Lofgeornost
Feeling Martian!
- Joined
- Jul 8, 2020
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I've recently been looking through some of my collection of games in PDF format--which nowadays dwarfs my actual physical collection--and I've been running into the same problem repeatedly. I will have multiple copies of a PDF of a particular game or supplement, acquired at different times--normally this is the result of buying the game on my own and then getting it in some sort of bundle later. And it's really hard to tell which is the latest version of the game, or if two of the versions are identical. The file date doesn't help, since that's when I saved it, not when it was generated. Often the file names do not help either--some writers/publishers seem to provide updated versions of games without changing the filename, or you can't tell from the name which is older and which younger. Nor does the information appear in the text itself.
I find myself scratching my head over this. I would think it would not be that hard to include a line in the front matter of any game, where you have the copyright information anyway, stating 'this is version X.Y created on date Z.' Nor would it be difficult to number versions in the filename itself--and some games actually do this, which is great. But a surprising number don't seem to note the version either in the filename or the front pages of text.
I would think that information would be useful for the creator as well, for keeping track of just what version of the work a given electronic file represents. So I'm puzzled that it often doesn't seem to appear anywhere.
I find myself scratching my head over this. I would think it would not be that hard to include a line in the front matter of any game, where you have the copyright information anyway, stating 'this is version X.Y created on date Z.' Nor would it be difficult to number versions in the filename itself--and some games actually do this, which is great. But a surprising number don't seem to note the version either in the filename or the front pages of text.
I would think that information would be useful for the creator as well, for keeping track of just what version of the work a given electronic file represents. So I'm puzzled that it often doesn't seem to appear anywhere.