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Post by Parduz on Jan 13, 2010 16:16:19 GMT -9
After having bought almost all of the minis, and have collecting all the free stuffs from the hoard and from other artist here in the forum, i want to start printing something. I have a printer capable of printing borderless, and all the PDFs are built to be printed in both Letter or A4... this means that there's a lot of white space in my costly A4 sheets. So, having Acrobat at the office, i though i can modify the PDFs to mixing the minis i need, and squeeze all wasting less paper.... and here comes the problem.
JIM's PDFs are "built" like a mosaic of tiny square bitmaps, or like "stripes" that are large as the page but only some pixel height. Some "Imperfect" miniatures are just a single image of the same size of the paper, and other are "manageable": this means that i can pick a single miniature, or at least a "stripe" of them and moving it to gain some room for others.
Now, i'm not really an expert of Acrobat: i just use it to export some PDFs or move something around the sheet, so it may be a bad approach to the problem...
.. so i ask: How should i proceed to squeeze the most minis i can in a A4 sheet, merging different minis from different PDFs, without loosing quality of the images?
... and, just as a tiny request, can you artist look if it is possible to generate a PDF with minis as images, instead of a mosaic of tiny bitmaps? (The last question may sound bad, but it is not: is just a thing i'd like to have and i'm just asking if it is feasible. I cannot write it better, but every time i read it seems that i'm criticizing.... sorry for that).
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Post by old squirmydad on Jan 13, 2010 16:30:30 GMT -9
Parduz, Can't say I've experience the problems you describe, but what I do is I open the pdf's in Photoshop at 300 dpi and cut, paste, and rearrange all the minis to fit on the page. I'm quite certain you can do the same thing in Gimp. I only use acrobat for printing pdf's.
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Post by Dryw the Harper on Jan 13, 2010 16:32:34 GMT -9
Wish I could help, but the whole PDF thing is a mystery to me. I lay out the Imperfect sets in Pagemaker on my ancient Mac, run off a sheet at the Best Quality on high quality paper, and my darling wife takes it to her Windows machine and converts it into a PDF through Acrobat by the means of ancient and arcane magic as far as I can tell. Dryw the Harper
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Post by Adam Souza on Jan 14, 2010 5:19:29 GMT -9
Just use GIMP to extract an image from the PDF and you can have a flat, easilly editable, image to deal with.
I almost never print JIMs PDFs as is. First I extract the image. Remove all the instructions, to save toner. If there is room on the sheet I'll often copy mirror images of the models into the blank space, to increase diversity. Then I print them to a virutal printer, which converts it back to a PDF and then I usually print those.
The Hordes almost always prompt me to do this, since I rarely want all of the models randomly collected in any given horde.
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Post by Parduz on Jan 14, 2010 23:14:25 GMT -9
Thanks to all. I was worried by image quality loss while importing / exporting the minis, that's why i was trying to work directly on the PDF... if you all do that way, i can import the PDFs in Paint Shop Pro and do the same.
This lead to me a couple of question: How much are the users that "customizes" the mini sheets? If we are a lot, is'nt it better to have the minis also as images, other than just the PDF?
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Post by squirmydad on Jan 15, 2010 12:19:53 GMT -9
This is why the PDF's are unlocked. It allows you to simply open the PDF in your favorite image editing program ,and do what you want wit it. This is already as much or more than a lot of other designers allow.
It's too much work for me to create and offer separate files just for the modders and colorists, which is why I have decided to go with color files only, to keep my time per set down to a point that it makes it worth while for me to do more. I've wasted too much time trying to keep everyone happy with alternate file types, figure parts, uncolored versions etc., that doing all this extra stuff has become a real burden, so I just can't do it anymore.
Before, creating all the alternate files and such ended up taking 30-40 hours of work per set. And I would only make about $2 per hour for my effort, not worth it! Now I can do a set in about 10-15 hours of work, and make closer to $4-5 an hour, still not much, but a lot better. I still need to work on my style a bit more to get the time of each set under 8 hours per set.
The quality of the image you get will entirely depend on the aoftware you use. If you use Microsoft paint as your tool of choice, your results will suck, because it is not a good photo editor. GIMP does a great job because it is designed for editing photos, or graphics like mine. If you open the PDF from within your program, you should not lose any quality. I recommend using the lasso tool to select individual figures for cut/pasting. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you need to read you software manual. JIM
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Post by Parduz on Jan 15, 2010 15:25:33 GMT -9
Thanks, Jim, for the detailed answer. About the graphic programs, while i can't create almost anything with them, i'm proficient about selecting, masking and so on 'cause I do Icons for the programs i write at work. I was just worried about loosing quality 'cause i don't know if the images are imported "as they are" from the PDF, or if they are "reworked" while importing them. And finally, i can only guess your amount of work for set, so i'm not complaining about not having them as (say) pngs; i was just courious.
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Post by squirmydad on Jan 15, 2010 16:20:26 GMT -9
Ah, I see.
The images in the PDF files are TIFF format, and are zero loss as far as compression. I create the PDF using no image compression except for internal zip, which does not effect the final image. These should be clean, artifact free images in and out, as long as your photo editor is compatible with PDF images.
I really appreciate everybody's desire to do a bunch of different things with my designs. But I simply can't add new options and formats to make it easier. JIM
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