Quote from: thedungeondelver;702040That'd be nice, but even the re-released G123 is only like...30 pages or thereabouts...throw in all the maps and you could push it to 40, tops.  The original monochrome prints were 8-10 pages each.

Unless they put the whole adventure chain all together, which would be G1-3, D1-3, and Q1

Quote from: YourSwordisMine;702041They kind of have to be scans... When these modules were originally released, computers weren't quite everywhere yet...

So, to do it any other way would require a lot more work... They would pretty much have to rebuild them from scratch...

Hush, you and your "facts."

Quote from: Arduin;702046These are small documents.  It would have taken very little work to type up the text newly and add the graphics into pdf.

You don't do typesetting, do you?

I've got B1 in hand. To replicate it as a modern PDF, first of all you're going to need the right font. And I do mean font, and not just typeface. B1 is done in Avant Garde, but if you use anything but the original font you are almost certainly going to get some degree of text variance unless the later font just happens to use the exact same kerning and sizing as the specific Avant Garde font that TSR used in 1980. Oh- and TSR's going to also have to find an Avant Garde that actually allows document embedding in its license, because a huge number of fonts are virtually unusable in PDFs because of their license restrictions on "reproducing" it- which includes embedding it into a PDF.

But why won't the spacing be the same? Because TSR module text is left-justified. I don't know what specific workflow TSR used in 1980, but I'm pretty sure that InDesign's paragraph composer is not going to automatically choose the exact same spacing inside each line that TSR used, particularly if they're not using the exact same font.

And why does this matter? Because whoever did the layout on B1 was extremely sloppy with orphans. There are a lot of left-justified paragraphs that terminate with just a one-word line, or worse, with a hyphenated fragment of a word. Any halfway-decent paragraph composer is going to pull these orphans in and rebalance the paragraph accordingly. Which means that extra lines of space are going to start popping up on your spreads because you've killed the orphans.

And because B1 was not composed to a baseline grid (check the paragraph lines and you'll see that they don't line up between columns) this is going to start pulling room paragraphs out of position or leaving white gaps in the page. You can try to rebalance the page by manually adjusting paragraph following or using certain tricks to forcibly recreate the original layout designer's errors but that is not trivial work.

I'm an amateur typesetter, and it would take me a week to go from a raw text file to a perfect reproduction of B1. A professional certainly would be able to do it faster, but would expect to be paid professional typesetter wages to do so. I can't see WotC burning that kind of money or skilled worker time on something that can be duplicated just as well for 99% customer base through a careful scan that an intern could do in a couple of hours.

Quote from: YourSwordisMine;702056I did find this

http://www.wizards.com/dnd/Product.aspx?x=dnd/products/dndacc/1eAgainstGiants

It doesn't seem to be available at dndclassics anymore however

Yeah; strange things are afoot...

Quote from: thedungeondelver;702043Oh lord help us all they "re-created" G1-3 for 4e?  :C

DAMMIT 4E WHEN WILL YOU STOP HURTING US.

It's like finding a leaking barrel of dioxin in the old swimming pond

They didn't recreate the G series for 4e; they published a new giant-themed mega-adventure in a hardbound book.

They definitely did sell it at one time because I have it and its still listed in my library.  They last updated it 1-23-2013.

As usual SineNomine pwns all.  Lol  

4e didn't just do Against the Giants once, they did it twice!  Once as Revenge of the Giants an early 4e adventure, and then again as a Chris Perkins Dungeon Magazine series.

Double Dioxine!  Soak it up!

Quote from: thedungeondelver;702043Oh lord help us all they "re-created" G1-3 for 4e?  :C

DAMMIT 4E WHEN WILL YOU STOP HURTING US.

It's like finding a leaking barrel of dioxin in the old swimming pond

The 4e giant module is not as good as the old 1E ones.

I was able to use it in a campaign but I had to change  a lot to say the least.

Some of the things in the module did inspire me to weave them into the events of my campaign.

Quote from: SineNomine;702082You don't do typesetting, do you?

I've got B1 in hand. To replicate it as a modern PDF, first of all you're going to need the right font. And I do mean font, and not just typeface. B1 is done in Avant Garde, but if you use anything but the original font you are almost certainly going to get some degree of text variance unless the later font just happens to use the exact same kerning and sizing as the specific Avant Garde font that TSR used in 1980. Oh- and TSR's going to also have to find an Avant Garde that actually allows document embedding in its license, because a huge number of fonts are virtually unusable in PDFs because of their license restrictions on "reproducing" it- which includes embedding it into a PDF.

But why won't the spacing be the same? Because TSR module text is left-justified. I don't know what specific workflow TSR used in 1980, but I'm pretty sure that InDesign's paragraph composer is not going to automatically choose the exact same spacing inside each line that TSR used, particularly if they're not using the exact same font.

And why does this matter? Because whoever did the layout on B1 was extremely sloppy with orphans. There are a lot of left-justified paragraphs that terminate with just a one-word line, or worse, with a hyphenated fragment of a word. Any halfway-decent paragraph composer is going to pull these orphans in and rebalance the paragraph accordingly. Which means that extra lines of space are going to start popping up on your spreads because you've killed the orphans.

And because B1 was not composed to a baseline grid (check the paragraph lines and you'll see that they don't line up between columns) this is going to start pulling room paragraphs out of position or leaving white gaps in the page. You can try to rebalance the page by manually adjusting paragraph following or using certain tricks to forcibly recreate the original layout designer's errors but that is not trivial work.

I'm an amateur typesetter, and it would take me a week to go from a raw text file to a perfect reproduction of B1. A professional certainly would be able to do it faster, but would expect to be paid professional typesetter wages to do so. I can't see WotC burning that kind of money or skilled worker time on something that can be duplicated just as well for 99% customer base through a careful scan that an intern could do in a couple of hours.

I want to buy you a beer now. That was great.