With the help of StratosVX' wonderful scans of some of his material, I've started working on German translations of some of the material that has only appeared in US releases.
As a first test run I've translated the "Alchemist's Shop" pages from the questbooks of "Kellar's Keep"/"Return of the Witch King", "Barbarian Quest" and "Elf Quest". I'm not sure if there are already German translations of the potions that are regarded as THE translations agreed upon by the community, so I've just translated them myself. Also I've aimed at a paper size of A5/A4, so they are a bit smaller then the US booklets.
Here's a ZIP file with PDFs of the translated shop pages in B/W and color (at crisp 300dpi), plus transparent PNGs to tinker with yourself (the English shop sign is includes as well). Small previews:
To me these things were really important: Having all text as actual text objects (and not just graphics), using mostly the original layout (diverging only where some tidying up feels necessary) and fonts (although I'm considering using Clearface for most of the bodies of text - like in BQ and EQ - since it looks MUCH nicer than boring Aldine721). Furthermore I really despise compression artifacts, so all those JPEG compressed scans on the web simply aren't good enough. Sure, you can't get around using JPEG for more detailed images, like cover artworks, to keep file size in check. But all those single color drawings in the books? Use PNG with a limited palette! The drawings in my PDFs were all saved as PNGs with just 32 colors - more than enough for these types of images, and smaller than even 50% JPEGs. Also, my PDFs should be editable without too much trouble. I've tried opening them in Acrobat and Illustrator, and in both you can edit the text without problems (although the fonts are embedded in the PDFs, maybe they need to be
installed for editing).
Ultimately I'd like to create German translations of the US questbooks - we'll see how time and motivation turn out
As a goodie, here's a little peek at the translation of the shop sign. First of all I had to remove the original lettering, but with Photoshop's healing brush, that just took a few minutes:
Then, using Adobe After Effects, I recreated the lettering (using the font "Primitive") by creating a carving pattern, distorting it a bit, stamping the letters out of it, and adding the outlines and shading with simple layer styles:
This way the text stays editable, so you can change it to whatever you want: