EZ20 now available for free. . .

[jdrakeh]

I was thinking that--if I had a laptop & was willing to use it during the game--the TiddlyWiki would be much more usable than hard-copy.

Oh, I agree -- the thing is that the number of people who own laptops and are willing to use them during game sessions is significantly smaller than those who are can print a file and are willing to use books during gaming sessions. The TiddlyWiki would be a nice alternative for the minority, but making it (or raw HTML) the primary means of conveying material limits the appeal of said material considerably.

One of the main reasons that PDFs took off as an electronic medium for presenting novels and the like while HTML didn't, is that a PDF can offer all of the advantages that HTML can and print-ready formatting. Seriously, there is nothing that HTML (or TiddlyWiki) can't do that a searchable PDF with hyperlinks doesn't do much better for your typical consumer.

A TiddlyWiki is easier to update for the person doing the initial presentation, but that is of little (if any) importance to the typical consumer who wants to use the material.

Seems like it'd be pretty easy to write a script to pull the text of the tiddlers out.

Cutting and pasting isn't hard -- but unless you're willing to spend many hours in layout on your end, the result is a very ugly, unformatted, text document. The advantage of a PDF file is that all of the organization, scaling, font selection, etc is already done for you. All that you need to do is click the "print" button. There's simply no need to compile your own documents from scratch.

Incidentally, it does really bug me that almost everything for being able to produce LaTeX quality print from (X)HTML is there, but not quite.

Almost. I suspect that it will be a while until we see it, too -- at the present time, the tendency exists for people to bypass HTML-only material in favor of print-ready PDFs (for the reasons already mentioned).

 

[I'm A Banana]

Looks like a pretty cool system. Perhaps a bit TOO simple for my everyday tastes, but nice for a pickup game or something.

 

[jdrakeh]

Looks like a pretty cool system. Perhaps a bit TOO simple for my everyday tastes, but nice for a pickup game or something.

Thanks! As to the ease of use, that's specifically tied to the first full-blown product that it will appear in and the target audience of that product (tune into my iCon interview to learn a bit more).