Printing *.pdf manuals

[Drew Dude]

I've just bought HOMM4 and the manual is an acrobat file. I was going to print but every page has a sort grey background to it which is going to both eat the ink up and take an ever to print.

Is there any way of turing this background off or do publishers not expect you to print it.

Couldn't they provide two formats of the document, one with a background and one without.

[Zopperoni]

Try setting your printer to print in "Pure black and white". Test it with one page and see if it works.

[tniem]

Part of the problem is that companies don't thing gamers need a printed copy other wise they would print the manual for you. If you cannot get the true black and white thing to work, try to send the .pdf file to me (tfry2002@hotmail.com) and I will attempt to change the background color for you in the full version of Acrobat.

[Standup]

I agree its a real pain. It was just about acceptable in budget games where its a way of keeping costs down but not in full price games (are you listening 3DO ?).

I'd like to see a RTF format but i'd imagine that involves more work for the publishers to convert it from their DTP packages.

[chronocrator]

Printing out manuals can never become an alternative to real manuals and it can also be quite costly to print out a 100+ page manual, since ink is so expensive.

Some games come in big nice boxes with a thick manual, a techtree and even a couple printed maps, other games just feature a very slim "manual" describing the game basics or worse: a tiny slip of paper with the setup instructions... the latter has become more and more common.

This practice of publishers encourages piracy - if you don't get more than a CD and a small piece of paper (Midtown Madness didn't even feature a CD inlet) I don't wonder why many people just copy the CD.
I hope more publisher realize this and change the situation...

[chronocrator]

Oh and concerning your problem: You could try to mark the entire text (I don't know if you'll have to do it page by page though ) and copy/paste it into word (or whatever texteditor you're using). That could seriously hurt the text alignement and might mess up all the pages but you could try it.

[Drew Dude]

Thanks for all the suggestions. When I had another look at the manual it turned out to be 64 (2 pages of manual per A4 page of printed paper) pages long so I decided to risk doing it at work on the office laser - even with plain text this was too long. I did a similar thing previously with Planescape Torment, got caught and managed to run the toner out on the printer as well. I was quite popular really. No probs this time, and being on a laser it does look good.

A few points though.

Even on a laser it doesn't look as good as a properly printed one i.e. colour. Also, I daresay they would decide not to supply a manual to reduce costs but are these savings we would ever see. Probably not. Finally, some games I think simply do just need a manual. In this case 128 pages is alot of info.

[Leonidas]

Suggestion for printing manuals:

Call around to a few print shops and ask them if they will print a pdf manual. If so, they should be able to print it to both sides of a page plus bind it for you. It should be cheaper (and easier) than having to print it yourself. . .

[dunk]

Print it at work.

[Urban Ranger]

What they should have done is to break the manual down into 3 parts: a user's manual, a reference manual, and a quick handy reference sheet.

For the user's manual, it shows you how to work the mouse, what various menu does, etc. The reference manual should contain unit characteristics, buildings, that sort of thing. The reference sheet should have just the the most essential things, such as keyboard shortcuts.

[PCRefugee]

I find it quite ironic that pdf actually stands for 'Printable Document Format'(or something very similar). I think it's the worst format out there. Give me a good, old fashioned manual with a game every time.

[chronocrator]

The Acrobat Reader features a huge list of printing options - I have no idea why there isn't a checkbox for "print background".

[rwprice]

Originally posted by PCRefugee
I find it quite ironic that pdf actually stands for 'Printable Document Format'(or something very similar). I think it's the worst format out there. Give me a good, old fashioned manual with a game every time.

It actually stands for "Portable Document Format". It really does it's job quite well, since the goal was to be able to see a document as it looked when it was prepared. If they sent a Word document, and you didn't have Word, you'd be out of luck. I think the pdf standard is a good one.

[Dis]

yeah but what if you don't have acrobat reader?

but yes pdf is better than word, because I don't have microsoft word

[Zopperoni]

Originally posted by Dissident
yeah but what if you don't have acrobat reader?

You're completely farked then
However, I assume that if the manual is provided as a .pdf-file, Acrobat Reader will be delivered on the CD as well.

As for Word documents, WordPad can handle .doc-files and is delivered standard with Windows.