The Gazette today launched their “new and improved” Alouettes coverage. This includes a special Alouettes section to their website, a new blog by football writer Herb Zurkowsky, and a special downloadable newsletter called Game Day (direct PDF link).

If this sounds familiar, you might be from Ottawa. The Citizen has been doing the same thing for Senators games since January. This is also similar to afternoon news editions like the Citizen’s Rush Hour or the Star’s Star P.M.

How successful these PDF papers are is a mystery. I don’t have access to the Citizen’s or the Star’s website stats. But they’re easy to produce and can be distributed instantaneously for free. So it’s certainly worth a try.

The Gazette’s first foray into this new system has hit a few snags though:

Pixellation: Don’t adjust your monitors, this is how the text (and everything else) appears, which makes you wonder why it’s not just a giant JPEG instead of a PDF. Normally things like this are done when font problems appear, so hopefully they’ll have that figured out by next time (UPDATE: Nope.). Not only is the text unreadable, but giant images like this require larger PDFs than vectorized text.

Font problems: You’d think they’d be solved by the rasterization of the entire document, but apparently not. “n” in one of the dingbat fonts makes a bullet, and it’s replaced here with a red Courier New letter.

Headshot: This shot of the lovable Herb Zurkowsky appears everywhere: in the paper, on the blog, in the Game Day special. And I’m afraid to look at it. Let this be a warning folks, HERB ZURKOWSKY WILL MURDER YOUR FAMILY.

Oh, and in case you’re curious, we won: 34-26 against the Toronto Argonauts.