Printing Tips

印刷のヒント

These are just a few ideas to consider when peaparing to either archive or produce materials that relate to video game history.

Paper

V-Notes are produced at 900ppi so using a laser printer would achieve the best images. For printing monochrome pen & Ink style illustrations use 24lb. paper or better. Use 28lb. paper or better for making double sided prints.

Double Side PDF Prints

Printing to two sides requires two print jobs. The first job is to produce the odd numbered pages. The second job is to produce the even number pages while using the first run of prints as the stock.
As noted above, you should use 28# paper or greater.

Printing from Your Browser

We took extra care in styling this site so that the pages print nicely. You can take it one step further by changing a few settings in your browser to make these prints look more like decent prints, than printed web pages.
To remove headers, footers, URLs, page titles, page numbers, and date and time from browser prints, first cancel your current print job.

Firefox

Disable these parameters from the Print Dialogue box.

Safari

Uncheck 'Print Footers and Headers' in the Print Dialogue box.

Scanning

For Color Print Images & Game Manual PDFs

Scan at 300ppi, no filters, no scaling, no descreen, only known color adjustments. Open the scans in Photoshop and use the Measure Tool (Usually found under the Eyedropper Tool) to define a correct alignment, than apply Image/Rotate:Arbitrary to correct the rotation. Use higher resolutions of 600-1200 ppi for vector interpolations.

For Black & White Source Material

Scan with Greyscale settings Clone Stamp or otherwise Paint any bad edges so all four borders are strong. Adjust Image Size by setting the ppi from 300 to 150ppi (784x600px), while using Bilinear Interpolation. Scans often have a dull appearance and benefit from Photoshop/Layer/New Adjusment Layer: Curves. Set an S-Curve by adding two axis to the curve and creating a sort of slight 's' shape with it, and save.

PDF Authoring

Adobe Acrobat Pro

Click the Create PDF button and select: From Multiple Files to choose your images. Got to Edit/Preferences: Convert To PDF to modify your compression settings. Bitmap: Mono JBIG2 (lossless), Grey-ZIP, Color-ZIP. TIFF: Mono JBIG2 (lossless), Grey-JPEG2000 Medium, Color-JPEG2000 Medium.

Image Processing

For game manual PDFs use 150 ppi resolution images. For V-Notes PDFs use 900 ppi Bitmap LZW TIFF images.

Vector Black & White

Vector images exported to: TIFF, LZW, Greyscale, Antialiased, 900ppi. Or: PDF, Mutlipage Printing. The resulting files are filtered with: Auto Contrast, than rasterized as: Bitmap, 50% Threshold, TIFF, LZW, and saved out in an 8.5"x11" file. The Auto Contrast filter helps to eliminate any dithering that could occur during the bitmapping of rich black colors.

Raster Black & White

Any images that have been saved to a grayscale or monochrome bitmap format have no color information and cannot be processed with color seperation techniques. Repair B&W Text and Images: Apply Brightness & Contrast (B&C) to +12, +12 to reduce compression artifacts. Than, Adjust Curves adding a vector to Input:50 / Output:67 to resaturate the black.

Correct the canvas sizes; NES Manuals - 4.227"x4" (1568x1200px @ 150 ppi).