Printing
If you are a Story Guide - i.e. if you are running a game - then you can order bulk A4 double-sided colour laser printing in advance.
This is being offered by staff member Andrew Oakley at my own personal expense. Please email me the files as attachments:
It is your responsibility to check with me before the event to confirm that this printing has happened. I recommend you bring at least one copy of everything yourself, or your files on a USB/SD memory card, so we can run off extra copies if I fail to print what you need in advance.
Acceptable file formats
- PDF is most preferred - very strongly the most preferred
- MS-Windows users can use PDF Creator to make PDFs from any application
- Microsoft Word .doc and .docx are accepted
- OpenOffice and LibreOffice .odt is accepted
- Bitmap images .jpg , .png and .gif are accepted
- Vector images .svg and .wmf are accepted
What you need to include in your email
- The document files, as individual attachments or as a .zip or .tgz archive
- How many copies of each document you require - if you're sending more than one document, state the name of each document together with the number of copies of each document, e.g. "6x player-brief.pdf and 2x storyguide.pdf please"
Restrictions
- A4
If you are from outside Europe, please make sure that your document still makes sense when printed on A4 paper. If you're using US Letter paper, this means that your document may be shrunk slightly to fit the squatter dimensions of A4.
- Double-sided
If your document is more than one page long, it will be printed double-sided unless you specifically request otherwise.
- Predominantly white
Each page must be predominantly white or a very pale near-white colour. No whole pages of black or colour please, it uses up too much toner. No full-page photos unless they're predominantly white/pale. If you're printing maps, then the colour that represents the largest area should be white. If it's a map of the sea, the sea should be white. If it's a map of land, most of the land should be white. Feel free to add a green or blue border to coastlines to highlight the fact that they're coastlines, but for heaven's sake don't fill in the whole map with colour.
If you can't work out how to adjust your map to suit this, email it to me as an .svg or .png and ask, and I'll probably be able to adjust it for you.
- Large documents
If you send a file with more than 6 pages, I will print it as an A5 booklet (A4 folded in half and bound together with a staple). If it's more than 20 pages, I will only print one or two copies.
No more than 40 pages per document, please.
- Large files
No more than 60MB total attachment size please. Use a .zip file if this is a problem.
- Colour
Printing is onto cheap matt A4 photocopier paper. Colours usually come out fine on this, because it's laser toner rather than inkjet. As with any RGB->CMYK conversion, though, saturated colours may appear darker on the page than on the screen. I am heavily colour blind, so I may not notice this.
Equipment
At home, I have a Xerox 6130DN double-sided A4 colour laser network printer. This is a massive full-sized office laser printer. It is connected to a number of Ubuntu Linux computers running Libre Office, plus one Microsoft Windows 8 computer running Microsoft Office 2010. All of them also run Adobe Reader.
At the venue I may bring a monochrome single-sided inkjet printer & Linux laptop, but you should not rely on this. I certainly won't be bringing a massive full-sized office laser printer.
