Does anyone know how to make pdfs look like "real" d&d pdfs. I'm thinking about logo, fonts and backgrounds. Is there a template of some sort that I can use?
Well, the first question is are you just wanting to make this for yourself? If so, you can probably find this stuff online. If you want to create PDFs to distribute, then the logos would be trademarked by my guess and you wouldn't be able to use them. You could probably find the font out there, or a replica of the one used. Not sure what you mean by backgrounds. Images? Those would all fall under copyright protection as well.
If and when a license comes out, there might be a template that WoTC has for third party publishes to use, kind of like what they did for their adventure submission context a while ago, IIRC.
*Edit* Two years ago (man I can't believe it's been that long already), I did a mock up for my Felk Mor superdungeon to emulate the WoTC official look, but it's not something I would ever actually use for the reasons I mentioned above. To answer your question, there was no template. Photoshop is your friend
It's just for personal use, so I don't have to worry about trademarks By backgrounds I mean the paperlook of the books - not images. I haven't been able to find a template online so far.
edit: Wow your d&d cover looks nice. Unfortunately Photoshop is not a friend of mine (and I'm not really interested in a friendship either )
Does anyone know how to make pdfs look like "real" d&d pdfs. I'm thinking about logo, fonts and backgrounds. Is there a template of some sort that I can use?
Ah. Ok. Well, you have lots of options. You can go here, which has a ton of resources for the parchment and other paper backgrounds. Really a trove of publisher supported things like that.
If you want to spend more time, you could probably find them for free by google searches. Same with the logos. The fonts used are explained here. I find dafont.com an excellent resource for fonts, and you may be able to download them from there.
Other than that, if you don't have something like photoshop, GIMP can be used for those budget minded.
*Edit* Mistwell nails it. Didn't know that existed.
I'm sort of interested in the font selections that are used for the 5e stuff, especially the basic rules, because I really like the text layout, even though I'm not a huge fan of emulated-parchment page backgrounds and the like.