Doing My own work

[Sigurd]

Open office will let you make PDFs. It creates indexes which it rebuilds as bookmarks inside of the pdf. I prefer it to word but I think its mostly a familiarity\training thing.

A thousand bucks for a hobby or sideline is a lot of money.

Seriously, if you want to produce game pdf's don't spend so much money on the plan that you are bitter if the monetary returns are slow. I think there is a lot to say for restricting yourself to free tools and keeping it a labour of love.

I don't know what the financial expectation is of the industry but I'm always being told its not high.


Sigurd

 

[madelf]

I'd reccommed you look into a product called Serif PagePlus. It'll do pretty much anything you're likely to need as far as layout and PDF production, and will certainly blow away anything like Word or OpenOffice. It might fall short of InDesign (though not by much from my investigations into InDesign) but it costs a fraction of the price. I think the current version is something like $130.

 

[Ampolitor]

Thanx

yea I can't spend a grand on any software so thats out. I'm going to look into some of the programs you guys mentioned. The book is a campaign guide for a D&D world that I've been adding too since 1986. Im really just wanting to get it printed, If I sell some hey thats great if not I have some nice books for me and my players.

 

[xrpsuzi]

yea I can't spend a grand on any software so thats out. I'm going to look into some of the programs you guys mentioned. The book is a campaign guide for a D&D world that I've been adding too since 1986. Im really just wanting to get it printed, If I sell some hey thats great if not I have some nice books for me and my players.

With that in mind, if you have some sort of photo editing software (to size and set dpi of art/graphics), Word, and Excel (for tables if any), and Adobe Reader (to review the final product), then you have everything you need. You can set up everything in Word and hit the "convert to PDF" button.

On the art/graphics, be sure to set the dpi at 300 for printing quality when you place it in the Word document.

Best of luck!

-Suzi

 

[seasong]

A little late to the discussion, I know.

I use InDesign CS on my home computer, I use QuarkXPress (InDesign's main competitor) on my work computer . . . but for the few PDFs I've done (free-only, and mostly for my own amusement), I've used OpenOffice to get reasonably solid results.

InDesign and Quark are both powerful tools to produce high-end, professional publications. They handle typographic elements (font hinting, kerning, swashes, and more) with a precision and grace that can't be matched anywhere else aside from a typographer's scalpel.

But OpenOffice gets you 90% of the way there, it's easier and faster to use, and it's free.

I use Quark for work, because Quark is the standard at my workplace. I use InDesign at home for my long-term publication plans, because eventually I want to be putting out really beautiful books.

But when I want to hammer out a "core classes for this setting" PDF for my players, and I want it to look reasonably professional but not over the top, I use OpenOffice.

(In the distant past, I used MS Word + Ghostscript PDF software, but MS Word is quirkier to do layout with than OpenOffice, and OpenOffice produces much cleaner PDFs.)

 

[Bacris]

(In the distant past, I used MS Word + Ghostscript PDF software, but MS Word is quirkier to do layout with than OpenOffice, and OpenOffice produces much cleaner PDFs.)

Definitely agree with this - especially when you start using the Heading options for text, add in tables & graphics, and the like. Word gets very quirky once you get over ~20 pages.

I'm really going to have to install OpenOffice now, oy!

 

[Sigurd]

My best advice would be to have two goals.

1. What is cheap and works? - in my estimation that is Open Office.

2. What are industry skills you can develop? - probably the Adobe CS2

This is a really powerful suite but you will have to sell a lot of PDF's to get to profit if your tools cost a thousand dollars. I'd keep your eyes out for sales etc... because of its market dominance.


In the mean time if you focus on Open Office you can give anyone helping you the same version. Its an instant _free_ solution.


S

 

[Ampolitor]

Thanks

Yea right now i think open office is the way to go, I just downloaded it today so Ill see how it goes. Thanks for the info guys!

 

[Moon-Lancer]

http://www.esoftwarevalue.com/productdetail/Adobe/Creative_Suite_Premium_CS2_Windows/9

try this link. I don know if it works with windows vista, but... its one version or so behind. i think 2.3 is the latest and this is 2.0. Its about 700$ cheaper then 2.3, and lets you do just about everything to make a book (aside from printing it)

Photoshop to Do all the art
Illustrater to do pritty nuevo vecters for your tables
and iInDesign CS2 the formating. I am also trying to make my own campain, and while i could *fined* these, i would rather spend 300$ and save myself a really nasty audit.

 

[Darrin Drader]

Just one more thing to add to the discussion regarding printing to PDF. I have no experience with layout programs, but I have done some layouts in MSWord, and then printed to PDF using the full version of Adobe Acrobat, which costs somewhere in the neighborhood of a couple hundred bucks. I have played with Open Office, but I haven't tried using it to create a PDF file. There's a much lower cost PDF writer and viewer that I wholeheartedly recommend called Foxit.

The Foxit PDF viewer is free, like Adobe's, but its alot smaller of a program. This means that it loads a lot faster and it doesn't tie up system resources nearly as bad as Adobe PDF viewer does. In terms of quality, its virtually identical.

The Foxit PDF writer has been reviewed as being just as good as Acrobat, and fully compatible, but with a price tag of $35.

Downloads and such are here: http://www.foxitsoftware.com/

Also, if you're looking for an easy and inexpensive way to get a printout of your book to proof, try printing through www.printfu.com I've used it to print out numerous PDFs. What you do is upload the PDF file to them and they print it out, spiral bind it for you, and then ship it. It will cost a lot less than running it down to a copy center and having the same thing done there, and the books they ship come out looking pretty nice.

Hopefully that helps somewhat.