Layout material seeking

F

Florent Giboin

First Post

• Mar 14, 2017

• #1

Dear EN world members,

I am writing since a while my personal D&D4 setting and I would like to use Wizard like layout like the 4.5 guide by example.
Do you have some tips and materials to help me ?

 

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Garthanos

Arcadian Knight

• Mar 14, 2017

• #2

If I do a martial power 3, I would need this too.

 

Garthanos

Arcadian Knight

• Mar 17, 2017

• #3

Wonder what software was used?

 

J

Jhaelen

First Post

• Mar 27, 2017

• #4

*bump*

 

Myrhdraak

Explorer

• Mar 28, 2017

• #5

Florent Giboin said:

Dear EN world members,

I am writing since a while my personal D&D4 setting and I would like to use Wizard like layout like the 4.5 guide by example.
Do you have some tips and materials to help me ?

Click to expand...

I have done some work in Word, but I do not know which 4.5 guide you are referring to

 

M

MwaO

Adventurer

• Mar 28, 2017

• #6

They use InDesign for books and Word for non-book items.

 

Garthanos

Arcadian Knight

• Mar 28, 2017

• #7

Myrhdraak said:

I have done some work in Word, but I do not know which 4.5 guide you are referring to

Click to expand...

I was thinking of yours actually

 

AbdulAlhazred

Legend

• Mar 29, 2017

• #8

Well, if you aren't into using expensive software like InDesign, you could use Scribus. It is a pretty capable package that produces professional print-ready output (it can produce industry standard PDFs, do spot color, and all the other craziness).

Depending on how elaborate you want to get, you COULD just muddle through with something like Libre Office Writer, which will produce some perfectly serviceable 2 column layouts, though doing something as elaborate as a WotC-4e-esque page layout is probably going to be at best damned hard. I've found it works OK up to a certain point, and it generates PDFs that are mostly pretty good for something you just want to read online (I would never attempt to print them, there's no color control of any sort and I doubt they meet the quality standards of even local print shops).

 

Myrhdraak

Explorer

• Mar 29, 2017

• #9

Garthanos said:

I was thinking of yours actually

Click to expand...

If you are good at Word and Photoshop (or Gimp if you want something free) you do not need InDesign. Of couse if you as in the 5th Edition want books that have tailored graphics for each page you should probably go for InDesign but you can get very far with just Word if you know how to use it properly. With the 4th Edition white page background it is very easy - the fonts you can find on the Internet (DnDLolth, DnDVecna, DnDIcon,Mentor Std and Mentor Sans Std). If you want to have colored pages you have to add PNG graphics in order to be able to overlay pictures on the colored background, but it is good enough as far as I can say. I have printed out some very graphic rich material on Lulu.com and the quality is really good and not very expensive. Send me a mail and I can forward you some templates, myrhdraak@spray.se

/Myrhdraak

 

AbdulAlhazred

Legend

• Mar 29, 2017

• #10

Myrhdraak said:

If you are good at Word and Photoshop (or Gimp if you want something free) you do not need InDesign. Of couse if you as in the 5th Edition want books that have tailored graphics for each page you should probably go for InDesign but you can get very far with just Word if you know how to use it properly. With the 4th Edition white page background it is very easy - the fonts you can find on the Internet (DnDLolth, DnDVecna, DnDIcon,Mentor Std and Mentor Sans Std). If you want to have colored pages you have to add PNG graphics in order to be able to overlay pictures on the colored background, but it is good enough as far as I can say. I have printed out some very graphic rich material on Lulu.com and the quality is really good and not very expensive. Send me a mail and I can forward you some templates, myrhdraak@spray.se

/Myrhdraak

Click to expand...

I've found that Scribus is easily 100x easier to use for more complicated layouts than any version of any Word Processor. Even the best of them simply lack the ability to frame up a page, create complex book layouts, etc.

The thing is, by the time you get to the point where you are wanting to do that, you've got to be pretty serious because its going to be a large time commitment, and then what? I've kinda gotten to that point with my own work, where its fun and whatnot, but laying out all 3-5 hundred pages of material in a complex format would be months of work, at best. Beyond which there's the skill question. I mean, laying out books is definitely not casual work! You borrowed heavily from the 4e layouts, which is cool, but for any of us who would desire to move beyond that it gets exponentially more difficult (or you have to just settle for something much less involved, which is OK too, lots of material out there is formatted in a very simple fashion).