Something between 75 and 150 dpi is usually quite adequate for screen display unless your artwork is very detailed indeed. I've been looking at Suzerain recently for review and, beautiful though it is, browsing through is a slooooow process because it is extremely art heavy.

Ash

You *can* get away with 150dpi for print, but it's pretty low, especially for line art. If I had a 72dpi screen version I'd really need a higher res print version too wouldn't I?

http://www.solipsist-rpg.com/

I keep the art res at 300dpi for both print and PDF versions. If the file size is an issue I may increase the compression a little, but if the PDF is intended to be printed by the customer I'd rather not skimp on quality.

Some of our PDF stuff comes with a plain text 'easy print version' aswell as the fully artworked version, you could always do something like that.

You only make one original file, with art around 300dpi, but use different distiller profiles for generating the e-book and POD PDFs. The main effect of this is to compress the images in the former (I use 150dpi).

Assuming you're working with a similar process.

Tim Gray
Silver Branch Games
www.silverbranch.co.uk

Ahh ... that's the non-free Acrobat, right?

http://www.solipsist-rpg.com/

Indeed; the highly expensive if you don't already have it Acrobat. I was lucky that I'd already shelled out for Acrobat 4 for web design purposes, and I'm still using it. At some point I should probably upgrade...

It's increasingly the trend for other software to include the ability to generate PDFs, and if you have that you probably have at least some options for tweaking the settings.

I should probably note that if you *did* go to the trouble of making separate original files with different definition versions of artwork I think you'd end up with a smaller file size for the screen-aimed one, but I'm not sure.

Tim Gray
Silver Branch Games
www.silverbranch.co.uk

At the moment I am lacking in software all round, I realise.

I have old page layout programs (PageMaker etc.) but they are not suitable for modern PDF production. I don't have InDesign (and am unlikely to afford it), and my version of OSX is too old for Pages. I do have Photoshop, but not illustrator (or any other suitable vector app except Inkscape, for character sheets), and I don't have Acrobat either.

All I really have is word 2004, lots of HTML oriented tools, and Photoshop.

This rather limits my options, and I'm not sure I want to invest £700 in design apps to produce some free PDFs :)

http://www.solipsist-rpg.com/

I recommend pdf factory as a cheap alternative to Adobe. It works as a printer for most applications. You can set the DPI as required.
The files are a little bigger though.

http://www.fineprint.com/products/pdffactory/

+++
JoE
+++

Prince of Darkness Games
Rock N' Role-Play....

Ahhh Drat! Now ... is there an OSX equivalent? :)

http://www.solipsist-rpg.com/

OS X natively makes PDFs using the "Print > Save as PDF...".

Yes indeed Gregor, and that is how I make PDFs now from word (it's built in PDF writer seems to be broken). However that doesn't save indexes, crosslinks, chapters and the like. That's okay for me, but it might be nice to have them.

http://www.solipsist-rpg.com/

Not 100% sure what you mean, but it sounds like you'd need to use a PDF export feature in the originating application to catch all that. PagePlus does some stuff like that (but no good for you on a Mac), and I expect Indesign would, but I hear you about the money.

Tim Gray
Silver Branch Games
www.silverbranch.co.uk

Well Tim the OSX built-in PDF creator just catches what was going to the printer and turns it into a PDF, so you get a picture of the page as it would have printed. A number of apps (like Acrobat) can create PDFs with internal links, contents lists, indecies and the like.

http://www.solipsist-rpg.com/