Download issues?

[Daphne]

Any issues with any of the downloads, feel free to mention them here.

[stormrazor2000]

Downstairs and Signal Failure give 404s

[T5Medici]

As do lost_colony 5, lost_colony 4, extreme_makeover, convent_nicholas 1 and obedience.

[T5Medici]

The title page for Hidden Knowledge 4 is at the end instead of the beginning. 

[mm257]

It seems all the digital comics downloads(lost colony, cuckoos nest, etc) are distorted. They seem out of focus, the faces are especially bad in some of them.

[Daphne]

It seems all the digital comics downloads(lost colony, cuckoos nest, etc) are distorted. They seem out of focus, the faces are especially bad in some of them.

Hm, I don't see that at all. What are you using to view them?

[rreader3]

Yeah, although the images in the pdfs for, say, Cuckoo's Nest, are the same resolution as the online ones, they're not pixel-identical - looks like additional jpeg artifacts, as though they'd been recompressed.

The ones I've looked at don't seem too bad, but I may have just seen the better ones or something.

The hand-drawn comics I've checked so far have images at a much higher resolution than the online ones, but they look like they've been blown up to that size from something smaller (maybe a bit more than half the size), rather than the large image being the original size. This seems a bit odd unless the idea is to print them out at 600dpi.

So how much of this is intentional and how much isn't?

[Daphne]

OK, we've pulled the downloads. We'll reenable them at some point in the future when we can get an automated way of generating them where the quality is acceptable.

Note that we could send through the originals at full resolution, but that would result in PDFs for some titles that are 500MB or more; that's obviously not going to fly.

[T5Medici]

I don't think you should have pulled them. Most of the PDF's looked fine. The possible exceptions are the ones that had very small originals to begin with. To me, that means the process is working fine.

It will really depend on future updates. After all, if you are asking your artists for larger originals, the process will be fine long term.

The more important thing to me is when there was a very large original, your PDF produced is a reasonable size and is stunning in its detail. There are lots of things I never noticed before in some of those frames. It's a shame to keep those from someone who didn't have a change to pull them down.

BTW: I notice that some of the one line versions are a little bigger too. Much easier to see those now. Thanks

[mm257]

It seems all the digital comics downloads(lost colony, cuckoos nest, etc) are distorted. They seem out of focus, the faces are especially bad in some of them.

Hm, I don't see that at all. What are you using to view them?

I was using an apple previewing program, most of them were fine, lost colony 9 was the one with the worst resolution of the ones i downloaded.

[Daphne]

No worries, they'll be back soon; we're still experimenting with different ways of generating the PDFs. The current one did recompress everything; it worked OK when the original source was very high-resolution, but not so great on things (like the various Poser comics) which were already compressed to near-screen resolution.

[rreader3]

FWIW, I've used Luigi Rizzo's jpg2pdf utility (which is about the simplest possible jpeg to pdf converter) without problems. I tested it on some of your images (extracted from the pdfs) and it worked fine.

There's no actual need to recompress the images, since PDF allows JPEG format images to be embedded at any resolution with any required scaling done in the display code. Having to rescale a very large image can make display a bit slow, though.

[Daphne]

Given that the new downloads have already appeared on file-sharing sites, we're evaluating how much work it's really worth to put into this feature. :/

[blinded]

While I'm sorry to hear the downloads might not be back, I'm disappointed to hear that they have appeared on file sharing sites.  If that is the case, I understand completely if you don't bring them back.

[Daphne]

Oh, we'll bring them back; it's just annoying, but there's no point in punishing the honest for the acts of the guilty. (But to whoever posted them, shame, shame!)

jpg2pdf looks fun, but it only works on fixed paper sizes, which isn't quite what we need. Next up, reportlab!