SVC- Can we get a new subtopic in the "UPDATING SFB (WITHOUT SPP)" Topic called "SSD Technical Specifications" where we can discuss how to make SSDs. What programs people are using to draw SSDs, what format the files are being saved as, what software is being used to layout the images (notes, tables, and charts), what fonts are used for text, and what software is being used to convert the SSDs to pdf.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Sunday, July 06, 2025 - 10:27 pm: Edit

The way ADB does them (I invented it, Steve Petrick took it over) produces a TIFF file from a program called DESK PAINT. We normally aim for a size that shrinks to 64% in Pagemaker for an SSD book or Captain's Log, but some crowded SSDs drop to 60, 56, 52, or 48 percent. We use dot matrix fonts that I personally edited 30 years ago called SSD and BOX. SSD is a version of GENEVA which I edited for better readability. BOX is a modified version of SSD where every letter is an equal number of boxes wide so that weapons designations can center in an SSD box.

In the past, we have fanatically avoided letting outsiders do SSDs because if we cannot edit them getting a change made by going back to the original designer could delay a product by however long it takes the creator to fix his mistake or make the improvement we want.

Given that Steve Petrick is no longer going to be doing SSDs I am willing to allow outsiders to do SSDs that more or less match the "look and feel" that we use SO LONG AS Shawn Hantke or Mike West can open and edit the files as I can be certain that in an emergency I can get one of them on the phone and get a fix made in real time. (Imagine that a product is ready to start printing when someone happens to notice that the KLGINON D7Q SURVEY SHIP is in need of a correction. If we can fix it, we can fix it in a matter of five minutes (long enough for Jean to decide to re-proofread the rulebook). If we cannot edit it, and we send it back to John Doe to be edited on his unique software, we don't know how busy he is, if he's in his home town, if he checked his email, and so on. The whole office comes to a dead stop until a corrected SSD is received, which in one case took most of a week.)

At this point I am willing to use SSDs done by anyone so long as...
Look and feel is the same
You don't expect to be paid
Mike or Shawn can edit the file
The file survives checking (proofreading) by myself, Jean, Mike West (aka, the new Petrick), or Shawn Hantke.

Just as I was leaving the office last Thursday for the holiday weekend, I got an email from someone who I have no reason not to trust casually mentioning "Oh, I already updated the R5 SSDs" and I need to get his files and put them through the proofreading wringer. If his files exist and are "close" to ready to print, the revision process goes into warp speed (and he will get rewarded).

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Monday, July 07, 2025 - 06:33 am: Edit

I should comment that Shawn, Mike West, Jessica Orsini, and Nick Samaras have all submitted SSDs which are close to the mark.

By Ryan Opel (Ryan) on Monday, July 07, 2025 - 07:49 am: Edit

Great news.

By Shawn Hantke (Shantke) on Monday, July 07, 2025 - 01:04 pm: Edit

re Desk Paint? SVC- I can't find any information on "Desk Paint" It could be that there isn't any info out there. Is it possible that the software is called "MacPaint" or "MacDraw" or "SuperPaint"?

I can find lots of information about MacPaint which used rasters. Versions- v1.0 Jan 1984 for OS 1.0, v1.3 May 84 for OS 1.1, v1.4 Apr 1985 for OS OS 2.0, and v2.0 for OS 3.2. I believe MacPaint was Black and White only.

I can find some information about MacDraw which used vectors. Versions- MacDraw 1984 was Black and White only. MacDraw II 1988 added colors. MacDraw Pro 1991, ClarisDraw 1993, and EazyDraw 2004. MacDraw can be used in collaboration with MacWrite.

EazyDraw Retro is a 32-bit version that will run under macOS 10.4.11 through macOS 10.14, and can import many old image formats, including PICT, AppleWorks, ClarisWorks, MacDraw, MacDraw II, and MacDraw Pro.

SuperPaint uses vectors or rasters and draws in color. Versions- 1.0 1986, 1.1 1988, 2.0 1989, 3.0 1991, and 3.5 1993.


What is used to make the charts and Tables? MacWrite? Word? Excel?

Font clarifications. Is the Font Box only used inside the boxes? SSD is the font used on everything else on the SSDs? The Notes, Charts, Tables and box names? What is the Font used for Ship Titles at the top of the SSD?


What is the preferred resolution in dpi for SSDs and pdfs of SSDs?

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Monday, July 07, 2025 - 01:12 pm: Edit

It is Deskpaint, which will open MacPaint files. Charts and tables were built in MacPaint. I don’t remember the title font but will try to find it. It might be Silicon Beach. I have no idea what the Dpi is. As noted the files are done in a size i will look up and shrunk to 64 percent in pagemaker. I think we used SSD to hand build the charts.

By Shawn Hantke (Shantke) on Monday, July 07, 2025 - 02:53 pm: Edit

Okay I found a disk for it on eBay that got me a little further down the rabbit hole. I think Google search kept changing "DeskPaint" to "Desk Paint", still not a ton of information about it.

DeskPaint & DeskDraw (Zedcore). Versions 1.02 1985?, 1.5 1987?, 2.01c 1989?, 3.0.3 1990, and 3.0.8 1992. I think it supports color, and appears to be raster.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Monday, July 07, 2025 - 04:16 pm: Edit

It is a dot matrix thing just exactly like MacPaint, but it allows a bigger drawing area. To do an SSD in MacPaint means doing it in two pieces and lining them up in PageMaker, which was never all that good. Deskpaint allowed us to do everything in one big beautiful SSD. I opened it on my ancient Mac and it says version 3.54 which is 1993. It is by Zedcore.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Monday, July 07, 2025 - 04:57 pm: Edit

The titles are SILICON BEACH 24 bold.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Monday, July 07, 2025 - 05:07 pm: Edit

I could ask Leanna to come by the office and build a "font suitcase" of BOX, SSD, and SILCONBEACH which I could then make available to anyone.

By Shawn Hantke (Shantke) on Monday, July 07, 2025 - 06:28 pm: Edit

A Font suitcase would be very helpful!

If I recall correctly, the Omega 5 SSD book was done by SPP does a pdf exist?

For coloring the SSD books that I have done. SPP would send me a pdf. I then would convert the pdf to tiffs with a "Pdf to Tiff Converter" and then added color to the tiffs with various different versions of MS paint over the years. My issues with that were that the tiff files were huge, probably I have the conversion output dpi settings way too high. I would then make a pdf out of the colored tiffs with Adobe Acrobat 6.0. Adobe Acrobat 6.0 has a bad habit of randomly blowing up some of the images to 4x letter size. This forced ADB to resize some of the images in my submitted pdf before uploading them to the eBook sites.

I have tried some other ways to make pdfs and in the past, they have failed and ADB can't open them. Sadly, I sent a pdf that crashed SPP's Computer once. A built in problem with Adobe Products (and some others) is that they are backwards compatible but will NOT open files created by newer Software. Examples- Adobe Acrobat 10 can open pdfs created by Adobe Acrobat 6, but Adobe Acrobat 6 can NOT open pdf files created by Adobe Acrobat 10. The same is true for versions of Adobe Illustrator.

Tiff, Gif and Png files are easy for me to work with. Jpegs are too pixilated and near impossible to color. As soon as you fix something, after any save it is all messed up again.

I believe the FC Cards and the ship counters are done with Freehand 8 and the files are saved as eps files. eps files are vector based images. I believe that Adobe Illustrator 8 and 10 are the last versions that can open eps files, but I fear that if an eps file is modified with Illustrator 8 or 10 Freehand 8 might not be able to open it. Can anyone test this? I believe the eps format was discontinued in favor of svg files. No version of Freehand can open svg files. I am not sure if Freehand 8 can open files created with Freehand versions 9, 10, 11 or MX either.

Illustrator Version 9 included a tracing feature, which was similar to the functionality found in Adobe's discontinued product, Streamline.
This means you could use Illustrator 9 to convert raster images (like photos or scanned drawings) into editable vector graphics. Versions after 9+ likely can do the same.

svg is a newer vector graphics image standard than eps, that most image software can open and edit today.

I have no idea what the SFB SSDs or FC Ship Cards use as images in the old or current ship libraries for SFB Online.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Monday, July 07, 2025 - 09:03 pm: Edit

Experience with moving files between Illutrator and Freehand is “just don’t”. It introduces errors that are hard to spot and harder to fix.

By Mike West (Mjwest) on Tuesday, July 08, 2025 - 03:15 am: Edit

For SSDs I used my ancient, and I mean ancient, version of Paint Shop Pro that still amazingly works. I tend to work with GIF or PNG, but now that I know ADB works with TIF, that's what I'll use for official stuff.

I now have a pretty large set of images that I craft from. I have cleaned up a lot of stuff and even reworked various charts to be more compact. I have done things inconsistently as I have progressed, but I can make sure to use my "best practices" on official stuff.

I have no real idea of what the fonts used are. When I need new text, I simple "construct" the words as images, rather than proper text. It's painful to do when I need something new, and the kerning isn't always perfect, but it works well enough and you can't really tell. I even had to "build" some of the letters I was missing, but that's all done now.

I am collecting and documenting all of the SSD comments that are used, but there a lot of them. Probably over 100. It's taking time to make sure I have all of them. I have also made some minor changes to them as I've gone along and those will need to be approved or reverted. The primary reason for any changes was brevity. Saving even one line of text can make a huge difference on a CVA or something like that, which is using ALL of the space on the SSD.

For any colorization (which, honestly, I don't like on the SFB SSDs), it I'll be a simple process once I have those samples, as it will just be color sample and fill into the boxes. Time-consuming, yes, but simple enough.

I have not had the time to really learn how to make FC ship cards, or to figure out an appropriate tool yet. But hopefully I'll get around to it eventually. The SSD stuff comes first.

By Robert Russell Lender (Rusman) on Tuesday, July 08, 2025 - 09:23 am: Edit

I've got a small group of SSDs I created for personal use. I used existing templates of SSDs in GIF format that had been created by others and simply modified them or painstakingly recreated new ones of other ship types by manually creating all the lines and boxes or letters.

I used MS Paint (Win7 & XP versions worked best). All the work was slow and laborsome but produced very "Official" looking SSDs. The work involved manually copy/pasting existing things like SSD boxes or lettering and manually dragging them into place. Occasionally I'd have to manually recreate something from scratch with the line or pencil draw feature while zoomed in. Again, laborious, but it worked well. It sounds like Mike's old PaintShop Pro techniques were similar.

For the record, I too dislike the colorized SSDs. The good ole black on white originals are for me.

Cheers,
Rus

By Russ Simkins (Madcowak) on Tuesday, July 08, 2025 - 09:04 pm: Edit

I use MS Visio and can turn a blank page into a B10 in less than 15 minutes. I plop an image of the SSD to reproduce (scan, pdf to image, whatever) onto a background layer, lock it, and make it not print so it is a perfect guide. Builds really quickly and accurately with snaps to half the box dimensions.

I have all the weapons charts, fighter mini-SSDs, etc in 'Stencils' for each empire so I can drag and drop anything that isn't specific to that SSD.
Each 'box' is a smartshape so I can select from a dropdown what boxtype (i.e. standard blank, lettered torp, numbered phaser, all the funky mech-links, +/-shading, etc).

I am truly not scratching the surface of what it does outside of printing a paper SSD. A lot of code behind it within Visio. Example: semi-automatic (interactive) damage allocation that rolls the dice, reads the DAC, reads the SSD boxes to find the next available available undamaged boxtype (it knows phaser arcs), greys out all other boxtypes (or phaser not in arc), and then YOU click on which non-greyed out box to hit. It even knows those bloody Klingon phaser arcs.

I could go on with a post longer than 100 typical Garys with all the really cool stuff it can do. It's taken years to get here.

Downside, Visio 2024 is $310 (I use 2016 still which is now ~half that). Haven't tried to reproduce the rasterized line styles for hull outlines (could be a show stopper for y'alls needs).

-more cheers,
the other Russ

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Tuesday, July 08, 2025 - 11:38 pm: Edit

Nick Samaras is the mystery SSD creator who impressed Petrick. Nick has already updated R5, R7, and R8, so I think we can get those out between now and Christmas of this year or some other year.

By Jessica Orsini (Jessica_Orsini) on Wednesday, July 09, 2025 - 06:50 am: Edit

Excellent news, that!

By Steve Stewart (Stevestewart) on Wednesday, July 09, 2025 - 08:20 am: Edit

I love the colourised SSDs! My wallet is taking a monthly hit so I can replace the B&W ones!

By Shawn Hantke (Shantke) on Wednesday, July 09, 2025 - 10:07 am: Edit

I started coloring the SSDs for new and younger players, or players coming over from Federation Commander. The colors help them find systems on the SSDs quicker. I am aware that some players love it, and some players hate it.

Per google there are nineteen versions of Visio going back to 1992. It appears that newer versions of Visio can open files created by older versions of Visio, but some files created by newer versions of Visio can't be opened by older versions of Visio. It sounds like it depends on what features were used when creating a file and if that feature is used by the older versions. Visio can save files as a pdf, png, svg, gif, or tif.

By Jeff Anderson (Jga) on Wednesday, July 09, 2025 - 03:35 pm: Edit

How much extra effort would it take for ADB, Inc. to offer parallel products; SSDs with color and without?


(P.S.: If it'd be too much of a headache, please feel free to delete this post. Thank you in advance for not throwing frying pans at my head. )

By Kosta Michalopoulos (Kosmic) on Wednesday, July 09, 2025 - 05:20 pm: Edit

Jeff, parallel colour and black & white SSD books are already available as PDF products via the online retailers (DriveThruRPG, Warehouse 23, Wargame Vault). I suspect colour print products would be too expensive to be viable.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Wednesday, July 09, 2025 - 05:30 pm: Edit

Color printing would cost a lot; nobody would buy it at our production levels.

By Alex Chobot (Alendrel) on Wednesday, July 09, 2025 - 05:59 pm: Edit

Filling in the gaps in the R-series modules is gonna be huge!

Jeff, they have been offering both B&W and color versions of SSD books for a while, and color SSD packages for Captain’s Log.

By Shawn Hantke (Shantke) on Friday, July 11, 2025 - 10:53 am: Edit

ADB is using Cutepdf 3.6 to assemble some of the SSD Book pdfs, at least according to the document properties.