I've noted that some folks around here have bought PDFs from Paizo.  I have an extra $8 and I was considering buying a couple PDFs from Paizo...so how are they?

Are they all professionally OCRed or are they just straight scans?  In either case, what's the quality?

Mixed bag, really. The RC scan for example, has jumbled text when copied and pasted. Oftentimes pages will be off-kilter. But generally I´m satisfied.

Yeah, the pdfs pretty much look like a summer intern did the scanning for minimum wage.

They're still worth the money, though.  Four bucks for the RC, any Gazetteer or Keep on the Borderlands?  Beats eating at McDonald's.

Why is it, that you americans never speak of all the other  food franchisesyou have? There is Wendys, Arbys, Jack in the Box, Taco Bell, KFC, Olive Garden etc.

It`s always McDonalds.
 How come?

Quote from: SettembriniWhy is it, that you americans never speak of all the other  food franchisesyou have? There is Wendys, Arbys, Jack in the Box, Taco Bell, KFC, Olive Garden etc.

It`s always McDonalds.
 How come?

Should be self-evident. McDonald's is, and was, the most popular of the fast food chains. Their primacy has eroded away in recent years, but they're still the most recognizable burger chain. Hell, they may not even be number 1 now. But for a long, long time they were the Colossus of hamburger joints, and the name McDonalds became synonymous with fast food.

I...

I have no idea.  

Maybe it's because we have all this subsumed guilt from when we were kids and harangued our parents into feeding us that slop.

Or maybe their advertising is just that damn good. :eek:

Quote from: SettembriniWhy is it, that you americans never speak of all the other  food franchisesyou have?
 How come?

Those other fast food places are the places I go when I don't want McDonalds and they are the places, that when I am at them, I wish were McDonalds.

I think it's also because they have a near universal rep for being completely disgusting.  Other fast food joints usually manage a few things that are half decent, but McD's is just cheap and nasty all the way.  Makes it a better scapegoat.

Their TSR pdfs are initially the same ones that are on RPGNow and were on SVGames/WotC (Jim Butler then Bastion Press did the scanning before WotC halted first non-D&D titles then all). So inconsistently scanned, some missing or upside down pages, and some are really bad scans (contrast or off color). Some are tolerable to quite good. IIRC all have at least a nod to OCR but with some missing parts/misspellings, but I expected that.

Paizo do have the ability though to correct things (unlike say RPGNow), and have been adding missing pages esp. but not gotten to any rescans of whole titles yet last time I checked (early this year). They had/have a thread of updates.

However when I last bought from them the PDFs had an annoying watermark in the center of the page which tends to screw up either the original header or footer. :rolleyes:

The biggest problem I have with Paizo are their criminally slow downloads.  I've got a screaming 4kb/sec going right now on my Darokin Gazetteer.