SRD 3.5 Competition

[Dimwhit]

I wasn't going to bother with the psionics stuff because my game group doesn't use it so I didn't want to go to all that work for something I won't even use. On top of that it is 3.0 and on top of that it is not core rules that's an optional book.

That was more or less my thinking, which is why it should be optional. So unless a lot of people are strongly opposed, optional it will be...

 

[doktorstick]

That was more or less my thinking, which is why it should be optional. So unless a lot of people are strongly opposed, optional it will be...

Keeping psionics out of it is fine. I think enough players _don't_ use the system to warrant keeping it out and shouldn't penalize anyone in the competition.

On the other hand, going for completeness is a Good Thing (TM), especially if you hook someone with your design that uses psionics.

/ds

 

[doktorstick]

Document Design

For those layout folks out there...

In this competition, you were given the RTF files by WotC and so it made since to go directly to a layout manager. How would you approach creating a document with layout from scratch? For example, you have written your basic outline of what you want to publish. Do you write it first in something like Framemaker and then use Quark/Indesign to finish it off?

I'm interested in the document creation process, but have little exposure to it. At work, we wrote a lot of our docs in SGML with emacs, vi, or whatever, and then generated HTML and PDFs from that. The layout, as you can imagine, was limited--it was more for information sharing than eye candy. However, something like published D&D books, articles, adventures is held to a higher standard, and that design process, from writing to the document to its layout, is unknown to me.

Anyway, any information that you can provide would be useful.

Thanks.
/ds

 

[Dimwhit]

I'm interested in the document creation process, but have little exposure to it. At work, we wrote a lot of our docs in SGML with emacs, vi, or whatever, and then generated HTML and PDFs from that. The layout, as you can imagine, was limited--it was more for information sharing than eye candy. However, something like published D&D books, articles, adventures is held to a higher standard, and that design process, from writing to the document to its layout, is unknown to me.

I do a lot of layout work in InDesign (Quark before that). I would get the basic text together in a text editor like Word. When I had all the words down, I would just put that document into InDesign (called "placing" the document). From there, I would manipulate the text, give it styles, pretty it up, etc.

So, basically, the "layout" would take place in the layout program, but I usually wouldn't type from scratch in there (although you certainly could). I would just import all the text and manipulate from there.

Not sure I'm even making sense. I'm tired and need to get to bed...

 

[woodelf]

Personally I don't find the "ease of use" thing convincing. As for paying extra for "good fonts," well, maybe I'm just not discerning enough to see the difference. Maybe when you release your demo/sample I'll feel differently.

Tons of people buy the D&D3.5E books instead of, or in addition to, downloading the D20SRD(3.5). There must be *something* to the "ease of use" idea.

As for fonts: partly, it's a matter of taste. I can get fonts that i think are beautiful, and/or easy to read, for under $100/ea. I also think that some of the basic bookface serif fonts that ship with Mac OS are perfectly readable for most purposes.

 

[woodelf]

Yeah that is a really nice looking reformat of the SRD. Youre not doing it in RTF?

Why bother? There's nothing you can do with RTF that you can't do with HTML. And there are things you can do with HTML that you can't do with RTF. And clean HTML4.0 is damn-near universal. RTF is nowhere near universal--every program, version, and platform seems to deal with it a bit differently.

 

[woodelf]

For my money, I'd have to say that anything, no matter how beatiful and well put together, should automatically lose if it is not in some way searchable. Even if that searchability is limited to (extremely complete) bookmarks in pdfs and a table of contents or navigation frame in html.

OK, what do people mean by "searchable"? You are aware that Acrobat Reader and damn near every webbrowser have a "Find..." command? And for the HTML version, GREP is your friend. So, what more are people looking for? Boolean searches? If so, what sorts of standards? Multiple search terms on the same page? Same paragraph? Same sentence? Same line?

 

[woodelf]

I've already gotten started on mine (been working almost all day in fact), and it just won't compete with that stuff.

Heh. Matter of opinion. I'll vote for HTML/CSS (maybe Java/Javascript) over ASP or some other opaque database-driven format any day. The "benefits" of the latter don't begin to compensate for the drawbacks, IMHO. I think you can compete just fine. But, whatever.

 

[woodelf]

When I first started I grabbed the SRD files and ran them all through a converter to handle the initial conversion. This process took the program 5 hours.

Ouch! What'd you use? I used r2net (available for Mac, MSWindows, Linux, and a few other platforms--free 30day trial), and, other than gakking on the Feats file (i haven't bothered to figure out why, yet, nor fix it), it did all of them, beautifully and pretty much flawlessly, in 15-30 min, tops (i wasn't exactly timing). In fact, the HTML files turned out much better formatted than the RTFs.

 

[woodelf]

What browser are we going to use as a reference point?

Shouldn't you use the HTML standard as the reference point? Or, failing that, the browser that comes closest to supporting the standards? That's Mozilla/Chimera or Safari, currently, isn't it (don't know for certain since i don't have anything that can run Safari)? What's the W3C's current test-bed browser? Does it run on anything but some obscure flavor of Unix?