Adobe Acrobat [.PDF] vs. OpenOffice vs. Dundjinni
There are lots of programs out there that give you the option of saving files in the .pdf format. However, most of them are next to worthless, and don't even come close to utilizing the potential of the format. The "be-all/end-all" of .PDFs is Adobe Acrobat, but it is very, very pricey, so unless you're made of money like [MENTION=29558]Mowgli[/MENTION] you might as well forget about that option. There are a growing number of clones of wildly differing capabilities and usefulness, one of which is, I think, OpenOffice, which you and I have discussed before, DeWar. I have still not yet fully explored the potentialities of OpenOffice. I learned how to use it to fill my immediate need, which was using its spreadsheet capabilities to make maps for my games, and then I stopped my exploration.
In a similar vein, I have flirted with the idea on several occasions of buying a dedicated RPG software package. There are several out there, but for my tastes,
Dundjinni looked like the best buy, at least at that time, several months ago. It is still for sale at the price of $39.95, not that much, I guess, but more than I want to drop on a program that does the same thing as software available for free, like
OpenOffice.
But, giving credit where it is due, my own mapping techniques were learned from [MENTION=11520]Scotley[/MENTION], who taught me how you can turn a common, everyday spreadsheet into a formidable dungeon! All you have to do is first adjust the column widths to be equal to the height of a line of data, which PRESTO! gives you a grid of squares otherwise known as graph paper. Then you use the program to draw borders around whichever cells in the grid you wish, which is like drawing lines on the graph paper, and you can even put numbers or letters in some squares to be room identifiers. A double line border in one square of a room can represent a door quite effectively, and so on. And then there are the myriad possibilities of colors, different textures, symbols, ad nauseum. Your own creativity is the only limit of which I am aware for the countless ways that OpenOffice can be made to admirably serve the many and varied needs of the diabolical DM/GM.
One more note about using spreadsheet mapping -- as near as I've been able to tell so far, you can just keep widening the columns to make squares until Asmodeus is caught in a blizzard. There is, functionally at least, no limit to the width/length of your piece of "graph paper" in OpenOffice.
