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Catalyst's Shadowrun Products / Re: The Needle's Eye is out

« Last post by Michael Chandra on <06-03-24/0623:43> »

At least on pdf, on drivethrurpg.  I haven't looked for hard copy yet.  No preview page on strong yet

It is another campaign book, like Third Parallel or Whisper Nets.

They sold a significant bunch of hard copies at the UK Games Expo this past week. Technically it's not a campaign book, Final Bets will be. It explains the Grand Tour, has sections on Prague, Lisbon, London, and Paris, explains the various rich arses folks that are part of the Grand Tour, and then has a section on many different plots you could use with your players, involving these multi-billionaires their ongoing stories.

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Catalyst's Shadowrun Products / Re: The Needle's Eye is out

« Last post by FastJack on <05-31-24/0702:08> »

Hrm... Let me do some checking. I have Acrobat installed, so I was able to save and reduce the file size of Needle's Eye from 187 to 86, I'll check and see if there's something to be done.

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Catalyst's Shadowrun Products / Re: PDF size of ShadowRun books varies so much. Why?

« Last post by taranion on <05-31-24/0325:07> »

My guess is that it is related to the size of the images. If they are optimized for print, they do have a large resolution, leading to large PDFs. When you optimize the PDF for screen reading, the image quality is lowered and you get smaller PDFs. But I am not familiar with the Adobe InDesign (I guess) export options, so this was just me guessing.

It really is an issue if you are using Commlink to link PDFs - the internal PDF viewer requires a significant amount of time to display a page, especially if the PDF is loaded for the first time that session.

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Catalyst's Shadowrun Products / Re: PDF size of ShadowRun books varies so much. Why?

« Last post by MercilessMing on <05-30-24/1155:39> »

Yeah, it's an issue for me too, like why is my 6e library topping 1-2 GB, there's just no need for that.

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Catalyst's Shadowrun Products / Re: The Needle's Eye is out

« Last post by MercilessMing on <05-30-24/1149:50> »

This was asked of them on their 6th edition Facebook group recently, and the response could be boiled down to "we don't think size is an issue in this day and age".  My reading of it was that they weren't aware that their file sizes were an issue, and after being made aware of it, decided it still wasn't an issue.

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Catalyst's Shadowrun Products / PDF size of ShadowRun books varies so much. Why?

« Last post by Beta on <05-30-24/1029:15> »

For example:
Scotophobia: 186 pages, 187.2 MB
Dark Terrors: 186 pages, 10.3 MB 

Same page count, one is nearly 18 times as big a file as the other.  In general it is the newer books that are larger, but it is not entirely consistent (Third Parallel is 171 pages and 20.5 MB, so not as compact as Dark Terrors, but only off by a factor of ~2 -- and like Scotophobia is a 6e book, so presumably sharing the same page template, etc.)

On my laptop I don't care too much one way or the other.  But on smaller devices (phone and e-reader) I'm more sensitive to file size.  If there is a real benefit to the larger sizes, then OK.  If it is just someone forgetting to set compression or something, it would be nice if they could get more consistent on that.

Anyone here have any insight?

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Catalyst's Shadowrun Products / Re: The Needle's Eye is out

« Last post by Beta on <05-30-24/0802:04> »

Aria: great question, that I also have -- I'm worried that my e-reader is going to run out of space soon, with how big all the newer pdfs are.  On the other hand, they seem to move between pages on the ereader better, so my guess is that they are using a lower compression setting or something like that, but purely a guess.

Now I'm kicking myself for not asking that on the AMA they did on Reddit a little while ago.

Maybe I'll make a new thread here, to ask, and see if anyone with connections can find out.

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Catalyst's Shadowrun Products / Re: The Needle's Eye is out

« Last post by Aria on <05-30-24/0434:21> »

Thanks Beta, definitely picking that one up!  Question though, why are the file sizes so damn big?!?!?

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Fan fiction / Re: Johnny Mnemonic is the best SR movie ever made

« Last post by DaedalusPrime on <05-30-24/0214:56> »

Sleep Dealers...
that's all I got to say about that...

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Catalyst's Shadowrun Products / The Needle's Eye is out

« Last post by Beta on <05-29-24/2046:12> »

At least on pdf, on drivethrurpg.  I haven't looked for hard copy yet.  No preview page on strong yet

It is another campaign book, like Third Parallel or Whisper Nets.