Sunday, November 28, 2010

A personal note about the Field Guide

Hey guys, something was mentioned in a recent review, and its been mentioned to me privately a few times in emails from folks who bought the Field Guide, so I thought I'd take a second to address it.

What I'm talking about is the lack of search text and copy/paste.

The Field Guide PDF is not protected. I don't believe in DRM beyond watermarks and never use them.

However, the Field Guide was built in a different way from any PDF we've ever released, which resulted in three differences from our usual: a bigger file size, lack of text search and lack of copy/paste.

Basically, the book isn't a PDF in the strictest sense. The text isn't just embedded in the book, alongside images, like most PDFs. Every page (text and images) were built in photoshop, then turned into an image, and then placed in the book. This had some disadvantages, namely everything I mentioned above.

I ultimately went with this method however, because it also resulted in the book looking *awesome* in my opinion.

Now, these issues are compounded by the lack of bookmarks, and that is 100% on me. Every version of the book I sent around internally to Vigilance Press writers and artists for proofreading was bookmarked. Just not the one I put on sale. So that's just me being a goober.

We have an update on the way, which will both correct some typos in the book, and add bookmarks.

I'm pleased with the book's sales, and think Jason Tondro and Dan Houser both did some of their best work on it, I just wanted to take a second to let you know I didn't cripple it on purpose.

Thanks as always for the support,

Chuck

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