Selling PDFs as a printer's spread, and printing advice

[Thomas Lawrence]

I'm asking this question primarily as a consumer, although the answers may infrom hpw I deal with my own projects should I ever pluck up the courage to finish one and distribute it.

I've been buying a lot o findie games on PDF lately. PDFs bought in this way, as far as I've seen, seem to come as a reader's spread - that is, the pages are laid out in sequential page number order so they can be read on a screen.

Now, this is great for reading the PDFon a computer, obviously, but I'm betting most people who buy PDFs do so with a plan to print them out by some means, in whole or in part, for actual use at the game table.

The problem that now arises is one of imposition (hope I'm using these terms correctl) whereby if you try and print out the PDF, say, double-sided with two pages per side of A4, with a view to folding the pages down the middle to make a stapled booklet, as a home user might, you can't print it right without specialised imposition software or plug-ins.

So my question is, why not sell PDFs along with a printer's spread version where the pages are ordered for printing rather than reading, to help out the home printer?

Alternatively, can anyone recommend a good method of sorting out imposition without forking out hefty sums for specialised software?

[Eero Tuovinen]

Ah, the best things in life come from Finland: Findie, Finnish indie products for the masses...

Thanks for a weird marketing slogan, Thomas!

To answer your question: good idea, I imagine the only reason not to faciliate that kind of thing is that nobody has thought to ask. I think that many authors would be glad to make an alternative layout for that purpose if you asked them nicely. Now that you mentioned it I'll have to make sure to make that kind of layout if I ever end up creating a pdf product.

I don't have any easy trick for home-users to do this, but if you have Adobe Acrobat you can certainly reorder the pages manually to print them in the correct order. Takes some patience though, as you have to move the pages bit by bit.

[Josh Roby]

Actually, you can print books four-up for this through Adobe Acrobat Reader.  I have little copies of Capes that I call my mini Capes books.  They're awesomely useful.  Let me try and remember how you set it up...

First you'll print Even Pages Only, four to a page.  Then take those pages and feed them back into the printer.  Print Odd Pages Only, four to a page, reversed order.  Use a paper cutter to cut the margin off the edges (.5" on all sides, if I recall correctly) and then cut the sheets into quarters.  You'll then need to sort the little pages into order.  Any print shop can comb bind the pages together, usually for less than five bucks.  Fits in your hand, easily flippable, entirely disposable.  Good stuff.

Now that I think about it, you can do the same thing, but full sized, by just not doing the four to a page part.

[Thomas Lawrence]

Joshua: I did thing of the even/odd technique. The problematic thing about it is the "feed the paper back into the printer stage" which I can't do using the laser printers at my university, as the paper tray has a padlock on it. I'd rather not print it via inkjet at home owing to ink cost. Also, using folded pages I can bind the whole thing with two staples.

I did find one freeware program which rerranged the pages and shrunk them so they were two pages to an A4 side, which worked well for printing My Life With Master, but the program choked a bit on DOgs in the Vineyard, failing to do some of the pictures properly. Ack.

[Josh Roby]

Thomas, you can do the steps I outlined above and then run the thing through a xerox machine turning one-sided to two-sided sheets.  You'll see a little image degradation, but nothing huge.

[Thomas Lawrence]

Thomas, you can do the steps I outlined above and then run the thing through a xerox machine turning one-sided to two-sided sheets.  You'll see a little image degradation, but nothing huge.

Yeeeees,but this would inflate the costs further, as no wI have to pay for the photocpying as well as for printer credit on the uniiversity lasers.

Ah, well. I'm hioping to find a freeware programme which will get me the results I want. I'll post up my results here later.

In the mean time, for future rference, here's one customer that would really appreciate it if the orgininalpublisher gave some thought to how the PDF might get printed when making it, and would epsecially appreciate anyone making printer's spreads. :)

[Thunder_God]

I want to note that some people HAD thought of it, InSpectres and ocTane are available in this manner as well as a reader's spread.

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

I think it's criminally stupid of me not to have done this with Trollbabe a long, long time ago.

When Sorcerer was only available as a PDF, people would routinely make home-bound books out of it and its supplements. I never realized at the time that I should have made that easier and more fun by formatting the game in a usable way.

Best, Ron

P.S. Findie! Omigod! That is hilarious!

[Thomas Lawrence]

Thanks for all the comments and talk. I shall have to check out ocTane and InSpectres.

I have now tried two free methods of creating my own printer's spread for booklet versions of some RPG PDFs.

THe first method utilised a small freeware program based on a Perl script called PDFBKLT.exe, which is available from this webpage. This uses a command line prompt. It did the needed job beautifully for My Life WIth Master, provided the -l operator was used for linear scaling. However, trying it with Dogs in the Vineyard caused a number of picture errors to manifest - although most of the text was arranged correctly, many of the pictures either vanished or appeared corrupted.

My next thing to try was a free trial of CutePDF Pro. This does add a small add banner to the PDF's it manipulates, but the effect is not excessive. It's built in Booklet functionality performs the job admirably and handled Dogs in the Vineyard with ease.

If anyone has any questions about my experience with either of these programs I'll happily answer them.

[andrew_kenrick]

So, as a publisher, what is the best way to set my pdf up so it can be used in this manner? I had a go with one of my Dead of Night adventures so it could be printed out and assembled as a mini-booklet, but that involved me having to shuffle the pages about in Acrobat manually. I'd sooner have an automated way of doing it!

[Thomas Lawrence]

So, as a publisher, what is the best way to set my pdf up so it can be used in this manner? I had a go with one of my Dead of Night adventures so it could be printed out and assembled as a mini-booklet, but that involved me having to shuffle the pages about in Acrobat manually. I'd sooner have an automated way of doing it!

As a publisher it might be worth forking out the money for a piece of software that would do it for you, like CutePDF above. Other than that, just rearranging the pages is the way.

[Jared A. Sorensen]

There's a third-party program for InDesign called InBooklet that duplexes pages. I think that's the term.

That's how you can take the standard 1..2..3... pagination of a PDF and make it easy to print out and turn into a book.

- J

[Joe J Prince]

fineprint is good too, I think there's a free version available.

It's what I use to put out booklet versions of all my PDF RPGs.

Cheers,
JoE

[Clay]

Here's a crazy idea, but it seems like if you've got an inkjet printer it's actually cheaper to go to your local copy shop and run the booklet on their duplex printer.  I cheat because I've got a duplex printer where I work, but it works out pretty well.  I'm not sure what it would cost to take it to the printer, but from the last user manual I printed up I seem to remember something like $10/copy, most of the money being spent in cover and binding.

[Narf the Mouse]

What is a 'printers' spread'?