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My LWBs

toddaroo

SOC-9
Back here I inquired about the various weights of paper for the LBBs. I'd also asked about the fonts that were used, and I settled on Optima. The purpose of course is to ultimately fill in those missing LBBs in my physical collection from the Far Futures' CD. Inspiration took me and I have gone farther.

I edited the Mongoose Traveller PDFs I currently have by deleting superfluous pages and keeping the finished page count to 100 pages or under. Duplex laser printing them to digest size on 24# paper and adding a 67# cardstock cover I now have a growing collection of LWB... or Little White Books. (Yes, that is a scanned/printed copy of DGP's World Builders Handbook mixed in.

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This worked so well, that in addition to completing my LBB & Journal collection, my goal now is to finish off the Mongoose books, scan my remaining DGP MT books I have and print those, and print the Traveller 5 books from the CD - all in LWB format. Well, except for the CT and T5 books. I'll burn through black ink and print up proper covers for those.
 
Well, they look a lot better than the copies I printed off and stuck in a series of binders! Pretty awesome.
 
The pages of my LBB copies are in A5 plastic pockets - I figure they'll take more handling that way.

I'd make enquiries at your local print shop. They can probably arrange to have a set of glossy black covers printed properly for less than the cost of your ink.
 
I'd sure be appreciative if you'd be kind enough to write a step-by-step "how to" guide, including your choices of the programs, fonts etc, you utilized to do this nice work.

I might be inspired, myself!
 
I'd sure be appreciative if you'd be kind enough to write a step-by-step "how to" guide, including your choices of the programs, fonts etc, you utilized to do this nice work.

I might be inspired, myself!

Ditto that.

The text I get off some of the CT CD books is pretty wretched. Plus there are the missing pages that'd have to be inserted and so on.

Is there some special PDF-fu you have that we should know of?
 
Thanks for the kind words everyone. :D

I'll happily put together a simple step-by-step, dean & saundby. Not a problem at all. I'll list out the sortware I use, settings where applicable, and maybe another photo or two.

I agree there are some crummy pages in the PDFs on the CD (not to mention the missing pages). I am comparing those against copies purchased at DrivethruRPG to see if they are the same scans or different ones (the Drivethru copies have full cover scans where the copies I looked at on the CD do not). Some of the wretchedness can be cleaned up, and some might be a little more stubborn. I'll keep you updated when I start the process.

Thanks Icosahedron for the suggestion on having a print-shop do up the covers. That will definitely save me on ink and it will most likely look a lot better too.
 
I'm impressed and envious. I'm gonna have to figure out how to do something like this, so my original black booklets don't take so much wear-and-tear!

Nice job!
 
Thanks for the kind words everyone. :D

I'll happily put together a simple step-by-step, dean & saundby. Not a problem at all. I'll list out the sortware I use, settings where applicable, and maybe another photo or two.
Nifty, I'm looking forward to it.
I agree there are some crummy pages in the PDFs on the CD (not to mention the missing pages). I am comparing those against copies purchased at DrivethruRPG to see if they are the same scans or different ones (the Drivethru copies have full cover scans where the copies I looked at on the CD do not). Some of the wretchedness can be cleaned up, and some might be a little more stubborn. I'll keep you updated when I start the process.

Thanks Icosahedron for the suggestion on having a print-shop do up the covers. That will definitely save me on ink and it will most likely look a lot better too.
The OCR text in the CD PDFs does not match the image text in a lot of places. It's often quite garbled. Also, the scan of some books (Scout in my experience, others have been reported) is at a low resolution that results in pretty well unreadable prints of the images. And, since the OCR text is garbled, you can't cut and paste that for printing, either. It comes down to hand transcription if you want clean copy.

There were threads about flaws in the CT and JTAS CDs that didn't seem to go anywhere as far as existing owners were concerned. As it is, I don't even know if the CDs offered now have any corrections to them, so I have no idea whether buying another would get me anything better. I also don't know how the individual scans on DriveThru compare, so I'm left with what I've got not knowing if spending more will get me better or not. :nonono:

Anyway, looking forward to hearing how you did it.
 
I don't even know if the CDs offered now have any corrections to them, so I have no idea whether buying another would get me anything better.
As it happens, I bought a CD for CT just a week or so ago. If you have a particular example passage in mind perhaps I can look at it to see if it has been corrected.

I'm a little bummed to realize how many pages long is the thread on issues with the CD. I had assumed when I bought it that the books would be good copies, but now I'm really wondering about this. :(
 
My CT CD problems pretty well match what's in the list.

If you want a couple of quick checks, look at Scouts and The Imperial Fringe. On bk 6, my scan is low res and the OCR is garbled. On adventure 0, the scan is decent but there's no OCR.
 
My CT CD problems pretty well match what's in the list.

If you want a couple of quick checks, look at Scouts and The Imperial Fringe. On bk 6, my scan is low res and the OCR is garbled. On adventure 0, the scan is decent but there's no OCR.

The CDs (including MT) are basically a hack job. A 6 year old could have done as good a job scanning. I'm assuming that digital files of MT exist somewhere. They should put THOSE on CD not bad scans of tattered books...
 
The CDs (including MT) are basically a hack job. A 6 year old could have done as good a job scanning. I'm assuming that digital files of MT exist somewhere. They should put THOSE on CD not bad scans of tattered books...

Several people have made corrected digital editions of MT... but all of them are pirate if shared. Most include someone's house rules, as well.

I doubt the original layout files still exist. I once asked Roger if he got them; he said he'd not gotten them, as they were not DGP property.
 
I purchased my CT CD about a week ago as well, and checking out the two examples saundby gave, I'm not sure I am seeing them now. Scout is a decent scan and I can copy/paste text from it. I can search it as well. Same with Adventure 0. Perhaps I am not understanding what is meant by 'no OCR' or 'light OCR' though, because there seems to be OCR to me. I also looked at a few examples in the list, and found some to be corrected - for example, in Safari Ship, the list states it is a fuzzy scan and pages 15 and 25 are upside down. On my CD the scan is not what I would consider fuzzy, and page 15 and 25 and not upside down (though page 15 which is a map, is presented in landscape). Another random example, Special supplement 2 Exotic Atmospheres states on the list that page 5 is missing. On my CD page 5 is there.

So perhaps there have been some corrections? The CD is certainly not as good as having all of the books physically, but its a close second. I wouldn't go so far as to call them a hack job - but they certainly could be done a whole lot better. Has anyone talked to Marc Miller about rescanning the books? I'd certainly be interested in helping to make a good product better.

Samules - nice find. I have a Brother HL-5370DW laser printer that will print duplex pages. So I just select 'booklet' in my print settings and the printer renumbers the pages for printing so I don't have to. But if someone does not have access to a duplex printer, the site you linked is a wonderful tool for manual printing. I've bookmarked it myself.

As to a step-by-step with the Mongoose PDFs, you need to have a PDF editor. I use Foxit Phantom myself. Essentially what I did was look through the whole book and make note of the different sections. For example, the spaceships, vehicles, and equipment could all be removed and saved for adding to the Central Supply Catalog. So I extracted those pages and saved them as a separate PDF. Then I deleted the pages in the original PDF. I deleted the back cover, any advertisements, the index, the front cover and the introduction. I extracted the Gvurrdon section and saved that to add to the Spinward Marches PDF. I deleted those pages as well. I ended up with 80 pages. My saddle stapler will do 25 pages tops so I try and keep everything below 100 pages. I set my printer to print in booklet (4 pages to a single sheet of paper) and print. I use my inkjet to print a cardstock cover and staple the booklet - the saddle stapler (or long-reach stapler) allows you to staple deeper than a normal stapler, so it will reach the 5.5 inches to the center. Then I carefully fold the booklet in half and use a stack of books to compress the seam flat. Ultimately, I've done this sort of thing with just about every Riki-Tiki-Traveller book I have. If anyone needs any clarification or further explanations, please let me know. :D

Next up will be the T5 books.
 
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As mentioned, I extracted the spaceships, vehicles, and equipment from each of the Riki-Tiki-Traveller books in order to lessen the overall page count. What i did with those extracted files is this:

I took the Civilian and Military vehicles books and combined them (after deleting all the superfluous pages like before). I then added all of the vehicles I'd extracted from all of the other books. This all made one file. I then added all of the equipment to the Central Supply Catalog. I then combined those two files into one great big file.

Going to this site, I made sure my page count was over 343 pages (to make the minimum order). Sure enough, it was 380. Perfect. In photoshop I whipped up a new black & white cover, added it to the beginning of the file and uploaded my new Central Supply Catalog.

Next I did the same to Traders & Gunboats, Fighting Ships, and all of the spaceships I'd extracted.

Finally I took the Gvurrdon information I'd extracted from Vargr and combined it with the Spinward Marches book.

While these three items are not LBBs or LWBs, they are nicely printed spiral-comb bound catalogs that will lay flat on the table when in use. Each cost me about $12 including shipping, and took about a week and a half to show up.
 
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