PDF Magazine

[Zach]

I think I might do it..

Getting sick of messing with web sites and standards and shit

Going to see if I like PDF making software and then we'll se

[Lefteris_D]

The PDF making software will only handle the conversion for you. My suggestion is to try the official Acrobat from Adobe as it supports digital signatures and other nice features to protect your work from being stolen.

To create the magazine however prior to converting to PDF you will need something else. The easiest solution to find is probably Microsoft Publisher as it is included in Microsoft Office Professional.

Please let me know if you find something better.

[Lefteris_D]

Oh, there is also Adobe PageMaker. PageMaker can also export directly to PDF so no extra software is needed and no quality is lost.

Give that a try and let me know

[Zach]

Yes I fully intend to try and find a program that will let me work the PDF right inside it and save ad, prefferably from Adobe..

[Lefteris_D]

PageMaker is what you need to try then.

[ShadowWarrior]

Why don't you try compiling your magazine into a standalone (exe) Flash file?

[Zach]

Adobe is the best platform for me right now.

Anyway.. got my hands on MS publisher 2003, and its a nice program and all. But like other programs it seems to have issues with a lot of my images.

It opens a lot, much larger than they really are. Specifically older screenshots from pre-existing work.

I mean.. when the filesize is 256x224, I don't expect to get an image TWICE as large showing up on the screen... meh. Yet oddly enough, taking brand new recent shots, yields perfect results.

Oh I love graphics manipulation

[Zach]

I have been familiarizing myself with Publisher. It is by far the best out there for doing layouts.

This is a sample page. I will have different sections color coded for each system, and things of that nature.

http://www.oldskoolgames.com/mag_layout.pdf

[Lefteris_D]

How long did it take for you to make it?

What did you use for the PDF? Acrobat or a third party PDF maker?

[Zach]

I worked on the page on and off the whole day.. It took that long mostly cause I was learning how Publisher works and stuff.
I used Adobe's PDF printer to make it.

The one thing I don't like is that in publisher, you can't seem to make the hyperlinks appear as plain text, with no underlines etc.. Plus the hyperlink doesn't work after conversion.

I can manually put the hyperlink on the text I want, in Acrobat, but I REALLY don't feel like doing that for a dozen pages... Is there anyway I can batch apply a hyperlink to a specific piece of text, or "Section" of all the pages ?