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Fixing the MT CD-ROM

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DonM

Moderator
Moderator
Marquis
Marc has asked me to put together a complete list of issues with the MegaTraveller CD-ROM, similar to the CT CD-ROM issues list.

Here's the current list:

Code: 
0211 MT Players' Manual.pdf: pp. 4, 27-28, 63-64 missing; some misordered pages.
0212 MT Referee's Manual.pdf: pp. 102, 104 need clean rescan; many misordered pages.
0213 MT Imperial Encyclopedia.pdf: Spinward Marches data needs clean rescan.
0214 MT Rebellion Sourcebook.pdf: pp. 72-75, inside back cover need clean rescan. 
0215 MT Referee's Companion.pdf: pp. 43, 86, 95 need clean rescan. 
0216 MT COACC.pdf: no specific issues. 
0218 MT Fighting Ships of the Shattered Imperium.pdf: p. 25 upside down. 
0219 MT Knightfall.pdf: p. 76 needs clean rescan. 
0221 MT Hard Times.pdf: pictures and tables fuzzy; needs clean rescan.
0223 MT Assignment Vigilante.pdf: pp. 1-2, 9, 14 need clean rescan. 
0224 MT Astrogator's Guide to Diaspora.pdf: pp. 8-9 are upside down; all tables need clean rescan. Color sector map needs higher resolution. 
0225 MT Arrival Vengeance.pdf: many misordered pages; all tables need clean rescan.
0000 MT Imperiallines1-2.pdf: p. 4 needs clean rescan. 
All files need to be reviewed for page breaks and have FFE separators added.
MT Challenge articles missing.

Please post if I've missed anything.
 
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DonM said:
Marc has asked me to put together a complete list of issues with the MegaTraveller CD-ROM, similar to the CT CD-ROM issues list.

So... if people could post the problems with the files...
Click to expand...

Where is the big file list to show progress?
 
Gadrin said:
Most of the pictures/tables that are set apart in Hard Times simply are unreadable.
Click to expand...

Ditto. The tables in Hard Times, being shaded rather than white-background, did not scan well and in fact are illegible.
 
Players' Manual is missing
p. 4 (which may be blank)
p. 27
p. 28
p. 63
p. 64

These have some important information for gameplay, so it would be great if they were posted on ffe's site pending inclusion on new version of the cd. Or if anyone who has the book is willing to scan them and post them here under Fair Use guidelines, many of us would be very grateful!

The only other issue I've seen with the Player's Manual is that the inside front and back covers are light grey rather than black printing, which is a little harder to read, and the Spinward Marches map in the front is too small/low res to read. But that's pretty trivial, since there are so many other Spinward Marches maps out there.
 
Arrival Vengeance

Like a lot of the files, this book is offset in its page order, so page spreads do not show up correctly. This is not a big problem with this module. It's worse in the Players' Manual, and much worse in CT books where you expect to print out spreads all at once. But it would be nice if placeholder pages were put in (one just before the title page in this case), like in some of the books on the CT CD.

More important are the shaded boxes in Vengeance, which range from barely legible to illegible. They need to be carefully scanned, carefully compressed into pdfs, and carefully reviewed for legibility.

Specifically:
p. 3: box mostly legible, but problems around the edges
p. 12: I think there's stuff that's invisible/unreadable around the outside of the ship plans. Can't even tell for sure.
p. 17: Most of the information in the box is on shaded backgrounds, and totally illegible.
p. 24: box mostly illegible.
p. 26: box is almost all legible (except the last date, which I can probably tease out), but a better scan would be nice.
p. 31: box largely legible, but gets to be a big problem around the edges.

(note these page numbers refer to the book's page numbering, not the pdf file's numbering)
 
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Referee's Manual
Again, offset page spreads. This time it's because, after the front cover, the next two pages are the inside of the front cover, then the inside of the back cover (Rule of Man map). Should probably put them back in order, since the table of contents does tell you where to find the RoM map.

The maps at the end of the book both have problems:

The First Imperium map on p. 104 (p. 107 as the pdf file itself is numbered) is scanned a bit light, so small dots are missing. This is not very important, as they're just indicators of scattered systems in the rifts.

Much weirder and more problematic, the Cultural Regions of the Imperium map on p. 102 (p.105 of the pdf) seems to have been written on before it was scanned. Several subsectors are actually blacked out, and the blots make the names of the cultural regions illegible in several cases.

That's all I see in that book.

============

Imperial Encyclopedia Looks almost completely clean to me. Spreads are correct. The inside of the back cover is scanned (or originally printed) light grey. It's perfectly legible by humans, but the pdf OCR didn't work on it, so text is unsearchable and unselectable. It's all just Spinward Marches data, so it's all available elsewhere.

============

Rebellion Sourcebook

Almost clean, and scanned so the spreads come out right. The only issue I see is the maps on pp.72-75, showing the progress of the wars. On each of these maps, it says

" Represents major battles or clashes."
Only you can't see the mark that's intended to represent them, except maybe a couple of flyspecks on one or two of the legends. Nor is any such obvious on the actual maps, unless it's the tiny dots spread here and there. If so, they're at the very edge of resolution, and many are no doubt missing. They seem to resolve better at subsector edges, for some reason. I get no better results by zooming in or printing the maps. A very careful scan and compression would be needed to get these through, or a much higher resolution scan.

Oh, one other thing: it'd be great if a larger, higher contrast, higher resolution version of the hexagon sector map from the inside back cover were included on the CD, so you could print it out at finer quality and read the numbers better (and use it).

=============

Referee's Companion
Page spreads offset again.

In a few places, small print is at the edge of resolution, and hard to read. The problematic pages are:
p.86 (hexagon sector map, again - high contrast this time, but still too small for the numbers, and won't print well enough).
p.95 (word generation tables)
p.43 (calendar - this is quite okay to read, especially since the numbers are, well, predictable, but it's small enough to be a bit fuzzy - a cleaner scan could be got with care)

That's all for me tonight.
 
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Continuing on...

COACC - the only issue I see is that a blank page is again missing, so the spreads are offset. Not much of a problem in this book.

============

Fighting Ships has the same page-spread problem, but it's much more of an issue for this, because lots of the time an illustration is supposed to face a ship description, and doesn't. Other than that, the only problem I see is that p.25, the illustration of the BM-15, is upside down.

============

Knightfall: Same page-spread problem. Again no big deal. More important, the p. 76 map of the Massilia sector is scanned too small. You can probably tease most of the information and names out of it with careful study, but a larger, higher-res scan should be included. Presumably the information is now on travellermap.com, and of course you can reconstruct the whole map from the data on the following pages, but still...

============

Hard Times is in BAD shape. Shading is the problem.

This book should probably be re-scanned start to finish, with careful Photoshop/GIMP work and a greyscale (not b/w) final output. Or scan in color, if that shading was originally colored.

Specifically (but not citing pages, there's too many): The Imperium maps are messy, and the darkest parts have unreadable text in them. Lots of pages have shaded boxes of text, which is often mostly unreadable. Lots of pages have shaded lines of tables, which are usually unreadable. Surface maps have shading and textures that are hard to make out. Detail star maps are at the edge of readability, too. Oh, and once again, it's got offset page spreads.

===========

Vigilante has the same problems as Hard Times, but on a much smaller scale. Shaded table rows on p.9 can just be read if you zoom in. Shaded boxes on p.14 are readable enough, but messy-looking. (There are a couple of similar smudges on p.2, and the b/w illustration cover page on p.1 is not what it could be, but these are not that important.) The color scans are gorgeous.

===========

Diaspora again has the same problems with shading: the system data charts have shaded blocks. I think they're all readable by humans, but the pdf OCR doesn't catch much if anything there. Also, the lovely sector map printed in color on black should be provided at higher resolution.

Again, the book has offset page spreads. Pages 8 and 9 are upside down.

===========

I don't know what the MT1,2,3 thingies are. Typed background info for computer games, I take it, but I don't know anything about those. It would be good to have some explanation of them on the CD, if there's a reason to include them at all.

The scans of Imperial Lines #1-3 look good. The sector map on #1, p.4 is fine, given that it's presenting very little information. You can't actually read hex numbers, but that hardly matters.
 
Slightly off topic, but related IMHO,

The MT CD and the JTAS CD both have no Challenge Magazine articles for MT. If they are planning a separate CD for the later articles (which are listed in the master Index on the JTAS CD) then fine.

If they are not planning on a second Magazine CD, then including the Challenge Articles for MT on the MT CD would be nice. (And the same for any TNE articles and the long awaited TNE CD.)
 
0000 MT Imperiallines1-2.pdf
all pages light but readable
IL#2, pg6 (PDF pg 14) rotate
 
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0212 MT Referee's Manual.pdf
My copy almost had none of the problems listed
No misordered pages
pg 102 (PDF pg 105) "⌧ural Regions of the Imperium" needs rescan in greyscale (shaded portions of map unreadable black blotches)
 
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0213 MT Imperial Encyclopedia.pdf
good up to book page 96 (PDF pg 98)
Book pg 97 too light
last few pages missing (index indicates at least 99 pages)
 
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DonM said:
0215 MT Referee's Companion.pdf: pp. 43, 86, 95 need clean rescan.
Click to expand...

0215 MT Referee's Sourcebook.pdf
My copy of pg 43 is clean
pg 86 needs rescan (hex number unreadable)
PDF jumps from book page 88 to 91 (missing 89, 90)
pg 95 needs rescan (text too small - unreadable)
 
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