The Gameatory

Why No Print-Friendly PDFs?

Creighton Broadhurst -

Am I the only one who wants printer-friendly copies of the adventures I buy?

I don’t like to write in my lovely gaming books. I prefer to buy a PDF and print out the module to make extensive notes therein. That way, my shelf copy remains in good condition.

I’m running two weekly games at the moment. Neither of the digital editions of the modules came with a printer-friendly version.

Module #1

The first module is over 600 pages long. Every page has an attractive scroll-like background. It looks lovely, but I don’t want to print it 600 times.

I contacted the company and asked if they had a print-friendly PDF I could buy. They replied and said they don’t. Making a print-friendly version of the PDF wasn’t that hard in this instance. I just turned off all the background layers using Adobe Acrobat and exported a flattened version of the PDF. Not ideal, but I got there in the end.

Module #2

The second module is a much more manageable 40 pages long or so. That said, it has literally 100% black coverage on every page. You can imagine how keen I am to print that out.

I contacted the company in question (using their Contact form) and asked about the possibility of buying a print-friendly PDF of the adventure. They didn’t even bother to reply. So, I thought I’d do the same as I did for the module above…to discover they had locked the PDF down so completely I couldn’t even copy the text out of it! What possible justification could they have for this?

My Rant

Why does neither company offer print-friendly versions of their adventures?

What possible reason could there be for not making their customers’ user experience as good as possible?

Why are they making their customers work harder to play their games?

Why are they deliberately making it harder to print out their PDFs?

It is utterly baffling. I cannot be the only GM on the planet who wants print-friendly PDFs. Certainly, the second company has lost a customer. I won’t be buying any more of their products—which is a shame as the game looks like a ton of fun.