[for_d]

Hello!

The current v4 anniversary edition clocks in at around 50 MB on my disk right now. The short stories, the artwork, the pictures and the formatting is very, very cool, but:

* It takes a heavy toll on a laptop, and presumably netbooks. I'm currently reading in Adobe on Linux, which may have some special quirks, but page loading is very, very slow. Granted, my laptop is getting old, but once I'm past the shinay, what I'm interested in is quick access to the text and tables. Is it possible, or are there any plans to provide lighter PDFs?
* A friend of my tried hacking the PDF-file onto his Kindle. It looked horrible, probably because of pretty advanced formatting. In this day and age of e-book readers, netbooks and pads, are there any plans for PDFs formatted for more specifically such devices?

[Wolfboy]

honestly i have a Kobo which is a off brand e-reader and it has no problem whatsoever with them other than its processor and ram being to slow and causing it to take forever to load sometimes.

[Black]

I suspect your mostly talking about hard disk space.  I suggest you invest in a portable harddrive and move non-essential documents, vidoes, pics etc to the portable harddrive, and just keep the what you feel is neccessary on your laptop.  In addition to this, have a look at your laptop and see what you can clean out.  Its surprising how quickly a laptop, particularly older ones, can get filled up.  I keep all movies, tv series, pdfs etc on my portable hard drives and only what I am currently using on my laptop.   Until I started doing this, I was always running out of room.

I also do the same for my ipad (which has a pretty good pdf reader in the ebook app).  Its harder with the Ipad, as some apps and music can take up a lot of room quickly.  I foolishly invested in a comic book app and alas my ipad is now constantly filling up with material...  Still, got all my shadowrun books on it and thats all that matters. 

[for_d]

50 Mb is not a lot of HD space, so no. It's more an issue of processor and RAM making searching and pagination slow. It works just fine on my brand new stationary computer, of course, but I can't lug that to the gaming table. :-)

[JustADude]

50 Mb is not a lot of HD space, so no. It's more an issue of processor and RAM making searching and pagination slow. It works just fine on my brand new stationary computer, of course, but I can't lug that to the gaming table. :-)

And stuff like this is why I foo-foo netbooks. I had one and then sold it to buy a full-size laptop that I could actually do something with.

[Mirikon]

Indeed. I actually converted my gaming group to bringing laptops to the table. They take up as much or less space than the books people would normally be having at the table, and with a good wifi signal, my group has started keeping an open Google Doc with mission notes and plans, so they can keep track of things in real time.

[Crash_00]

I'm on the opposite end of the spectrum. I really don't care for computers at the gaming table, makes it very very easy for people to get distracted. Especially with groups that are spread across the room rather than at a single table. One of the worst gaming events in college was asking to see a character sheet and having a laptop try to get passed to me knocking over every soda in the vicinity with it's power cord.

Then again, I just like the feel of books and hate the strain reading from a laptop puts on my eyes. Which is weird. I can program for hours on end, but reading a couple pages on a computer makes me feel like I've been staring into the sun.

[hobgoblin]

My recently aquired Toshiba Thrive have no real issue rendering SR PDFs once i got ebookdroid installed. Allows me to lug the whole SR4 book collection in something the size of a single hardcover mainbook.

[Parker]

Yeah, I'm one of those gaming twits with both the dead-wood and electronic versions of Catalyst's books for Shadowrun 4th Edition.  My GM is happy; since the external I have has them loaded up on it for easy access for gaming night.  I just need to lug my laptop and the external over to his house and he's got access to the books during game-play.   Especially useful during a rules call-out or a question of what a piece of equipment/gear's stats are.

[Peter_M_Andrew_Jr]

To address the original poster's question: I have no idea, but I would like a Kindle friendly version. I've tried SR4A on my DX but the illustrations are too complex and seem to slow it down horribly and the formatting doesn't take advantage of Kindle's zoom and contrast features. I might try the original SR4 now that I'm thinking about it, less color illos.

As for electronics at the table (or where the thread has migrated), I use a laptop when I run a game pretty much exclusively. All the books are on a portable and I prepare all my adventures on One Note. It lets me keep scenes on seperate tabs and put play notes in so I can tell where we left off and what the players did.

Peter

[_Pax_]

To address the original poster's question: I have no idea, but I would like a Kindle friendly version. I've tried SR4A on my DX but the illustrations are too complex and seem to slow it down horribly and the formatting doesn't take advantage of Kindle's zoom and contrast features. I might try the original SR4 now that I'm thinking about it, less color illos.

  I have all my shadowrun PDFs on my NookCOLOR.

  And the simple fact is: Catalyst PDFs are among the WORST OPTIMISED EVER.  I really mean that - the worst in the entire history of Mankind.  The PDF reader the Nook came with couldn't successfully display anything from Catalyst - the order of arious layers got messed up, large chunks of text being hidden behind the background image, etc.

  I've found a reader than can handle them, with surprisingly good performance (ezPDF, I believe it's called).

  But still: Catalyst needs to hire someone who knows what they're doing with a PDF, to go over EVERY one of their products and make them semi-reasonably-well optimised.

As for electronics at the table (or where the thread has migrated), I use a laptop when I run a game pretty much exclusively. All the books are on a portable and I prepare all my adventures on One Note. It lets me keep scenes on seperate tabs and put play notes in so I can tell where we left off and what the players did.

  I got my NookCOLOR specifically so I culd have a CommLink-like device at the tame that, incidentally, has every SR4 book I own on it.  Since that comes to over 40 files?  Well, a stack of forty Dead Tree Edition books would weight a frelling ton.  I'm forty, not fourteen.  Carrying that much paper around just isn't an option anymore. 

[Mirikon]

I haven't tried using any of the PDFs on an eReader, but I've never had a problem with them on my laptop or PC.

[_Pax_]

My PC doesn't have problems either.  But then, my PC has 8GB of RAM; my eReader only has 512MB. 

[CanRay]

They work pretty well on my First Generation EeePC running at 900 MHz.  Of course, IIRC, it also has a Gig of RAM.

[hobgoblin]

  And the simple fact is: Catalyst PDFs are among the WORST OPTIMISED EVER.  I really mean that - the worst in the entire history of Mankind.  The PDF reader the Nook came with couldn't successfully display anything from Catalyst - the order of arious layers got messed up, large chunks of text being hidden behind the background image, etc.

  I've found a reader than can handle them, with surprisingly good performance (ezPDF, I believe it's called).

I have had good success reading them using Ebookdroid.