A suggestion for WotC re: DDi

[Klaus]

One thing that'd be very useful to me, and I'm sure to other DDi subscribers, would be to collect Dragon articles of the same series/column in their own PDF files. Like:

- "Ruling Skill Challenges" <--- specially this!
- "Creature Incarnations"
- "Ecologies"
- "Playing...", grouping together the MM races expanded in Dragon.
- "Bestiary"
- Optionally, there could be PDFs grouped by race: "Dragonborn" would feature the Ecology of the Dragonborn, the article on Io'vanthor and maybe the article on Tiamat's followers; "Tiefling" would include Vor Kragal, "Class Acts: Warlord" that focused on tiefling warlord/locks and maybe the tiefling-based Domain of Dread.

It'd sure make it easier to reference/print similar articles.

 

[ferratus]

Aside from more or better categories, I'd like a list of "related" articles based on tags. So if you trigger the "Dragonborn" tag you might get their ecology article, religious practices of Bahumut, or an adventure where a dragonborn is trying to raise a flying citadel of Arkhosia.

 

[Riley]

Tags would be a fabulous idea to implement.

To make it work, though, Wizards would also have to start updating the individual articles at the end of each month - and not just fixing errata in the 'whole issue' PDF.

 

[Jack99]

I like this idea!

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Me, too. Might pay off to have some capability to dynamically generate PDF on the server based on some (formatted) text.

 

[Asmor]

Me, too. Might pay off to have some capability to dynamically generate PDF on the server based on some (formatted) text.

While I'm no type-setting expert, I strongly suspect that type-setting is not the sort of process which is easily automatable. At the very least, you'd want someone to review every single change and make sure nothing broke (e.g. text running into images, bad paragraph breaks, etc).

Perhaps a more usable idea would be a fan-run database with a list of all articles, tags for each, links to the direct articles on DDI, and a link to and page reference for the compiled (and updated) issue.

Actually, I might just try to do something like that.

 

[Klaus]

While I'm no type-setting expert, I strongly suspect that type-setting is not the sort of process which is easily automatable. At the very least, you'd want someone to review every single change and make sure nothing broke (e.g. text running into images, bad paragraph breaks, etc).

Perhaps a more usable idea would be a fan-run database with a list of all articles, tags for each, links to the direct articles on DDI, and a link to and page reference for the compiled (and updated) issue.

Actually, I might just try to do something like that.

But the thing is: the articles are already formatted separatedly. It'd take next-to-no effort to get articles of the same column (like Ruling Skill Challenges) and put them in a single PDF file.

 

[Ktulu]

I think a "Related Articles" section would be pretty nice, with one exception. D&D can tag a lot of stuff. Feats, Powers, Class, Race, Level, Alignment, Deity, and so on that it could get somewhat bloated.

I think that the solution should rest with the compendium. Add more tabs for things like Skill challenges, traps, and an expanded artifacts section.

Because, really, having two separate, searchable compendiums seems superfluous (heck, even adding the .pdfs to the compendium as an article search would be pretty sweet.)

 

[UngainlyTitan]

Dynamicly generated pdf sounds like it would be quite a pain to create and I am not sure WoTC has the resources to devote to this. I would be happy if they databased the metadata for Dragon and Dungeon so that one could search the articles and get the issue and page number of the relevant article.
Is it possible to hyperlink to pdf articles? if so then they could open the reelvant issue to the appropiate page.

 

[JohnnyQuest]

Yes, I'd really like to have the Skill Challenges article all in one place. Maybe one place to start is just to group all the articles that have Part X in the title together. I'd even be happy with just the links to each article being grouped together.