One Column vs Two Columns and other questions

I have a few questions for either publishers, players or DM.
My company recently sent in a review at a company that not makes you pay a 40 fee upfront, which some of the material, they send you is worth at least 20, and alot of it you can download off the net, but anyway, the first reply was told to change our cover. Yes it was black and white, then we changed it to a color which now we ended up losing the whole mysterious creepy factor and we tweaked the text.
Then sent it back in and was asked what changes we done as if someone never even looked past the first four pages. Now I know the material is OGL and SRD good, there is no nudity or violence or anything of that nature. In fact it is d20. Yes, we kept the inside cover the same, because well we like it, its the black and white we originally did on the cover. That shouldn't affect a review. One of the reasons I can think of is that we did the layout in one column instead of two. Why? When we did a test run on the product since it was meant only to be a pdf primarily for the online gamer we got a hell of alot of complaints about the two columns having to scroll up and down and down. Gamers would tell us, that for them it was a complete waste of time to scroll up to the top of the page then to the bottom. Even a certain said books that I will call the "Bible of pdf Creation" devoted a good section of this of how the two column garnered alot of complaints.
My question is even though the traditional is the two column, if you were going to use a pdf book for mostly online gaming and even if you weren't an online gamer and just wanted to buy the pdf to read, then download as the usual procedure, would you prefer the one column or the two or does it really matter to you?
IMOHO which don't count as much, I really cringe when I open a pdf and its in columns, infact I would almost rather waste my precious ink paper and print it out then have to read in columns. Yes I know we read books in columns, but you can move a book closer or farther away without a struggle and you can't do that with your moniter easily. I don't care what you say reading a book with columns is different then reading the monitor in columns, you read differently, your eyes adjust differently and so on.
 

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I like 2 column even for PDFs. And trust me when I say I read a lot of PDFs. Mr Browning though, as usual, has the good answer of Lanscape for PDFs. I love me some landscape two column PDF reading. :D
 

One option you could try is produce two versions. One for display with one column, the other for printing with two columns. In addition, try shrinking down page size with the display version so it fits on the screen. Would make it easier to read. Most word processors allow different page sizes. Adobe Acrobat might as well, but you'd best check.
 

nightprowler4321 said:
I have a few questions for either publishers, players or DM.
My company recently sent in a review at a company that not makes you pay a 40 fee upfront, which some of the material, they send you is worth at least 20, and alot of it you can download off the net, but anyway, the first reply was told to change our cover. Yes it was black and white, then we changed it to a color which now we ended up losing the whole mysterious creepy factor and we tweaked the text.
Then sent it back in and was asked what changes we done as if someone never even looked past the first four pages. Now I know the material is OGL and SRD good, there is no nudity or violence or anything of that nature. In fact it is d20. Yes, we kept the inside cover the same, because well we like it, its the black and white we originally did on the cover. That shouldn't affect a review. One of the reasons I can think of is that we did the layout in one column instead of two. Why? When we did a test run on the product since it was meant only to be a pdf primarily for the online gamer we got a hell of alot of complaints about the two columns having to scroll up and down and down. Gamers would tell us, that for them it was a complete waste of time to scroll up to the top of the page then to the bottom. Even a certain said books that I will call the "Bible of pdf Creation" devoted a good section of this of how the two column garnered alot of complaints.
My question is even though the traditional is the two column, if you were going to use a pdf book for mostly online gaming and even if you weren't an online gamer and just wanted to buy the pdf to read, then download as the usual procedure, would you prefer the one column or the two or does it really matter to you?
IMOHO which don't count as much, I really cringe when I open a pdf and its in columns, infact I would almost rather waste my precious ink paper and print it out then have to read in columns. Yes I know we read books in columns, but you can move a book closer or farther away without a struggle and you can't do that with your moniter easily. I don't care what you say reading a book with columns is different then reading the monitor in columns, you read differently, your eyes adjust differently and so on.

Sweet Jesus, what a mess. Were you drunk when you posted this, Prowler? I'm terrified to ask what your role in this company is, because you might say "editor". Considering the topic at hand, the irony is pretty heady.

See that little "edit" button under your post? Give it a good click, my friend. Toss in some line breaks, fix the spelling errors, merge some of those sentence fragments together, split off some of those run-on sentences, and yank out all those "yes" remarks that you keep starting sentences with because you apparently believe you're skilled at anticipating what your reader is thinking (FWIW, the average reader is likely thinking is "wtf am I reading?"). Then after you've done all that, we can have a nice discussion about layout format. ;)
 
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jgbrowning said:
If you're going for PDF only, try landscaping the image so the two colums are always visable.

joe b.

That is actually a good idea, and it makes better sense, but would this make a sourcebook look clunky? This is a fairly huge pdf, 256 pager 7.3 mb so I'm just wondering here
 

mythusmage said:
One option you could try is produce two versions. One for display with one column, the other for printing with two columns. In addition, try shrinking down page size with the display version so it fits on the screen. Would make it easier to read. Most word processors allow different page sizes. Adobe Acrobat might as well, but you'd best check.

I should never say never, but we don't plan on going to press with this, being primarily an pdf sourcebook for online gameing but I see your point and with pdf you can make two different versions. Thanks for the feedback even if I sounded lets call it a frustration of things in my orig post.
 
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Felon said:
Sweet Jesus, what a mess. Were you drunk when you posted this, Prowler? I'm terrified to ask what your role in this company is, because you might say "editor". Considering the topic at hand, the irony is pretty heady.

See that little "edit" button under your post? Give it a good click, my friend. Toss in some line breaks, fix the spelling errors, merge some of those sentence fragments together, split off some of those run-on sentences, and yank out all those "yes" remarks that you keep starting sentences with because you apparently believe you're skilled at anticipating what your reader is thinking (FWIW, the average reader is likely thinking is "wtf am I reading?"). Then after you've done all that, we can have a nice discussion about layout format. ;)

Yeap, you could say testy or was, I still prefer frustration. For the record, I or my staff don't make our pdfs like we message board. Actually, when it comes to our product I'm pretty hard on them about grammar and spellcheck, format and anything that comes to mind. Maybe its not a good thing, but with emails and message boards, I'm pretty relaxed about it unless of course, it has to deal with assignments.
It probably is/can be a bad habit to allow that relaxation into emails and messageboards, and maybe I will kick myself for it. Course, my "speech" lol wasn't just primarily aimed at the question. In hindsight, I most assuredly went into left field and should of stayed in the center. In hindsight, I can see why one of the famous game designers, has his stuff elsewhere because of well.... the frustration, but perhaps I'm being too cynical.
Thanks for the feedback everyone, I will get together with my design team and discuss the suggestions and decide what course of action we want to take.
 

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