Hey Jon, Great work that pays homage to a great edition and Mr. Gygax. Recreating a book to match an existing book is MUCH harder than creating one from scratch!!! Your work is appreciated. I run into the same problems that you did recreating a book that has no existing digitals. My non-freelancing, "pay the bills" day job is as a graphic designer at the Center of Military History and occasionally, I'll have to recreate old WWII books that were written in 1945 and are into their 20+...
Great work that pays homage to a great edition and Mr. Gygax. Recreating a book to match an existing book is MUCH harder than creating one from scratch!!! Your work is appreciated. I run into the same problems that you did recreating a book that has no existing digitals. My non-freelancing, "pay the bills" day job is as a graphic designer at the Center of Military History and occasionally, I'll have to recreate old WWII books that were written in 1945 and are into their 20+ reprinting! It's part of an ongoing process to get rid of the old film negatives that the books were printed from in the past. How I do it is by cutting the binding of the book off (I know, folks reading this are passing out at the thought of cutting a D&D book up), then I run it through a high-speed bulk scanner, I then turn the scanned page image files into a single PDF and then OCR it (tough part is if there are tables in the book as OCR chews them up, I have to recreate the tables from scratch). I locate and scan the original photos from either our own archives or the National Archives collection, then lay the book out again in InDesign. The toughest thing in layout is getting the fonts to hold to a page without pushing or pulling. This is especially difficult if you are working to stick with the book's existing index. Getting an exact matching font is impossible (Times Roman is the worst as there are thousands of TR fonts out there) and even the slightest variation can throw the text flow off.
In a nutshell, I appreciate the work your team did on this project and thanks for sharing the process with us Jon!
Yep, yep! I had to do a similar project involving old newspaper articles. With all the bleed-through, it takes a lot of finesse and judgment to clean up and batch processing isn't always possible. I like the beautiful cover treatment on this re-creation.
Great work that pays homage to a great edition and Mr. Gygax. Recreating a book to match an existing book is MUCH harder than creating one from scratch!!! Your work is appreciated. I run into the same problems that you did recreating a book that has no existing digitals. My non-freelancing, "pay the bills" day job is as a graphic designer at the Center of Military History and occasionally, I'll have to recreate old WWII books that were written in 1945 and are into their 20+...
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