SRD 3.5 Revised (Full) Bundle (TWO 5 Star Reviews! 05-21-04)

[Mark]

After the glowing reviews on this thread, I thought I'd take a look.

Yes, it's obvious a pile of work went into it. The linking is an order of magnitude beyond any d20 .pdf I've heard of...

Thanks!

...but I still won't be buying it.

The big reason: Readability issues.

The body text is in a sans-serif font which I find hard to read onscreen. By the time I get the text big enough that it's readable, the column is so wide that my eyes have to traverse several inches. That leads to eyestrain pretty quickly. With justification turned on, the intra-word kerning is not wonderful, either. (It almost appears that there was a TrueType vs. PostScript font clash.)

There are some sections (spell lists) that are not only in a sans-serif font, but in all-caps as well. Mixed case is significantly easier to read than all-caps. Bolding that font makes it even worse: the words become so visually heavy that I find myself wanting to squint at the page. Further, every other line is on what looks like 30% grey -- too much saturation for a background for small, dense type.

Aside from the readability issues... this is quite nice.

I am glad that you checked out the demo version first.

I've gone back and forth on this text issue with a number of people and found that I had far more folks who prefer this cleaner sans-serif version over other tests of serif fonts that tend to look very muddy in text-heavy works. Perhaps I'll looks into an alternate version for the next revision, though that might be too much work for the effort.

Personally, I am my own acid test for on-screen viewing of materials. I'm on the dark side of forty years old now and use my computer sometimes up to 80 hours a week (when on deadline, but most weeks at least 60 hours). My own PDFs are my primary DMing/Design tool. I've never had any difficulty with eye strain or any other visual problem though I do realize that not everyone is built the same way.

For other potential customers, as always, try the demo and make sure that the reference material is in a format you can use for a good period of time or it simply won't be worthwhile for you.

(Table headers are the only thing as dark as 30%, the alternating lines of the tables are shaded much lighter.)

Thanks for you viewpoint on that, Axegrrl.

One other thing I would find useful: bookmarks grouping of feats by type, in addition to the alphabetical group. In other words, where the bookmarks under Feats are currently

what would be even more useful is

I'm not suggesting that the feat texts should be included multiple times, just that each type of feat in the list above should have additional bookmarks that redirect to the appropriate item in the text. That makes it easier for the person who needs to consider *only* one type of feat (for character creation, for example).

I might just add them multiple times for the next version and add in an additional index with them broken out that way. There will be a number of additions to the revisions that I think will enhance the usability of the material. I'm not sure that will help you, though, due to the other issue from above.

Thanks for taking a look and I hope everyone does!

 

[Axegrrl]

life might be easier with FrameMaker...

I'm curious what size monitor you've got. I'm sitting here with a 17" monitor that's 6 or 7 years old. It's fine for 99% of what I do, but...I do wonder if this is a case where a bigger monitor would help bunches.

I don't know what you're using to create this monster (and I mean monster as in OMG is it big), but I do know how to make it easy to produce both serif and non-serif versions -- IF you have the project in FrameMaker. (Hmmm. Something similar might work if you have InDesign, too, but I haven't looked at that in a while.)

The basic version of a how-to:
Do most of your work with the sans serif style, since that's what you're used to. Generate the sans-serif PDFs as usual. Save off all your files and create a backup.

Take your longest, most complex file -- with respect to text formatting, that is. Save that as "sansseriftemplate.fm" and as "seriftemplate.fm". Leave sansseriftemplate.fm alone.

In seriftemplate.fm, go into the Paragraph Styles (ctrl-m to open). Go to the Default Font tab. For each paragraph tag, switch the font Family to a serif font. Click Update All each time. Rinse and repeat. Save seriftemplate.fm.

Get all the files ready to create a sans-serif PDF. Have the seriftemplate.fm file open. Then from the book file, select all the files, then use File>Import>Formats. Select seriftemplate.fm as the file to import from. Click the Import button, and all the files will get the formats from seriftemplate.fm.

I've done this on many occaisions, and it's actually easier than it sounds, once you set everything up. The first time through, you may want to make some other adjustments to the seriftemplate.fm formats.


(If you aren't using FrameMaker and you've read all of this anyway, there's another advantage to using Frame for something this complex... you can create cross-references and have Frame + Acrobat turn them into links semi-automagically. It would make a two-column format a bunch easier, too. And no, I don't work for Adobe. I just use FrameMaker 30+ hours/week.)

 

[Mark]

Thanks for the suggestions. My monitor is smaller but not quite as old as your monitor. I'll look into some of the other ideas you have and see what I can do. Hopefully you can make it out to the Chicago Gameday one of these times and perhaps we can discuss it more easily.