LBB size

[plazman30]

The coating is contact paper. I cover all my paperbacks in it.

I did this book using the matte finish option for the cover. That was a mistake. The matte finish feels horrible. I don't know how to describe it. It just feels "odd." So, the ones I re-ordered, I got with glossy covers. Obviously, that's not the same as the LBBs, but you have to work with what you have access to.

You can go to Lulu.com and use their pricing calculator to figure what it would cost you. I recommend the following settings:

1. Digest size
2. Book Length: 48 pages
3. Premium Black and White (trust me on this one. The price difference is minor, but it's worth it)
4. Saddle Stitched
5. Glossy cover (Matte cover feels odd in the hand. I do not recommend it.)

There are a few other services that will do a saddle stitched POD book.

This is the cover design I created for my print copy of the LBBs.

Just a warning. You can't just upload your PDF to a POD service and magically get a book back. You need to format it for their specification. You'll need to make the cover. And you'll need to open the PDF and remove the front and back cover, and any blank pages to get the book down to 48 pages. Then you probably will need to resize the book, since there's usually a bleed margin they trim off and you'll need to add that to the book.

I'm an amateur font nerd and DTP experimenter, so this was relatively easy for me. But it could be a hurdle for some others.

The other issue you face with Lulu specifically is that their process is 100% automated. Should the process require any kind of human intervention and they feel you're printing someone else's copyrighted work, even if you have the legal right to do so, they'll simply refund your money and ban your account.

I've read a few stories where a publisher specifically gives rights to print one copy of the PDF for personal use. So the person sends it off to Lulu, and something happens. Package gets lost in the mail. Print comes out bad. Anything that requires you reach out to a human being.. They reach out, and Lulu bans their account, even though you have an official letter from the publisher giving you permission to print the book.

 

[Spinward Flow]

This is saddle stitch, POD done in digest size (5.5×8.5).

Looks BEAUTIFUL!

I can tell, at a glance, that handling books printed like this will "feel authentic" to the original print run.

I think they really need to be saddle-stitched for the proper LBB experience. Saddle-stitched books will also lie flat on the table. Perfect-bound will close on you as soon as you let go of it.

THAT is the real nostalgic feeling for LBBs.
If you've never handled the real article in person, it's hard to describe the difference.

 

[plazman30]

Looks BEAUTIFUL!

I can tell, at a glance, that handling books printed like this will "feel authentic" to the original print run.

THAT is the real nostalgic feeling for LBBs.
If you've never handled the real article in person, it's hard to describe the difference.

So, here is my story about that.

I'm 56 years old. So, I am the right age to own the LBBs. But back in the early 80s, I was AD&D-only, I would not even look at another RPG. I remember walking into my local hobby shop and always seeing all the Traveller books on the shelf. But I had no interest in them. I actually bought Gamma World and Top Secret, because I felt they were at least AD&D adjacent, since they were TSR products. But they were not the almighty AD&D, so I just ignored them.

Then I got to college and met a bunch of friends and I found out they were all into RPGs also. But when we got together, they played Call of Cthulhu. And I immediately tried to find ways to "sabotage" the game, so we could end the campaign early and get back to AD&D. Problem was, by session 2, I was having way too much fun. I learned AD&D was not the end-all, be-all of role-playing games. Then I tried a few other games and immediately knew I wanted to experience as many RPGs as possible. Then things happened: job, wife, kids. Of course, by then, GDW either folded or was in sad shape, so I could not get any Classic Traveller products anymore. I honestly hadn't thought about getting Classic Traveller until a few years ago when I joined a Mongoose Traveller game. Well, by then prices were through the roof. So, I ordered the CD-ROM and just watched videos on YouTube of people's Classic Traveller material and hoped I'd find some books in a thrift store one day, or on Craigslist.

POD will let me relive the "good old days" I never got to experience because I was an idiot.

 

[plazman30]

So, no one has a GDW301 boxed set they can measure for me and get me the picture on the bottom?

 

[plazman30]

My LBB PODs arrived today!

I changed the cover of Book 0 so the front matches Books 1-3. I believe the orignal Book 0 had the word Traveller in white. I also justified the text on the back cover, because I thought it looked better that way,

 

[whartung]

Those came out pretty good!

 

[plazman30]

Here's where nitpicky me has complaints:

1. The word Game Designers' Workshop on the bottom is too close to the edge of the book. According to the template I uploaded, it should have been about 3 mm higher.
2. The template has a "bleed area" that gets cut off from the cover. I extended the black to cover the entire bleed area. But on some books, I can see a bit of white on the edge of the cover, which should not be there if they cut the bleed area off.
3. The last book I had printed, I had a matte cover done. It was nice and black, but it felt horrible in the hand. Which has been my experience with other POD stuff I had printed at Lulu.com. So, this time I ordered the glossy cover. Feels much better in the hand. But the black doesn't look as crisp and dark as it does on the matte cover.
4. I know the original LBBs were all saddle stitched. The ones Lulu did are also saddle stitched, but they're also square-backed, as you can tell from the last image. Not a bad thing. Just different from the LBBs.
5. The printing on the back cover is too close to the edge. It was supposed to be a few millimeters from the edge. I think it's that close because of the square-back added to the saddle stitch.

I will not order another set. These are acceptable. But I will tweak the template in case I get more LBBs printed. But I'm noticing the scan quality of some of the other LBBs isn't as good as these 4 are. I found another POD service, Mixam, that will saddle stitch PODs up to 64 pages long. So, I started prepping Mercenary, and there was more cleanup to do inside, rather that just design a clean cover and upload it.

I think a better solution is to "remaster" the LBBs by recreating them in a desktop publishing app from scratch, but that's a lot of typing to do, especially for one old fart in his basement. If these rules were pubilc domain, we could crowd source the work. But they're not. And IMHO, the biggest PITA is redoing the tables.

 

[spank]

Here's where nitpicky me has complaints:

1. The word Game Designers' Workshop on the bottom is too close to the edge of the book. According to the template I uploaded, it should have been about 3 mm higher.
2. The template has a "bleed area" that gets cut off from the cover. I extended the black to cover the entire bleed area. But on some books, I can see a bit of white on the edge of the cover, which should not be there if they cut the bleed area off.
3. The last book I had printed, I had a matte cover done. It was nice and black, but it felt horrible in the hand. Which has been my experience with other POD stuff I had printed at Lulu.com. So, this time I ordered the glossy cover. Feels much better in the hand. But the black doesn't look as crisp and dark as it does on the matte cover.
4. I know the original LBBs were all saddle stitched. The ones Lulu did are also saddle stitched, but they're also square-backed, as you can tell from the last image. Not a bad thing. Just different from the LBBs.
5. The printing on the back cover is too close to the edge. It was supposed to be a few millimeters from the edge. I think it's that close because of the square-back added to the saddle stitch.

I will not order another set. These are acceptable. But I will tweak the template in case I get more LBBs printed. But I'm noticing the scan quality of some of the other LBBs isn't as good as these 4 are. I found another POD service, Mixam, that will saddle stitch PODs up to 64 pages long. So, I started prepping Mercenary, and there was more cleanup to do inside, rather that just design a clean cover and upload it.

I think a better solution is to "remaster" the LBBs by recreating them in a desktop publishing app from scratch, but that's a lot of typing to do, especially for one old fart in his basement. If these rules were pubilc domain, we could crowd source the work. But they're not. And IMHO, the biggest PITA is redoing the tables.

From what I see the real issue is getting a font to match the spacing of the typesetting in the OG books. I've tried a few, Orginal I thought it was Optima or some variant, but alot of the letters were slightly off. Based on Spinward Scout's tip,

Post in thread 'Book 9: Pirates preview'

Mar 28, 2025

Don McKinney told me once that the font in Classic Traveller was Univers 55.

I've found that BT Zurich Roman at 8.5 point in Microsoft Word is visually identical to the font in The Traveller Book.

Univers was created by Adrian Frutiger in Zurich, Switzerland in 1957.

Which is why we see clones of Univers called Zurich and Frutiger.

All of them should be somewhat interchangeable, except maybe in boldness and italicizing.

The Pirates book really just looks to need to be a bit bolder or a heavier print thickness. The line spacing might only be o.01 off from the LLBs.

• Spinward Scout

• 

I've been looking at Univers. He suggested Univers 55, Which was very close but not quite bold enough. After some looking I found the number system for Univers and Tried 65, because it's bolder. VERY CLOSE.
It needs to be very slightly more condensed, and the letters and punctuation need to be rounded on the ends.

 

[mike wightman]

Is today's scanning to pdf software not a lot better than when the FFE cds were produced?

The quality and formatting of some of the scans are woeful - pages saved as image files instead of text, poor text recognition, missing pages, upside down pages and more.

 

[Ildefonse]

I think a better solution is to "remaster" the LBBs by recreating them in a desktop publishing app from scratch, but that's a lot of typing to do, especially for one old fart in his basement. If these rules were pubilc domain, we could crowd source the work. But they're not. And IMHO, the biggest PITA is redoing the tables.

Man, I would be all over something like this: use Frank's CT concordance, clean everything up, release to the public. Many years ago I did something similar for the Vance Integral Edition, and it was great fun. CT LBB's would be much smaller in scope, if only we could...

 

[Silverhawk]

So, no one has a GDW301 boxed set they can measure for me and get me the picture on the bottom?

I looked at my boxed set but it doesn't have the 301 on it. But that may be because it is the first box since the. books are '77 editions near as I can tell. After I got it a friend of mine who was there regretted passing it over when he looked at it.

 

[plazman30]

From what I see the real issue is getting a font to match the spacing of the typesetting in the OG books. I've tried a few, Orginal I thought it was Optima or some variant, but alot of the letters were slightly off. Based on Spinward Scout's tip,

Post in thread 'Book 9: Pirates preview'

Mar 28, 2025

Don McKinney told me once that the font in Classic Traveller was Univers 55.

I've found that BT Zurich Roman at 8.5 point in Microsoft Word is visually identical to the font in The Traveller Book.

Univers was created by Adrian Frutiger in Zurich, Switzerland in 1957.

Which is why we see clones of Univers called Zurich and Frutiger.

All of them should be somewhat interchangeable, except maybe in boldness and italicizing.

The Pirates book really just looks to need to be a bit bolder or a heavier print thickness. The line spacing might only be o.01 off from the LLBs.

• Spinward Scout

• 

I've been looking at Univers. He suggested Univers 55, Which was very close but not quite bold enough. After some looking I found the number system for Univers and Tried 65, because it's bolder. VERY CLOSE.
It needs to be very slightly more condensed, and the letters and punctuation need to be rounded on the ends.
View attachment 6117
View attachment 6116

The cover of the LBB is definitely Optima, and the internal is Univers. The problem you're having is getting a modern digital computer typeface to match optically with same typeface done on an old Letraset typesetting machine. You're going to get close, but not exactly right.

Plus, there are various versions of these typefaces available. The cover is Optima. But in the realm of computer typesetting, we have have Optima, Optima Pro, and Optima Nova.

Univers has the same problem. There is Univers, the original typeface. Then we have the first digital version, known as Linotype Univers, which is a "reworked" version by the original font by its creator. Then there's Univers Next and Univers Pro.

That's why I think getting a perfect match for the original LBBs is going to be a fool's errand. I'm sure you can get a 100% match, but it's going to be a LOT of work to get there.

We need to address font licensing. To use a font in an ebook (epub, pdf, etc) you need to pay an annual fee and many times it's an annual fee, plus a per-unit cost. So, this is not a "one and done" purchase. Because of this, I think any smart publisher will look for clones of Univers, or open source recreations under another name, just to avoid the absurd licensing costs. You can buy a copy of Univers in various weights for probably a few hundred dollars. To use it in an epub and either sell it or even give it away for free will probably cost you around $2000 PER YEAR. And that price will GO UP, depending on how many books you sell.

So rather than find a weight of Univers that will work, you're better off grabbing the font Perun, which is open source licensed. It's 99% Univers in appearance, but it may not lay on the page the same way. But at least it prevents Monotype from hunting you down and extorting a lot of money out of you.

 

[plazman30]

Is today's scanning to pdf software not a lot better than when the FFE cds were produced?

The quality and formatting of some of the scans are woeful - pages saved as image files instead of text, poor text recognition, missing pages, upside down pages and more.

The scans of LBBs 1-3 are quite good. I see the others are not so great.

A lot of it is the resolution you scan at. Scanning at 600 DPI produces results you almost can't distinguish from the original when you print it out. But scanning at 600 DPI produces some really large files. When these books got scanned in 20 years ago, it's possible that they scanned them in at something like 150 DPI to save on space.

OCR software has gotten WAY BETTER than it was when these books first got scanned in. But the actual scanning itself hasn't changed much in the last 20 years.

And there is software that can convert scanned text into editable text. But the best it can do is make a Word document. It can't make a desktop publishing file, and it certainly can't make nice formatted editable tables.

 

[aramis]

The original LBBs were printed "sideways" on standard 8.5x11 inch paper that was then folded in half at the middle of the short axis and staple bound through the fold.

Hence ... 11/2 = 5.5x8.5 inches

Once the books were bound, they presumably went through an edge cutting machine to square off the edges (so the pages in the middle of the bind didn't stick out further than the cover when the LBB was closed) before getting boxed up for shipping to retailers. This would then mean (inevitably) that when the books were open, the pages towards the center would be narrower than the pages towards the cover (due to packing losses when folding paper). This was actually helpful when using the books, since it meant that (while open) the pages were easier to thumb through to find the page you were looking for (cut to same length while closed means cut to different lengths while open). So if you pulled the staples out and compared the sizes of the pages in a LBB, they would all be subtly different depending on where they were located within the binding.

It's a technique called Saddle Stitch Binding.

Needless to say, some of the downsides to Saddle Stitch Binding are:

• Limited Page Count: Saddle stitch is not suitable for publications with a high page count.
• No Spine Printing: There is no spine to print on, which can limit display options.
• Durability: While still sturdy, saddle stitch may not be as durable as perfect binding, especially for long-term use.

Side effect of who was doing the quality control of the scans.
Not everyone was as ... meticulous ... as they should have been.

Most home units are limited to about 25 sheets, and to about 20 sheets reliably. Some with long-crown staples, up to 35 sheets, 30 sheets reliably. Note that a cover is about 3 sheets worth.
I got a cheap Chinese 25-sheet one, about 8 years ago.

If you're a cheapskate, cut a trench in a board at 45° to the orthoganal, mount it so the trench is up, prefold the pages, stack them over the slot, use a T-50 to drop two construction staples into the slot through the paper, then use a finishing tap to fold the legs down. I got this through about 55 sheets.

 

[plazman30]

I just ordered a POD of High Guard from Mimax.com. I'll post pictures when it comes in.

 

[plazman30]

So, I should clean up my house. But instead, I futzing with Traveller PDFs on my Mac…

Learned something interesting today. I have an app on my Mac called PDF Expert. It lets me convert a PDF into a Word doc. So, I took Book 8 - Robots and threw it in there. I wasn't hopeful, since it's a scanned PDF and not a rendered PDF. But worked! It wasn't perfect. I had to fix typos and font sizes.

But once I set up styles, I think I can get through cleaning up a book pretty quickly.

So, here is page 4 of Robots from the original PDF:

And here is what I recreated:

I know the page number is wrong. I can fix that later.

The font I am using is Perun, which looks like an open source clone of Univers, which is the font the LBBs use.

I REALLY REALLY want to bold the word Introduction across the top, but that's not the way the original LBB had it, so I'll leave it be.

There may be typos. I have not proofread everything.

 

[whartung]

Looks like you have extra whitespace as well, perhaps too much indent, little more blank space around ROBOT DESIGN SYSTEM etc.

 

[spank]

So, I should clean up my house. But instead, I futzing with Traveller PDFs on my Mac…

Learned something interesting today. I have an app on my Mac called PDF Expert. It lets me convert a PDF into a Word doc. So, I took Book 8 - Robots and threw it in there. I wasn't hopeful, since it's a scanned PDF and not a rendered PDF. But worked! It wasn't perfect. I had to fix typos and font sizes.

But once I set up styles, I think I can get through cleaning up a book pretty quickly.

So, here is page 4 of Robots from the original PDF:

And here is what I recreated:

I know the page number is wrong. I can fix that later.

The font I am using is Perun, which looks like an open source clone of Univers, which is the font the LBBs use.

I REALLY REALLY want to bold the word Introduction across the top, but that's not the way the original LBB had it, so I'll leave it be.

There may be typos. I have not proofread everything.

Looks good.
From what I see, at first glance, the new text is a bit fluffier than the OG. For example the first paragraph is Four lines in the OG, and 5 in the new. More like 3.5 and 4.1,.
I think a lot of the difference come down to the spaces between the words. IDK if that is a function of the font, or the word processing, From trying to clean up a scan of Space Patrol , the 1977 edition, that when you are editing scanned PDFs the software loves to fool around with the spacing. When you re-type one word the whole paragraph is rearranged, IDK if that's the case here.
So even if you get the font and size perfect, the text on the page ends up being differently arranged because the software plays with the spacing between letters and words, to try to fill the line and make the left edge and right edge smooth, ending with a letter justified to the edge of the text box. It looks like OG Traveller did this as well. I wish there was some way force certain words to be the first and last in a line, that would go a long way toward being able to match the originals.
It's crazy to say, but I think it'd be easier to find a linotype machine, and re-typeset the pages.

 

[plazman30]

My control of spacing is limited, since I am using a word processor here. I'll tinker more more and see what I can come up with.

 

[plazman30]

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