Happy Dave Arneson day to all of you! In celebration of this day, I have an exciting announcement -- the one I was referring to yesterday.
The Announcement
A couple of months ago I won an eBay auction of the 1977 print edition wherein all illustrations were done by Dave himself. The book cost me $150 -- and yes, it really is that hard to obtain, though it was in rather good condition with both maps present. The books is beautiful and a unique insight into the early days of our hobby. One that I am truly sorry to see people being restricted from by its steep price.
Through the last couple of months I have busied myself with the creation of a digital PDF version of the whole book and have gone to great lengths at creating the best result I possibly could. I will return to this digitizing process below, but before that I would like to present my plans to you.
I learned from this blog post by Dave Arneson, that he owned all the rights to the book. Rights which I assume has been transferred to his estate. I therefore contacted Kevin McColl, who hosts Dave Arneson's official website, and he agreed to send it along to the Dave Arneson Estate when I am finished with the PDF. I don't expect anything in return, but hopefully, the finished PDF will make it easy for the Dave Arneson Estate to upload the book (eg. to DriveThruRPG) and make it available again for everyone to enjoy.
I would say that I am about 75% finished with the whole process, but with my slow rate going through this I expect some more weeks before I will be done (The work has taken me 30+ hours until now and I don't have a lot of spare time currently). I will of course update you all when I get done.
Here are two samples of completed pages of the book:
The process
I have been photo editing for a long time (as seen from my previous posts as well), but quite recently learned about a great tool for taking on bigger projects like the scans of books. ScanTailor can, among other functions, organize, crop, rotate, de-skew and optimize images for the creation of beautiful PDF files with a small size. A lot of these functions can even be done automatically, though for some books it works a lot better than for others.
The whole process of digitizing this book can be listed like so:
- Scan all 96 pages + cover + two maps equivalent to 8 pages in best scanner resolution
- Go through all pages in ScanTailor to create preliminary PDF
- Read through the whole book and mark printing errors, speckles, spots for editing
- Retouch all marked places in Affinity Photo
- Separate the grid from the maps in Affinity Photo for 18 pages (plus the equivalent of 8 pages from the two separate maps) to get both grid and map represented in a 3 color index image compression.
- Go through the retouched pages in ScanTailor to create the final PDF
- OCR to make the text searchable and copy/paste-able
- Create PDF bookmarks for all headings
At the moment, I am through 75% of the pages in step 5 though it is a slow process. Retouching and editing of each image takes me at least half an hour. For most book purposes, steps 1, 2, 7 and 8 is enough to get a good usable PDF. In this case, however, I wanted the book to look as good as possible. This is two examples of the fixes I did throughout the whole book:
If anyone is interested I will gladly post some guide or detailed instructions at some point. Just ask in the comments
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