Wordman/PdfReviewGuide

It is rare for me to buy hard-copy rpg books these days. PDF works much better for me, since I cart a whole library in a laptop, search it quickly mid-game and do batch searching a lot of books at once to find all information for a single term. (This is how, for example, I put the Calibration page together quickly.) Once upon a time, they were cheaper as well, but this seems to be changing. Using PDFs is a recent phenomenon for me. As an example, I have most of the 1E books in hard copy and PDF, but almost none of 2E in hard copy at all. I buy Exalted PDFs from DriveThru RPG (and, yes, I own them).

When reviewing a PDF, the rating it is given has less to do with the actual gaming content than the features of the PDF itself. As an example, some of the very early 1E Exalted PDFs were just scanned pages and could not be searched. The PDF might as well have been a stone tablet at that point. It was completely useless for my purposes. In an attempt to encourage PDF features I like and discourage practices I find irritating, what follows is a method for generating ratings for PDFs that can be applied equitably to any review.

System

This system assumes the product is perfect to start with, then deducts points for when this assumption is proven wrong. It starts giving a perfect "five stars", then can only get worse. Note that it is possible for a score to be negative, in which case it gets "rounded" up to zero. There are a few "above and beyond" ratings that add rating. These function by "forgiving" penalties, and can't make the rating higher than five stars. I'm tinkering with some Perl code that could detect many of the rated features automatically, which I will post if I get it working correctly.

• Role-playing content
  • Awesome: no change
  • Good: - ½
  • Bad: -1
• File size, measured in MB/page
  • Less than something: no change - still need to figure out what works as a reasonable something
  • From x to y: - ½
  • Greater than y: -1
• Bookmarks
  • Multi-level bookmarking: no change
  • Only top level chapters bookmarked: - ½
  • No bookmarks: -2
• Design
  • Uses vector-based text: no change
  • Uses scanned page images: -2
  • When put in "one page at a time" mode, and holding the mouse down on the down scroll arrow, most pages pass by without getting fully drawn: - ½
  • Many pages take more than two seconds to draw on reasonable hardware: - ½
• Security
  • Uses watermarks: - ½
  • Uses other DRM: -2
  • Prevents printing: -1
  • Prevents editing bookmarks: - ½
  • Prevents adding notes: - ½
  • Prevents text touch up: - ½
  • Prevents cut/paste: - ½
  • Prevents page deletion: - ½
• Price, as a percentage of the printed version
  • Free: +2
  • ≤50%: no change
  • >50% and ≤75%: - ½
  • >75% and ≤100%: -1
  • >100%: -2
• History
  • Each time document has been updated for free to include changes made to the print edition: +½
  • Each time document has been updated for free to include online errata, rulings mentioned in forums, etc: +1

Ratings

coming eventually