Mind Control Comics Forum

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

Downstairs and Signal Failure give 404s

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

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

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?

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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. :/

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.

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!

I'm fine with removing downloads all together. I like to have them so I can read them when I don't have internet access but I can easily live without it.

As a compromise what about having a delay in when new content is available for download? I know it doesn't solve the problem, but it at least gives incentive for folks to keep supporting the site and the fine talent here.

Some people have no brains. >:( They simply don't understand "personal use". That doesn't mean "post it everywhere for everybody!"

I do appreciate the effort since some of the originals are very large and it is nice seeing the detail in the art which I think is missed on the web versions.

I can't say I'm surprised, but still it sucks that there was such a quick turnaround for pirating.

I don't understand the mindset of someone who would pay money to get the files here on MCC and then turn around and post them on some file-sharing site for everyone to see for free.  A lot of the people on those sites are such wankers.

Where do you actually download the comics? I haven't been able to find a link anywhere.

You can't, right now; we hope to have them back soon.

Well, serves me right for not downloading "The Hidden Knowledge" when I had the chance.

Personally I prefer downloads because when you download, the pdf always corrects to the width of your screen.  I noticed that sometimes when you're reading the comic straight from the website, the page is too wide.  This was a problem when you are reading something like "Bearing Gifts" with dialogue on each end and you have to scrollbar back and forth.

OK, downloads have been reenabled. Let me know about any problems; be sure to mention the particular title and issue, and what the problem is. If you just say, "i cant downlod :(", You Will Be Mocked.

It's still recompressing the jpegs - the loss in quality doesn't seem quite as noticeable as last time, but the artifacts are there when you look for them.

Sadly, can't be helped.

Sure it can. Taking an existing jpeg file and putting it unaltered in a pdf as an image stream is basic pdf functionality.

If you can supply a tool that:

1. Works on the command line.
2. Works on an arbitrary page size.
3. Does not recompress.

... we'll be happy to use it.

This only applies to the comics that started their lives as JPEGs (and that's really just Lost Colony).

The one I was looking at was Cuckoo's Nest, not Lost Colony.

If the Cuckoo's Nest pdf is actually just a different compression of an original lossless source, then it may simply be that the one in the pdf is compressed to less than half the size (with corresponding reduction in quality) compared to the web one.

What are your specific requirements here? You want the page size to be variable between pages of a single document, following the proportions of the images? Or you just want to specify WxH in points, or DPI, for each comic or image?

Hang tight; I'm up to my hips in Python right now. (And, yes, that would make a great visual for a comic...)

OK, new generation scripts in place. Let me know what you think.

That seems to have bitmap (uncompressed except by deflate) images for the digital comics now? I guess those are original, since they are now better than the web ones (same resolution but without the usual artifacts).

It depends on the original, but comics that were supplied to us as PNGs (that pretty much means all of Sturkwurk's comics) are now compressed using Deflate rather than JPEG. (We can get away with this because they're not as high-resolution to begin with as the drawn comics.)

OK, unless someone has encountered another problem, we're declaring victory on the downloads, yay!

The download for Obedience comes up 404.

Also, Signal Failure, Convent of St Nicholas, and Downstairs.

Extreme Makeover seems to be missing all but the cover page.

Homecoming seems to have significantly worse jpeg artifacts than the web images, even though it looks like the images in the pdf are not stored as jpegs. This interacts really badly with the art style for this particular comic.

They're definitely JPEGs in the PDF: no way the download would be just 21MB if they were encoded with Deflate. It's fixable, but that would be a gigantic download.

Huh, yeah, you're right. My tools must be confused by all the additional objects in the file.

But the problem remains that the pdf version, especially displayed at its "native" resolution rather than reduced, shows obvious artifacts - possibly they wouldn't be so noticeable with another art style, but here they show up badly particularly on characters' faces due to the contrast between the smooth colour and the artifacts extending outward from edges of mouths, eyes, etc. Have you tried higher quality settings?

Sorry if I sound like too much of a perfectionist, but Homecoming is something of a favourite of mine.

-dJPEG=100; doesn't get much higher quality than that. :)

OK, give "Homecoming" another download; I tried a different way of creating the PDF.

That is vastly better - that takes it from "annoyingly visible artifacts" to "artifacts that are only barely visible under high magnification"

Hello - hit 404 errors on Obedience and Signal Failure.

Those should be fixed now.

Got Signal Failure (thanks!)... but still 404 on Obedience.

I did a shift+refresh on the page before clicking the link and also waited a day and tried again.

OK, Obedience should be good now.

Thanks (again) download working now - but I noticed the "live" view vanished.

Downstairs & Convent of St. Nicholas give 404 errors.

OK, those should be fixed.

Thanks!

Hi, just thought I'd mention that the PDF for Beyond Rubies 2 seems...off.

I have tried everything I can think of (fiddled with the settings, deleted and downloaded the file again, updated to the latest version of Adobe etc), but the individual pages of the file take forever to load/assemble themselves; it’s so slow you can see the individual elements (picture, speech bubbles, text etc) build and half the time it’s going so slow you think it’s stalled out completely.

I don’t know if it’s just me, but I don’t have this problem with any of your other PDFs (or anyone else for that matter) so I suspect it’s the file.

I only metion this beacuse BR is my favourite series on the site and this is a bit of putting :-)

The BR2 file is significantly bigger than the others. Unfortunately, we're probably not going to be able to easily shrink it, sorry.

OK, not a problem  :)

Thanks so much for the download ability of the Beyond Rubies issues (along with all of the other releases).

I know you said you wouldn't be able to shrink the 2nd issue, but what about the more recent releases?  The file size isn't a problem to most with a broadband connection, but for whatever reason I (and probably others as well) have problems with the files inside a number of different PDF viewers.  I'm guessing it's purely the size/large resolution being provided by the pages, but it makes the offline copies much more difficult to view, to the point of being unable to be opened/navigated.

Here's the problem. The only tools which can really shrink a PDF with reasonable quality without rasterizing the type are Adobe tools. They're not scriptable, and manually tweaking each issue isn't really practical. So, we kind of have to just accept whatever resolution the final art is delivered as for the PDFs, which often means pretty big files. The good part is that you are guaranteed the best possible quality!

Thanks, it was worth asking in any case.  That's a good explanation and works for me, I wasn't sure if it was a matter of saving the provided files in a smaller resolution or something more involved.

I seem to have a problem to download anything. Something's down or?

Download server seems to be operating normally. Drop me a note to orders@mindcontroltheatre.com and we'll see what we can do.

downloads are not responding just checking on servers status

Download server seems to be operating normally. Drop me a note to orders@mindcontroltheatre.com and we'll see what we can do.