to let the people that own the rights to these books to make use of the effort I've gone through. So, I don't want to burden rights holders with expensive licensing fees.

Right now I have two fonts which are reasonable substitutes for Univers and Optima. But I went through a "What if" scenario this morning. I fired up Google Gemini and asked it to give me the best possible free (OpenSIL licensed) font that would be a good substitute for Univers. Then I asked it for a good heading font to use with it, and it came up with these two fonts:



Clearly, this doesn't match the LBBs. So, the purists who want an exact match will immediately hate this. But just looking at it as a "remastered" version of the LBBs, I like the look of this.

Opinions?

 

[coliver988]

Fonts are a pain. Personally, I'm okay with good enough. I have the original books so I am not the target audience here though!

I do applaud your progress - I find your process and progress fascinating. I do love people who actually DO things like this.

 

[plazman30]

One thing I really want to update is the tables to make them easier to read.

Original LBB vs my "remaster":

 

[plazman30]

The nice thing with doing this is that now the books are in an editable form, and not just static scanned pages. So, it's really easy to change fonts, add shading to tables, and do other cleanup work that just isn't possible with scanned images.

I'm also inserting all the errata into the text, rather than having to flip to the back, the way the Facsimile edition works. I applaud Marc Miller for the effort he went through to create that edition and include the errata. I wonder if these three could become a new facsimile edition.

I'm still having fun doing this.

 

[coliver988]

the Book 9 Pirates from Mongoose did the chart striping as well and that does help. Wish they got you to do it as it was close to the original style but had the uncanny valley thing as some of the formatting was off just enough to be, hmm, disconcerting?

 

[plazman30]

Mongoose has professional graphic artists on staff. I'm just a guy with a MacBook Pro having fun in my spare time. Recreating an existing 80s book is something I can pull off. But don't ask me to come up with an original idea.

I don't like the font they picked for the cover of Book 9. I have to assume they did that to avoid a font licensing issue. Some of these fonts cost as much as $1500/book/year. You heard that right. PER YEAR. So, there's a good chance they'll cover the cost in the first year of sale. But year 2 and onward? How many PDFs are you going to sell after that? Probably not $1500 worth.

There are fonts that are free and would have been a better match. But you need to do some homework. Kurino Seri is a free font similar enough to Optima that it will work for the cover. Here is what I came up with using it:

 

[plazman30]

Mongoose, if you're reading this and want to use that as your cover in future PDFs, feel free to, Ping me and I'll make you a PDF of the front and back cover. Or you can just install Kurino Seri and do it yourself.

 

[plazman30]

I'm hoping that when I finally retire in 10 years, I could make a part-time gig out of this and recreate classic RPG books with errata inserted into them that publishers could then use to create nice clean POD copies and PDFs for sale. So I guess doing these books might be a "resume" of sorts for my future retirement.

 

[Ildefonse]

Now that I finished recreating Book 3, I dove into Book 1 and Book 2. Book 1 is with proofreaders now. And Book 2 is about 75% done.

So, why am I doing this?

Well for a few reasons:

1. I find stuff like this fun to do. I'm a professional IT guy, and I have always loved typography. I find working on stuff like this relaxing.
2. I'm trying to learn how to use my desktop publishing software better. This was my first attempt at doing anything longer than a few pages. I learned a lot of new things.
3. With Book 2, I switched from Scribus to Affinity, which allowed me to learn something new.

One challenge in doing these is font licensing. The LBBs used Univers and Optima, which are owned by Monotype and now carry a rather expensive yearly, per book, per year font rental fee for PDFs. Obviously, this is a personal project, so that doesn't impact me. But if I am going through the effort, it would be nice to let the people that own the rights to these books to make use of the effort I've gone through. So, I don't want to burden rights holders with expensive licensing fees.

Right now I have two fonts which are reasonable substitutes for Univers and Optima. But I went through a "What if" scenario this morning. I fired up Google Gemini and asked it to give me the best possible free (OpenSIL licensed) font that would be a good substitute for Univers. Then I asked it for a good heading font to use with it, and it came up with these two fonts:

View attachment 7129

Clearly, this doesn't match the LBBs. So, the purists who want an exact match will immediately hate this. But just looking at it as a "remastered" version of the LBBs, I like the look of this.

Opinions?

As a purist (though not hidebound orthodox one) I like the body font, but the heading one seems jarring. I could live with it though.

 

[Ildefonse]

The nice thing with doing this is that now the books are in an editable form, and not just static scanned pages. So, it's really easy to change fonts, add shading to tables, and do other cleanup work that just isn't possible with scanned images.

I'm also inserting all the errata into the text, rather than having to flip to the back, the way the Facsimile edition works. I applaud Marc Miller for the effort he went through to create that edition and include the errata. I wonder if these three could become a new facsimile edition.

I'm still having fun doing this.

I think this would be ideal: even the facsimile edition has some errata, and a "remastered" version of it will be a great thing to have.

 

[plazman30]

I think this would be ideal: even the facsimile edition has some errata, and a "remastered" version of it will be a great thing to have.

I'd like to change the page numbering in the facsimile edition also, so that it shows the book number and page number: 2-48. I think that would make it easier to know where you are in the book and which book you're in.

 

[plazman30]

Here is the original heading with the body text font changed to Roboto:

 

[plazman30]

And the original heading with the body text changed to Inter:

 

[Ildefonse]

Either of those two headings looks better than the first, to me.

 

[plazman30]

Well, they look closest to the original. That makes sense.

 

[Rupert]

I'm not a fan of the suggested header typeface. Not because it's not Optima, but because it's very heavy and dark. Even for a title it's noticeably harder to read than the original.