CT Only: The Traveller Book Dust Jacket Replica is now live on Travellers' Aid Society!
- Thread starter plazman30
- Start date
pesco
SOC-9
So, you asked for a post-mortem. It's a bit tricky since I'm not using any prefab macros, building things from scratch, and I do not yet have a full grasp of how troff's low-level plumbing for such things works.
There are "environments" for saving parameters like font, line length, etc. You can "divert" output to recall later and also measure its size, so I use that on the floating content. Then you set "traps" at the appropriate (vertical) positions that shrink the text area to flow stuff around and finally move into the empty space and place the diverted text.
Something isn't working the way I expect which causes the spacing around the heading to fail. No idea what's going on, yet. Anyway, once I figure it out, I can roll the technique into macros and future inserts should be easy.
There are "environments" for saving parameters like font, line length, etc. You can "divert" output to recall later and also measure its size, so I use that on the floating content. Then you set "traps" at the appropriate (vertical) positions that shrink the text area to flow stuff around and finally move into the empty space and place the diverted text.
Something isn't working the way I expect which causes the spacing around the heading to fail. No idea what's going on, yet. Anyway, once I figure it out, I can roll the technique into macros and future inserts should be easy.
kilemall
SOC-14 5K
The technology of print went through weird interim phases. One of those was the very early computer typesetters that would output the print on wax backed paper. That was then pasted down onto sheets, photo masters taken and printed that way.
No physical typesetting per se but the very infancy of computer based print output.
Not the sort of thing that was ready for desktop but right sized for small newspapers and publishing.
You may be fighting oddities from manual adjustments made against a long dead codebase. No telling what weirdness went into the original book production.
No physical typesetting per se but the very infancy of computer based print output.
Not the sort of thing that was ready for desktop but right sized for small newspapers and publishing.
You may be fighting oddities from manual adjustments made against a long dead codebase. No telling what weirdness went into the original book production.
pesco
SOC-9
The software I'm using was originally made to drive a CAT...
As for the LBBs, elsewhere on this forum:
As for the LBBs, elsewhere on this forum:
That sounds a lot like a Linotype machine which as far as my (amateur) knowledge goes would check out with common technology of the time. The letters would have been typed via a keyboard into a machine that assembled a line of tiny metal moulds. When each line of text was finished, it would have been automatically cast as a single slug of lead alloy.
Because it was, indeed a Linotype. Per Loren Wiseman. (RIP)
pesco
SOC-9
Awesome, thanks for confirming!
Do you happen to know anything about the decision to use the condensed variants of some letters? Was that a common technique at the time, an artistic design choice, or necessitated by space constraints?
kilemall
SOC-14 5K
Wow, the machine I was referring to was in operation in 1979 at a small suburban paper of a few thousand in Texas so presumed it was in wider use.
I recall reading that Miller was trained up in printing- is that right?
That would be my guess. The books are all saddle-stitched, so that leads to page count contraints.Awesome, thanks for confirming!
Do you happen to know anything about the decision to use the condensed variants of some letters? Was that a common technique at the time, an artistic design choice, or necessitated by space constraints?
It's what was in the machine - they bought it used along with it's fonts/faces.Awesome, thanks for confirming!
Do you happen to know anything about the decision to use the condensed variants of some letters? Was that a common technique at the time, an artistic design choice, or necessitated by space constraints?
In the late 70's, mainstream press was moving to optically set aluminum or steel "foil plates"... so TSR, Avalon Hill, SPI, Yaquinto, and GDW all were buying up used linotypes (or it's competitor, whose name I'm too lazy to look up) as local printers deleted typesetter.
Note the following methods were ALL in commercial printing use in the mid 1970's and early 1980's, in changing proportions:
typed then optically mastered
Hand-written then optically mastered
Typeset, single printing by hand, then optically mastered
Typeset, print from assembled lead strips
Typed stencil (for mimeography)
Typed or handwritten inked master (ditto machine)
Note that typeset in this context means two different processes - manually fitting individual letters into printing frames, or casting lines of lead to form a contact press. A third was in minor use: typewriting an aluminum or steel or copper sheet for intaglio/lithographic printing.
Of these, individual letter cast and lead-cast are the only ones where the imprint is raised noticeably. Intaglio and Lithographic are both normally press paper into wells of ink.
While I know a shop in Anchorage was still using steel letters in frames as recently as 1983, it wasn't for English... it was printing in Cyrillic for Yupiq, Church Slavonic, and Russian. (Yupic in Cyrillic was dying out back then... Now, it's a historical footnote.)
I watched optical setting of stencils mimeographs in 1977 - in my elementary school. Meanwhile, my dad used a stencil cutting typewriter for some handouts at his job that same year. Also for mimeographs.)
I've high confidence that CT was optically set from linotype in-house mastered one-offs.
I feel like, if we're to make a digital reproduction of the original books, we have two options.
I know Marc Miller always had a dream of getting the LBBs completely digital in an editable format. As a crowdsourced project, I think it's doable. But I think it would definitely need to be a crowdsources effort.
The other issue we face is fonts. The cover of the book uses Optima, and the interior is Univers, I believe. Font licensing has changed a LOT over the years. If you want to distribute a book digitally, you need to buy an ebook license for a font, which is NOT cheap. Even if you plan to give the book away for free, you still need to buy a font license, which is usually a pretty hefty annual license, or a flat-fee purchase and a per item distributed price. To get around this, you'll need to use a free font, with a license that allows digital distribution. Even if you find a font that looks the same, the chance of it being a drop-in replacement that won't cause the text to re-flow is pretty slim.
In my "remaster," I'm using the font Perun, which is a font that's "close enough" to Univers that only a true font nerd could tell the difference. And Perun is OpenSIL licensed, so distribution is not an issue.
The Traveller dust jacket replica I made uses Univers, but when I exported to PDF, I had it convert all the fonts to outlines, so there are no embedded fonts in the PDF and no licensing issues. Of course, when you do this, the PDF is much larger, and it's no longer searchable.
- Find a really clean copy and scan it in at 600 DPI. If you get those printed, they should look as good as the original books from the 80s.
- Recreate the entire thing in a desktop publishing app using modern equivalent font, which will not be a 100% line-for-line match for the original books.
- Because we can
- Because it will make life a lot easier for people that want to play Classic Traveller
- Because it will give people a reason to buy the books, making a marketable product worth the time to make it.
I know Marc Miller always had a dream of getting the LBBs completely digital in an editable format. As a crowdsourced project, I think it's doable. But I think it would definitely need to be a crowdsources effort.
The other issue we face is fonts. The cover of the book uses Optima, and the interior is Univers, I believe. Font licensing has changed a LOT over the years. If you want to distribute a book digitally, you need to buy an ebook license for a font, which is NOT cheap. Even if you plan to give the book away for free, you still need to buy a font license, which is usually a pretty hefty annual license, or a flat-fee purchase and a per item distributed price. To get around this, you'll need to use a free font, with a license that allows digital distribution. Even if you find a font that looks the same, the chance of it being a drop-in replacement that won't cause the text to re-flow is pretty slim.
In my "remaster," I'm using the font Perun, which is a font that's "close enough" to Univers that only a true font nerd could tell the difference. And Perun is OpenSIL licensed, so distribution is not an issue.
The Traveller dust jacket replica I made uses Univers, but when I exported to PDF, I had it convert all the fonts to outlines, so there are no embedded fonts in the PDF and no licensing issues. Of course, when you do this, the PDF is much larger, and it's no longer searchable.
The LWB (Little White Book) is a pretty decent quality reprint, with errata both in and out of the rules.
Its one of my favorite books because of its compact, handy size. I've even mused "what if all of the books were in one volume", but that would make it a Little Fat Book and lose its charm (IMHO).
If the goal is to incorporate errata, then you're no longer burdened with a perfect recreation, and that makes things easier. Such as the font issue can effectively go away. Go for "close" and "inspired".
And if you reformat to Traveller Book size, then, well, that's just a bigger book. If you try to incorporate all of the books in Traveller Book size, that's 85% of MT.
Its one of my favorite books because of its compact, handy size. I've even mused "what if all of the books were in one volume", but that would make it a Little Fat Book and lose its charm (IMHO).
If the goal is to incorporate errata, then you're no longer burdened with a perfect recreation, and that makes things easier. Such as the font issue can effectively go away. Go for "close" and "inspired".
And if you reformat to Traveller Book size, then, well, that's just a bigger book. If you try to incorporate all of the books in Traveller Book size, that's 85% of MT.
pesco
SOC-9
Awesome, thanks for the information! I did not expect to hear that GDW did the typesetting in-house, let alone on their own Linotype. Then again, I am not old enough to have been around...
As for resetting the LWB, I'm going to keep dabbling with my little project. Not ready to turn it into a group effort though, because at this point it is just something I wanted to try for myself. I will post to this forum if I end up with a more substantial result than the first 3 pages. I did manage to fix up the spacing in the page 5 figure.
That said, I would be interested to know where Marc and Mongoose stand on such a project. I know that the Traveller Wiki claims FFE were in fact planning on doing such a thing (a "Retypeset Edition"), and now Mongoose did Pirates in the old style for fun (and profit?)...
pesco
SOC-9
My stuff is all troff. Thanks!
Would you like to see the source? I thought so!
If you can see through the noise, note how little explicit formatting is in there. It's basically setting tab stops (
.ta)and a few careful extra spaces (and periods) in places. ^A is the "leader character" that behaves like TAB but produces dots. I made the custom macros .BF/.EF to produce the floating figures.
