New scan of Alien Moduler 1 - Aslan book

[plazman30]

Matt announced this on the Mongoose forums, but I thought I would throw a note in here as well. I re-scanned the Aslan book and cleaned it up. I redid the front and back cover (see my other thread). I deskewed all the pages. Book is resized to 8½×11. Mongoose replaced their PDF with mine. So, if you want a nice 600 DPI scan of the Aslan book with a clean cover, go buy it on DriveThruRPG or the Mongoose Publishing website. If you already bought the PDF, then this is a free update.

If you're like me and own the CD-ROM, I'm not sure what your options are.

 

[TamsinP]

I believe that explains the notification I got from DTRPG about the updated file for the recent Bundle of Holding.

 

[plazman30]

And there's an updated Zhodani book also now.

Working on Vargr

 

[tjoneslo]

Are you doing any OCR on the text? Good scans are nice, but being able to search the text is very important also.

Thank you for doing this work.

 

[plazman30]

The app I am using does OCR. I believe I have Matt PDFs that were OCRed. If they're not, then I can submit new ones to him.

 

[TheDS]

If you haven't READ the resulting OCRed files, you might consider doing that. IME OCR is just a starting point, not an ending point.

 

[plazman30]

So, I'm confused. Are you expecting a complete redo of the file as a digitally typeset copy? Basically, a "remaster" of these books?

Someone could do that with a OCRed copy, but it would be a LOT of work. I scanned the book in and then OCRed it to make it searchable. My scans are 600 DPI, far higher resolution than the original scans. I also removed any scanning artifacts, such as dots on the page and page edges. Everything also resized to 8½×11.

That's as far as I will go for something I did myself and handed over to Mongoose. I can't possibly redo the entire book in a modern desktop publishing app by cutting and pasting the OCR and then forcing it to fit on a page. Heck, with modern desktop publishing fonts never being an exact match for old Linotype machine fonts, you're never going to get a 1:1 match, anyway.

Without this being my full-time job, there is no way I could dedicate the time needed to completely redo the book.