Oolite Bulletins

Kaks wrote:

Looking good! Can't think of a single nit to pick!

I can. Sorry.

Page 3 - Career choices
Bounty Hunting ......
Recommend minimum of: Beam Laser, ECM, Fuel Scoop and Shield Booster to be equip before attempting this profession.

All other entries in this section say "to be fitted"

I just noticed it says "Oolite Wik" instead of "Oolite Wiki" and "Ooite BBS" instead of "Oolite BBS" on the first page. KZ9999, can you please fix these and the one spotted by tomsk and reupload?

tomsk wrote:

Page 3 - Career choices Bounty Hunting ......
Recommend minimum of: Beam Laser, ECM, Fuel Scoop and Shield Booster to be equip before attempting this profession. All other entries in this section say "to be fitted"

another_commander wrote:

I just noticed it says "Oolite Wik" instead of "Oolite Wiki" and "Ooite BBS" instead of "Oolite BBS" on the first page.

Done and Done. And please do nit-pick. It's the hardest job in the world to be your own editor.

I've uploaded two versions of the RS using Open Office with the Deja Vu fonts, with and without the fonts embedded. Direct links to: Conventional PDF & Embedded fonts PDF file

Could people download both and have an appraising look at the two versions. I would be interested in whether the OO version is easier or harder to read than the Word one. I also interested to see which one behaves better on a variety of peoples set-ups. I personally think the New OO version is the best one yet, but I want' to hear you folks opinions.

It's interesting to note that both zip down to much smaller sizes than the word version. It makes you wonder what word stuffs in the file to make it bloat so big? <slightly concerned humming to oneself.>

One more nit-pick: Page 3, below the Commodities Guide: "Trafficking in these commodities is illegal in all GCW member system." Should be systems, no?

another_commander wrote:

One more nit-pick: Page 3, below the Commodities Guide: "Trafficking in these commodities is illegal in all GCW member system." Should be systems, no?

That would be a yes! <sigh> Maybe I should looking for someone to my upgrade my OCR software, I'm seem to be missing a lot of individual characters.

Oh dear, I definitely had too much time on my hands on the lunch break. I went through the PDF with embedded fonts and unearthed the following, mostly trifling issues:

page 1
shift D, docking without the sequence. As well as needing the extra equipment, we need to indicate that this only works at the main station

there needs to be a space between the [?] button and 'Display the contract...'

page 2
2 Fuel 'how much you need to able to activate': change to either 'how much you need to be able to activate' or 'how much you need to activate'

3 Cabin Temperature 'the ships life support': change to 'the ship's life support'

11 Threat Indicator 'the indicator is yellow colour': change to 'the indicator turns yellow' perhaps?

IFF Scanner 'the objects direction and distance from your ship. The flags position': change to 'the object's direction and distance from your ship. The flag's position'


page 3
Commodities Guide notes: 'GCW member system.' change to 'GCW member systems.'

Career Choices carrier service
'some else’s bulk goods' change to 'someone else’s bulk goods'

page 4
'Escape Capsule is primary lifeboats system of' change to 'Escape Capsule is the primary lifeboat system for'

fer-de-lance:
'A agile and deadly' change to 'An agile and deadly'. Not sure about 'and local militaries.' would 'and the local military.' sound better?

moray: 'A multi-role ships,' change to 'A multi-role ship,'

python:'a simple robust craft' change to 'a simple, robust craft'

page 5

thargoid robotic fighter: 'to swam their victims' change to 'to swarm their victims'

viper interceptor: 'of a interstellar scale' - either 'of an interstellar scale' or 'of interstellar scale'. I'd be inclined to use 'magnitude' instead of 'scale', though.

worm: 'a ships launch' to 'a ship's launch'

page 6

'Economy::' (in 4 places) change to 'Economy:'. And probably Commander Status, Manifest, Commodity, etc.. could do with a ':' too, for consitency.


Phew, that was a lot of minor niggles, I don't know how I never noticed them before...

And I just realised: the embedded fonts pdf is called 'Referance' instead of 'Reference'.

Well, that's me done with the RS for now!

Viper & Viper Interceptor - is the cargo capacity correct, seem high to me ?!!!

KZ9999 wrote:

I would be interested in whether the OO version is easier or harder to read than the Word one.

It's broken here, but I see why: you're effectively using “DejaVu Sans Condensed” “Normal” rather than “DejaVu Sans” “Condensed”, with the result that I (and anybody else who's installed ttf-dejavu on Debian-like systems) get the fallback font instead. I've tried setting the font and typeface appropriately but OO substitutes “DejaVu Sans” “Book” for that

So I've set the width scale factor to 83% and immediately got broken formatting elsewhere. And it's a bit obvious when you've used exactly the wrong number of line feeds; Shift-Ctrl-Return in the heading table cell will help with this.

KZ9999 wrote:

It's interesting to note that both zip down to much smaller sizes than the word version.

OpenOffice documents are zip archives.

KZ9999 wrote:

It makes you wonder what word stuffs in the file to make it bloat so big? <slightly concerned humming to oneself.>

It's done so that more memory and higher-capacity mass storage is needed. Or something.

Thanks Kaks, all typos duely noteded and fed to my trumble.

Thanks toconn for spotting the viper errors. Serves me right for cutting-pasting from the Anaconda.

_ds_ wrote:

It's broken here, but I see why: you're effectively using “DejaVu Sans Condensed” “Normal” rather than “DejaVu Sans” “Condensed”, with the result that I (and anybody else who's installed ttf-dejavu on Debian-like systems) get the fallback font instead. I've tried setting the font and typeface appropriately but OO substitutes “DejaVu Sans” “Book” for that

Book is the default format for the type of the DejaVu format for the TTF files I downloaded. So did I get the wrong set or is there a difference between the Windows and Linux versions I have to look in to that.

_ds_ wrote:

So I've set the width scale factor to 83% and immediately got broken formatting elsewhere. And it's a bit obvious when you've used exactly the wrong number of line feeds; Shift-Ctrl-Return in the heading table cell will help with this.

The excesses amount of linefeed are a temporary situation while I'm still mucking around with the layout. Once everything is set in-place, I'll be breaking columns left right and centre which should fix that problem.

Keep up the nit picking folks, and I'll keep squishing them. <cue evil laugh>

KZ9999 wrote:

Book is the default format for the type of the DejaVu format for the TTF files I downloaded. So did I get the wrong set or is there a difference between the Windows and Linux versions I have to look in to that.

It looks like a packaging issue.

_ds_ wrote:

KZ9999 wrote:

Book is the default format for the type of the DejaVu format for the TTF files I downloaded. So did I get the wrong set or is there a difference between the Windows and Linux versions I have to look in to that.

It looks like a packaging issue.

That what it looks like to me as well. I'll be digging in their forums when I've got some time to see if there's a solution. (Or at least logging bug notice.) I've done another update of the files, so for your interest here is the source Open Office file, standard pdf and embedded pdf. The HUD page has had a major rejig (the graphic is at the bottom now) so that the page doesn't break so badly when you roll-your-own on the source file. You will see that there is improvement of files size in the latest revision. It's a products of my image experiments for the Your First Flight get-you-going-guide I'm working on.

Look at this famous being from the Oolite Wiki, who's image weighs in at 59KB...


After applying a bit of KZ9999 DTP magic and shrinking the file to miserly 11KB we get...

It's simply a bit depth reduction to 8b from 24b and applying no dithering. I think the final image is still of good quality without losing to much detail.

Now here is an example of a screen shot to be used in the guide.


The PNG is 197KB in size (from the original BMP of 1.37MB). After applying the adjustment, it drops to 44KB in size with the following result...


Now remember that these images will be at 600dpi on the printed page or a quarter of the size you see on your screen. When the HTML versions come out, I'll still apply the same effect but I'll be reducing the images to quarter the size first before dropping the colours.

So what do folks think? Good quality/size trade-off, or is there another method I should be using. As always, suggestions are appreciated and please continue the nit picking of the RS.

KZ9999 wrote:

You will see that there is improvement of files size in the latest revision. It's a products of my image experiments for the Your First Flight get-you-going-guide I'm working on.

Sometimes it's better to convert to JPEG. The first of your images looks more photographic and, as such, appears to be a good candidate for this. (IMO, there is too much detail loss there.)

Another week, another update of the RS.

Results of the latest update:
1 ) Replace font for keys on page 1 from Deja Vu Serif Mono to Serif.
2 ) Rebuilt header on pages and added footer to pages. Now pages are broken in to type for reference in other documents.
3 ) Observers guide: Ship speed is Light Mach. Pylons now Weapons Mounts for both lasers and missile information. Recalculated ships roll and pitch to the a Holdstock standard.
4 ) Expanded General information section now covers two pages
5 ) New layout breaks Equipment list. Now split in to Combat Equipment and Commercial Equipment and placed in two columns.
6 ) Thread about 'Your First Flight' highlighted confusion about how player actions effect their legal status. Added a GCW Orbital Laws section.
7 ) Ended up splitting Careers Choices in to two sections across two pages due to new layout.
8 ) Added sections on mouse flight and joysticks.
9 ) Replaced all ship images from compressed pngs to jpegs at 80% quality.

Revised standard PDF now weighs in at 507KB normal and 422KB zipped. Concrete improvements all round. I've ended up with 2.3 columns of free space in the general information section, so any ideas will be good.

Links to the new version of the PDF standard, PDF embedded and OpenOffice source. I've revised ship images too.

EDIT: Just a cross threading here, I've just up loaded the first rough-as-guts alpha 0.1 of Your First Flight. It weights in at 1MB due to the fact I haven't squeesed down the 50-odd screen shots yet. If you want to have squiz' at it and offer any sugestions that would be great.

In the quest to make ever smaller documentation file size, I've been experimenting with different image compression ratios. The question is which is the best trade off of file ver' quality. I've been staring at screen dumps for so long I can't tell which is the best. So can we have fresh eyes make the call.

Original png file at 79KB


Jpeg at standard 95% size for 56KB


Jpeg at my standard of 80% size for 14KB


Jpeg at 60% size for 10KB


Jpeg at 50% size for 8.7KB


Jpeg at 40% size for 7.8KB


There's no need to make post on which is the best. Just PM me with which one looks the best.

Just one small objection regarding the RS: I don't think that missions should be mentioned as service. Missions in the original Elite were supposed to be surprises and they were never, ever, mentioned in any manual. I would consider removing that paragraph from the RS.