How to design a Character Sheet?

[Li Shenron]

There are many custom Character Sheets for D&D 5e on ENWorld already, so I am looking for instructions and suggestions from ENWorlders who have already created such kind of documents.

I use OpenOffice to create documents, and it already has a built-in feature to create PDFs from them. But I have some open issues, which are probably very basic questions, but consider me a noob...

- how do you define a layout for different sections of the document? In the past I've been at most creating documents with columns of text and pictures, but for a character sheet we normally need section or "areas" arranged in different positions on the page, each area containing text as well as empty lines

- how do you add some nicely-shaped boxes around a whole section or around single important stats such as ability scores or AC?

- how do you make some parts remain 'fillable' when the document is converted to PDF?

Thanks a lot!

 

[Hand of Evil]

What I use to do is "cut" apart character sheets and then lay them out, moving the parts around until I found one that was user friendly for me. I would then create it.

What it came down to:

• Easy to locate important information: you want to find the most used information first.
• Read-ability: This is boxes, breaks, spacing, etc. you want to know where information begins and where it ends.
• Page Count: Most of your "go to" information should be on one page with an extra page for backup data. You start moving to more than two pages, you have too many.
• Updating: Want to make sure your sheet can be used from 1st level to X level.

Because of time, I just use what is available on-line and allow my players to do the same.

 

[Li Shenron]

Thanks [MENTION=371]Hand of Evil[/MENTION], those are very good design points. But here I was mostly asking about technical guidance of how to make the actual PDF document

 

[Zhaleskra]

Adding to Hand of Evil's response, begin with the end in mind. Start with what you want the final result to look like, and work backwards to get to that point.