4th edition and book formatting? (for homebrew)

[Evenglare]

Does anyone know how / where I can get some tools to help me format my books to make them look as authentic as possible. I'm looking for the little details that wizrds put's in their books, you know the blue adornments for titles, section dividers and things like that.

Did that make any sense at all?

 

[the Jester]

I'd imagine your best easy way to approximate this is with a combination of font size and color and background color. The actual specific stuff WotC uses may well be proprietary (I don't know for sure).

 

[Mr. Greengoat]

You are probably thinking of a desktop publishing program to format your text into a "layout". The most common software to do this is an expensive item named Adobe InDesign.

There are free desktop publishing packages like Scribus, but they all take some practice. You can check around for the proper typefaces that are used.

Statblocks and tables are the most picky items to re-create. I would suggest learning how to use styles and headers properly in your word-processor to get a feel for it.

Does that answer your question?

 

[Nemesis Destiny]

For Item, Monster, and Power blocks, you can use power2ool's printer output page to snag the blocks you create as .jpg files (drag & drop or right-click--> save image as... should both work), then paste them into whatever you are using for layout.

Alternately, I believe some of the more popular 4e sites have their own formatting for such things built with html and css. It's a little more complicated to use properly, but is more customizable for things like width, fonts, and whatnot.

 

[JiffyPopTart]

I started a project awhile ago to convert our session write-ups and other campaign data people created into a 4e style DnD book.

I used Microsoft Publisher (found in the newer versions of Microsoft Office) to do the project, and used my PDF copies of the PHB, MM, and DMG to cut and paste all the different page elements (colored borders, page number circles, etc) to create a "book" that really looked like an official WotC book.

I would give you an example JPG but the project is on my backup HDD which I not readily available.

DS