2 - If you fly a lot of modules and want to have a lot of manuals (like 5+ at least), newer low per/page cost inkjet printers make it possible to get good quality prints in quantity if you put in a few hours of your own time. Very high initial expense, but can be worth it in the end if you value them enough.

For the bindings of the manuals I got a Rayson binding machine. This was a lot more expensive than I was expecting, but the result was much much better than a regular 3 hole punch. The ability to fold the book in half was great and the pages have much less of a chance of ripping out. Combined with a laminated cover and a leather back, it really turned a stack of a few hundred 8.5" x 11" pieces of printer paper into an actual book.

Summary Dithering manually may result in noisy image so some practice and experimentation need to be put in to achieve good results.

Examples and Brush Settings Airbrush Soft image1696×700 59.8 KB Airbrush Soft 80% Density image1696×700 119 KB Airbrush Soft 20% Randomness image1696×700 53.8 KB

DCSf16manualpdf

Welcome to /r/hoggit, a noob-friendly community for fans of high-fidelity combat flight simulation. Discussion primarily focuses on DCS: World and BMS. This is not a full on reprimand-you-for-having-your-navigation-lights-on-when-you-shouldn't-have type outfit here. You'll find we foster a laid back atmosphere to learn how to work the various modules available in DCS.

Blaming Bit depth for visible band seem like natural course of action but there is more to it. Like i stated Increasing amouts of bits will only increase amouts of bands. And Krita seem to have some dithering but apparently its not sufficient enought. image1359×1018 146 KB image1459×941 121 KB You can see Dithering in action.

I thought that banding effect was because of bad RGB math when mixing colours. This seems to lessen the effect but I am not sure.

I once did a review on the Tangent Engine and the conclusion for it’s banding was related to the bit depth too although there is is way more noticeable. I test this as is and for the tangent engine too then it is worth a shot.

With printing services out, I was going to need to get the equipment to do it myself. I've never done anything printing related before, so it was a learning experience for me.

3 - If you only want 1-2 manuals printed - you're still SOL. The method I jumped into is just too expensive to be worth it - at least to me.

I started to look at the cost of different types of printers - thinking that a color laser could handle the volume / color requirements of the manuals with a lower cost per page offsetting the additional capital expense of the machine. I then came across the HP SmartInk line of printers which optimizes for color cost per page, while still being relatively inexpensive like other inkjet printers. While this machine printed a lot slower and needed to have its paper try refilled mid-way through a print, it ended up being a perfect lower-entry cost, low cost per page mix. I need to print things on paper maybe 3 times a year in my personal life, so I really couldn't care less about the extra benefits of other machines.

F22DCS manual

So began my quest to find a way to materialize the manuals as cost efficiently as possible. It was clear pretty quickly that any pay-for-print place was just not going to cut it. The cost was never going to down to the "meh nice to have" price point.

Banding in the tangent normal engine is a bit more complex, though I don’t have the energy to go through all possible factors right now. However, this brush tip banding will also happen in 16 bit, the thing is that our brush tips are limited to 8bit for the foreseeable future.

DCSF18manualpdf

TLDR: I went on a quest to find a way to get printed DCS manuals for as low of a cost as possible - $700 later I ended up with a setup that costs ~$15 per manual which is pretty good in my book. Link to everything used here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13IanBCSlaYeE-9b7D2m9kdPZmgLNgoEdgCyr4YzKJSI/edit?usp=sharing

Anyway, the color smudge currently does some dithering, because all the maths is done in 16bit, and the gradient tools for 5.0 will have a ‘dither’ option, which uses blue noise to dither.

DCSj11manual

Now when it comes to DCS I can't google search or watch a youtube video on a topic that I don't eve know exists yet, and the manuals are structured in such a way to give you an excellent way of opening up to a random page to prompt a question like "What the heck is the LABS system in the F-86? - it's the only part of the panel left that i don't recognize". The book is going to give me some context on how to answer that question but 9/10 times I'm still going to just watch a youtube video on it.

In all - I'm glad I went down this road and I would do it again. I learned about so many things that I didn't know exist just by putting the manuals together. I imagine this will be interesting to all of about 10 people who google "DCS manual printed" in the future, as I did to start this. If you have any questions let me know - or if you have a way lower cost solution of your own (that isn't an iPad) - please keep that to yourself so I can stay in bliss...

The project ended up costing me wayyyyy more than I was expecting initially. At >$500 the upfront expenses of this make it a really steep investment to get started.

DCSF-14manualPDF

Brush Setting To achieve dithering in brush we will use Randomness and Density image753×552 22.7 KB Randomness will intordouse soft noise but doesn’t do good job at dithering color bands. Density will introduce deep dithering. This is what we need to soften Collor Banding but we can endup with noisy image if we dither over few color bands.

But once you get past that initial expense, the cost for each manual on just the consumables was extremely affordable. With just my initial purchase, the only thing that I actually need to restock on are the Ink and Paper. The bindings, covers, etc. will last me for far more manuals than I could ever want to print. So when the next major F-15E update comes out and it needs to be re-printed, I'm only looking at ~$15 of actual cost. That is absolutely the kind of cost efficiency that makes it worth it to me!

Using Blender Blur brush with density set to 26% and moving it along the color band will introduce proper dithering to a gradient. image1498×940 3.4 KB Capture1443×929 72.2 KB

I went a little overboard this Christmas break to solve a problem I've had since I started with DCS - how the heck do I get my hands on a printed version of the manuals!

DCSKiowaManualPDF

Dcs manual

So that's what I'm planning on using the manuals for - but my problem has always been that the cost to get them printed was just too high to justify the "nice to have" nature of them. Especially given the frequent nature of updates. At printing places like Kinkos, mimeo, etc. the A-10C II manual with a spiral binding was being quoted between $400-$800! That's insane!

The metal bindings did have a couple downsides though - it limited the maximum bindable length to ~250 pages, which forced some of the manuals (like the monster 800 page A-10C II one) into multiple booklets. This wasn't too huge of a deal - I just split the book at a major section and include the table of contents in each booklet. The binding machine I got can also only punch 12 sheets at a time, which meant there was a few hours of manual effort to work my way through the books.

No, it’s not caused by that, that’s a gamma correction thing. The problem here is just that 8bit isn’t enough for getting a fully imperceptibly smooth gradient.

Initially I had only planned to print out the F-16C manual as that has been what I have been trying to learn recently after flying the F/A-18C for a while, but the process was so easy that I ended up going all in and printing all the modules that I regularly fly.

Here's my argument for why they're useful: In my professional life I'm a software engineer - and as such I'll have to learn new technologies pretty frequently. When I start to learn something like a new programming language I'll always buy a book - not because I'm going to sit down and read it cover to cover to learn that language, there are better ways to learn and I can probably transfer the majority of my knowledge from areas I already have expertise in, making the majority of the book pretty useless. But the reason I do it is so that the book is there to tell me what I DON'T know.

Now I know what you're thinking - the manuals get updated pretty frequently, there are youtube videos, Chucks Guides. that are all much better for learning, etc. I know - I know, I actually don't use the manuals for "learning" either.

DCSApacheManual

Inroduction Every time we try to crate smooth color transitions we experience Color Banding. This occurs because Krita doesnt have built in dithering not because our 8-bit collor depth. (Using higher bit depth with dithering will result even smoother gradients but without dithering we will get just denser banding)

You can see a breakdown of everything that I bought (with amazon links if you wanted to pick it up yourself) here on this Google Sheet.

1- Don't pay to have someone print a manual for you unless you've got some kind of special in. The cost per page is just too high to make it worth it, especially on modules that will be updated in the future.

Examples and Blend Brush Settings We can enchance build in Blender Blur brush by setting its density in thic case to 80% image1696×700 57.6 KB

Gradients and Filters If we want to smooth big sufaces and we dont care about loosing detail we can use Filter->Other->RandomPick image720×484 11.9 KB

That ended up being 7 different manuals coming out on 15 different booklets, which is ~3,500 pages! Way more than I could possibly read, but it really helped fill out my bookcase ;)