There is a fairly interesting article by Jon Schindehette (senior creative director for D&D at WotC) about the creation of the 1e reprints: here.

(Just for those of you who don't visit the Wizards of the Coast's web site every day )

Without ripping it apart and separating the pages from the spine, I scanned about 52 pages and all four inside cover and flyleaf pages from a copy of the PHB and it did not bleed through.
Remember the Perleman PHB that made the rounds around the world for a couple of years before dissapearing into someones private vault?
All I did was open the complete book and lay it down onto the screen and while lightly pushing the book nearly flat scanned as well as I could.

I suspect that WoTCo tore the books completely apart to scan individual pages on a high grade scanner.
I am going to go out on a limb and state that I do not believe that they had all that much cleaning to do.

SimperingToad wrote:What surprised me was the mention of re-keying everything instead of using OCR methods.

Are those two mutually exclusive? Excuse me if that's a stupid question; I'm not very familiar with printing processes and only have a vague idea what "re-keying" means, but based on my limited understanding, I assumed that they could still have OCRed the text.

And then there's the cover. They wanted to 'pay homage'. Read between the lines. "We didn't have the source artwork, so we had to come up with something pleasing to the eye and yet familiar to the suckers... er... potential buyers."

Even if they had the original artwork, I'm sure they'd still have designed a new cover for the reprints. D&D has a very long history of changing the cover art when books are reprinted. The 1e core books each had two covers, the 2e black spine reprints got new covers, the 3.5 special editions had new covers (fake leather ones). The 4e deluxe prints had covers that were the close to the originals, but even those used only part of the original artwork.

Echohawk wrote:

SimperingToad wrote:What surprised me was the mention of re-keying everything instead of using OCR methods.

Are those two mutually exclusive? Excuse me if that's a stupid question; I'm not very familiar with printing processes and only have a vague idea what "re-keying" means, but based on my limited understanding, I assumed that they could still have OCRed the text.

Re-keying = re-typing. We do after all, use keyboards, not typeboards.    You could do both in certain circumstances, but if you have the scanner doing a good job on the OCR front, why bother re-typing?

Echohawk wrote:

And then there's the cover. They wanted to 'pay homage'. Read between the lines. "We didn't have the source artwork, so we had to come up with something pleasing to the eye and yet familiar to the suckers... er... potential buyers."

Even if they had the original artwork, I'm sure they'd still have designed a new cover for the reprints. D&D has a very long history of changing the cover art when books are reprinted. The 1e core books each had two covers, the 2e black spine reprints got new covers, the 3.5 special editions had new covers (fake leather ones). The 4e deluxe prints had covers that were the close to the originals, but even those used only part of the original artwork.

Sure, but if you notice, much more of the 4E covers are present for the specials by comparison to these. The benefit of having originals to work with. Which leads into...

misterspock wrote:I just took that to be that they scanned the original artwork, used photoshop to section out what they wanted, then continued to do the graphic design touch up stuff in photoshop, instead of someone mimic'ing the art from scratch. I'll be interested to see it in person though. I really hope it remained Sutherland and Trampier's work.

They simply couldn't use the covers of the original books to do a reprint. It would have been blurry and taken a lot of photoshop work. The first issue would have been dealing with the dot pattern from the printer. Assuming they found one perfectly in registration (all 4 colors lined up exactly where they should be), they would have had to remove the dot pattern, which often means a type of blurring. Then, there's all the text and the banner, not to mention the oval blurb on the back cover. Care to photoshop something in there?

And if you take notice, the painting doesn't stop at the cover edge, but it wraps around to the inside, and gets partially covered by the endpages. Again, not something easily scanned and dealt with. Although in this case, they could cheat and size the painting a bit bigger. Then, how does one make a good scan job of the spine area? No mean feat.

I'm guessing they indeed used pieces of the original covers, then photoshopped 'new' art using the scans as a base. The covers I recall seeing did not look like a simple scan and touch-up.

They still would have had the same issue with the dot pattern from the presses. I can't say I can recall the specs of the posters to say. But, in general, if the image on the poster is larger than the actual book, it might help mitigate that particular issue when reduced to size.

grodog wrote:I'm sure if WotC was very interested...

That may be the determining factor right there.  

I really look forward in getting these reprints, both for my collection and for my store. The article has raised my expectations  

Sardan wrote:Are these still only going to be available in the US?

Nope. They now have the same circulation as any new D&D release, including Amazon and other online stores.

Sardan wrote:Are these still only going to be available in the US?

No no, worldwide distribution