Printing a Hard Copy

Hi all

I’m trying to get a hard-copy prototype made up from a Vassal module I created of my original design ‘Urrah!’. I have the board already printed, using my original Seashore (excellent, free Mac graphics programme) files as the master. I sent Vassal screenprints of the game’s counters to Superior POD in the US for printing and die-cutting, but they say because the screenprints are at 72dpi the results will be useless. They need the images at a higher resolution.

Does anyone have any ideas about how I might get higher resolution images out of Vassal? Alternatively, some other method of getting good quality hard-copy counters from Vassal originals?

Thanks for your time on this.

Don

Thus spake yangtze:

Hi all

I’m trying to get a hard-copy prototype made up from a Vassal module I
created of my original design ‘Urrah!’. I have the board already
printed, using my original Seashore (excellent, free Mac graphics
programme) files as the master. I sent Vassal screenprints of the game’s
counters to Superior POD in the US for printing and die-cutting, but
they say because the screenprints are at 72dpi the results will be
useless. They need the images at a higher resolution.

Does anyone have any ideas about how I might get higher resolution
images out of Vassal?

If your images are bitmaps, then your problem has nothing to do with
VASSAL, but rather with the dimensions of the bitmaps you’re using.

You seem to have some misconceptions about what image resolution is. I
don’t see anywhere that you’re module is available, so I am supposing
that the images in it are bitmaps, not SVG. Properly speaking bitmaps
have dimensions, not resolution. Bitmaps have dimensions in pixels;
the medium to which they’re rendered has a resolution in dots per inch.
You have to divide the dimensions of the bitmap by the resolution to
find out how large in absolute units the rendered image will be.

For example: Suppose your piece images are 100x100px. If you display
them at 100dpi, they’ll be 1" square. If you display them at 200dpi,
they’ll be 0.5" square.

So: Let d be a dimension of your bitmap, r the resolution of your
device, and l the length in absolute units at which your bitmap will
be rendered. Then: d/r = l.

You know what absolute size you want your printed pieces to be, and
your printer should be able to tell you the resolution of their printing
process. Since r and l are fixed, you can solve for d to find out what
dimension you need your bitmaps to have.


J.

Hi Uckleman - thanks for the speedy reply!

I was in the process of uploading the module this morning; your reply beat completion :slight_smile: The module is now present.

As you can see, the vast majority of the pieces in the module were simply created within Vassal itself.

I’m not an expert in computer graphics and have no conceptions about them at all, I’m simply reporting what Superior POD have told me. They say the images I sent, which were screenprints of Vassal, were at 72dpi and they need ‘larger’ images, whatever that means, in order to create readable hard copy. I have no idea how to create ‘larger’ images from Vassal.

I have attached an example of the files I sent them.

Here’s their email if it’s any help: "I apologize that I didn’t get back to you. I spoke with Jeff and he said that because the images you were starting with were web images, there is not a way to increase the dpi. Most, if not all, web images are at 72 dpi.

Is there anywhere else you can find the images? Or if you could find the larger images, we might be able to reduce the size and increase the dpi. Other than that, I don’t have any other suggestions."

Thanks in advance for any further thoughts you may have.

Don

Thus spake yangtze:

As you can see, the vast majority of the pieces in the module were
simply created within Vassal itself.

I see from examining the module that you used the Game Piece Images
facility to create the piece faces, rather than supplying the images
yourself—which makes the situation a bit different from what I’d
described originally.

What VASSAL is doing in this case is composing and producing the
images for you, based on parameters you specified. Neither GPI nor
user-supplied bitmaps are well-suited for producing images for
printing—if you wanted pieces images which were suitable for both
screen display and print media, you should have created them as SVG—
but, with GPI you might be able to adjust the images to get something
which is adequate for printing.

So, find out from your printer what DPI they want. For example, if they
say they will print at 600 dpi, then the image for the face of a 1/2"
piece should be 300x300px. Right now, you have your pieces set to be
54x54px. To get piece faces which will be 1/2" at 600 dpi, you need to
set the size to be 300x300 and then multiply all of the font sizes by
600/54. That might get you something which looks acceptible, or it
might still look crappy. But that’s the best you can do without redoing
the pieces.

I’m not an expert in computer graphics and have no conceptions about
them at all, I’m simply reporting what Superior POD have told me. They
say the images I sent, which were screenprints of Vassal, were at 72dpi
and they need ‘larger’ images, whatever that means, in order to create
readable hard copy. I have no idea how to create ‘larger’ images from
Vassal.

I have attached an example of the files I sent them.

Here’s their email if it’s any help: "I apologize that I didn’t get back
to you. I spoke with Jeff and he said that because the images you were
starting with were web images, there is not a way to increase the dpi.
Most, if not all, web images are at 72 dpi.

I should point out here that even professional printers can be confused
or don’t communicate very well about these things: Bitmaps being “at 72
dpi” is literally nonsense, because dpi is not a feature of the images
themselves, but rather the medium in which they’re rendered. The only
thing they could mean here is that most web images are intended for
display at 72 dpi—and that itself is dubious, since the only screens
which ever were at 72 dpi were old Macs which largely predate the web.
If you check your screen, you’ll likely find that its actual resolution
is significantly more than 72 dpi. (The one I’m using now is 96 dpi,
e.g.)

What the printer is really telling you is that you need to supply more
pixels in each dimension if you want decent-looking printing at the
fixed absolute size you’re asking for.


J.

Many thanks for this comprehensive info!

I’ll try the size multiplication solution with a copy of the module. I fear it will be unworkable because of the large number of files I would need to create to cover all of the pieces, all of which are back-printed. The printer would have to stitch these all together, and I’m already over budget.

My fall back solution will be to print the files I already have on sticky-back paper on my standard inkjet printer, then stick them to foamies and cut them with a rotary craft blade. I’ve done it before, but never with this many pieces :frowning: The big advantage using the printer was going to be the die-cutting. C’est la vie.

Thanks again for looking at this problem.

Don

Thus spake yangtze:

Many thanks for this comprehensive info!

I’ll try the size multiplication solution with a copy of the module. I
fear it will be unworkable because of the large number of files I would
need to create to cover all of the pieces, all of which are
back-printed. The printer would have to stitch these all together, and
I’m already over budget.

Why can’t you join the images youself? That’s maybe a 5-minute job
with ImageMagick and a shell script.


J.

Thanks for that - it looks a little complex to me, but I’ll give it a go :slight_smile:

Thus spake yangtze:

Thanks for that - it looks a little complex to me, but I’ll give it a go
:slight_smile:

In fact, you don’t even need a shell script. ImageMagick’s montage
command with the -tile flag should be all you need after you fish the
piece images VASSAL produces out of the module file.


J.