Hs the CD from Farfuter.net been corrected form the Errata?
- Thread starter infojunky
- Start date
Note I was asking about MT specifically.
Sorry.
If there was an errata updated version of MT, I'm pretty sure it would be called the "Gold" edition, since that's how it would be treated.
I think MT is too big to reprint and republish with all of the errata.
MT is still just scans.
And while scans of the DGP MT materials exist, Marc doesn't have publication rights for them. He's still trying.
Ok that answers my question.
We won't mention them other than the digital backups exist...
While I've been tempted to ask for permission to relayout and errata correct MT, I don't actually have the motivation to do so in a complete and professional level.. I'd rather do a second edition, but while Mongoose is in operation, that's NOT going to happen.
On a whimsy, I was trying to just duplicate Book 1 in terms of layout and such.
Mind, I wasn't using an actual layout program, just a word processor. But it fell apart quickly. The smallest detail makes the fonts go off the rails.
It was close, for sure, but very imperfect.
Laying out all the tables plus the art would be a daunting task.
Ironically, the tables aren't a big problem for me.
A revised version would, of need, repaginate.
Indeed.
I guess the biggest issue is simply the addition of glaring white space, or, at least, the other editing involved.
Simply if Chapter XX grew by 3 paragraphs, there's a bunch of dead space at the end of the chapter. Back in the day, naturally, pages were expensive, so it was a goal to "make everything fit".
Similarly, dispersing art throughout the work helped break up the "walls of text" that the rule entailed.
It wouldn't be that difficult to do a "text only" updated reflow of the documents, but, boy, would they be hard to read.
Not if the layout guy knows what they're doing.
While my cheat sheets I produce for players to use are dense, the density is in blocks of single-spaced tables, with minimal (0.5 point) padding from the top/bottom - just enough to keep descenders off the line of the table internal borders, and the ascenders clear, as well (most fonts, rendering in that point size, already include a point or two clearance above... But dividers and whitespace between blocks.
My house rules document, I have 9 careers per page... including all 7 tables each, plus a contacts roll table.. If I were to clean that up for a revision, I'd up the point size a bit (it's 9.5pt in a large displaying narrow font), making it 1.5 pages, and more the career prose to be on the tables page spread.
Well, the premise was that the layout guy in the original knew what they were doing, so adding several paragraphs more of content becomes a square peg round hole problem requiring the hole to expand or the peg to be shaved.
going to pure text isn't an issue, really. Just add/remove pages as needed in multiples of four. Also note: most chapters as is don't end with full page. Withe a destructible copy or good scan, if the license is retained on the art, pagination won;t be a huge issue.
Layout isn't hard, with the right software and a bit of reading. It is time consuming, fiddly, but not hard.
The MT Layout is fairly simple... Letter, 1/2" margins, maybe 3/4" on the inside edge (esp for the square bindings.)
| page type | Header | footer | page borders | Sections |
| Chapter front | suppressed | Page No. | no |
|
| Chapter body | Left Pg: Chapter, GDW right Pg: Book, Chapter | Page No. | no |
|
| Chapter end | Left Pg: Chapter, GDW right Pg: Book, Chapter | Page No. | no |
|
| Tables 1C | Table Title | Page No | Yes¹. Overlain squares on corners. |
|
| Tables 2C | Table Title | Page No. | Yes¹. Overlain squares on corners. |
|
| Tables 3C ² | Table Title | Page No. | Yes¹. Overlain squares on corners. |
|
| Table 2C WT ³ | Table Title | Page No. | Yes¹. Overlain squares on corners. |
|
| Table 2C TW ³ | Table Title | Page No. | Yes¹. Overlain squares on corners. |
|
¹: Best done as SVG or EPS monochrome background image on a master page, where it's a few dozen bytes.
²: exemplar is the skill list at PM 28-29
³: exemplar is the character gen tables. Tables within appear to be tabbed, rather than table objects. In some programs, table-in-table is doable.
⁴: Exemplars are Career Types Info PM p. 12, Doctor Anderson, PM p. 18
Most of this looks like it was done in PageMaker or Frame Maker; it's a bit more nuanced than Word layouts of the time, and we know GDW was an IBM shop, so the mac specific page layout programs weren't doable.
Well, I look at the MT Players manual, and I'm not going to say there's no whitespace available, there's certainly not very much. I see some whitespace creep between paragraphs, some is bigger than others. But pretty much each page has 2 filled, fully justified columns of text.
I think some of the issue I ran into with my experiment can be tied simply to using the wrong font. There could easily be kerning and other spacing issues. Mess up one sentence break/word wrap/hyphenation, and there goes the whole page.
This is the first paragraph of book 1. It goes wrong at the 7th line. That's with an 8.5pt Helvetica. The original paragraph is 15 lines, this one is 14.
WIth an 8.6 font, it's darn close. Just the last two lines are wrong. The "and" is moved from line 15 to the end of 14.
An 8.63 pt font makes the last line work. That's intuitive!
Also, in page layout software (vs word processing), I'm pretty sure you can tweak spacing and what not on a line by line basis, rather than what I'm doing.
But it still doesn't look as good as the original. Too much space in the 14th line.
The point being that layout isn't necessarily hard, but matching a legacy layout is. And that I imagine there was a lot of just plain tweaking, nudging here and there to get the formatter to fill things in properly.
I think some of the issue I ran into with my experiment can be tied simply to using the wrong font. There could easily be kerning and other spacing issues. Mess up one sentence break/word wrap/hyphenation, and there goes the whole page.
This is the first paragraph of book 1. It goes wrong at the 7th line. That's with an 8.5pt Helvetica. The original paragraph is 15 lines, this one is 14.
WIth an 8.6 font, it's darn close. Just the last two lines are wrong. The "and" is moved from line 15 to the end of 14.
An 8.63 pt font makes the last line work. That's intuitive!
Also, in page layout software (vs word processing), I'm pretty sure you can tweak spacing and what not on a line by line basis, rather than what I'm doing.
But it still doesn't look as good as the original. Too much space in the 14th line.
The point being that layout isn't necessarily hard, but matching a legacy layout is. And that I imagine there was a lot of just plain tweaking, nudging here and there to get the formatter to fill things in properly.
From my >5 year old thumb drive version.
B1-3:
CT-77 9th
CT-81 Second Edition 6th
TTB: 1st
Starter: unnumbered
B4: 8
B5-79: 3
B5-80: 5
B6: 1
B7: 1
B8: 2
I meant MT's Printings
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