Tables in gaming books

[Dave G]

I'm doing some layout work for a friend, and I'm having a hard time deciding the best way to insert tables into the document. Since many publishers have been known to lurk around here, I thought I'd see how some of you built and inserted tables in your published books/pdfs

At this point I'm considering just trying to duplicate the tables in Adobe Illustrator and placing them in-line in the document.

Thanks in Advance!

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

I just built mine by hand, in Quark.

Text box, simple use of tabs, and like a 20% grayscale box manually dropped behind every other line.

There's probably a more scientific way to do it, using the font size and picas and such, but honestly I just eye-balled it.


Wulf

 

[NemesisPress]

Whatever software you are using should have some table-making capability either buit-in or as an adjunct (like the table-making utililty that comes with PageMaker). If it doesn't - don't use it.

I'm a bit behind, so I don't know how Quark and InDesign compare now, but the ideal program for these kinds of projects that integrate text, graphics, and tables has always been FrameMaker. It allows completely style-driven designs - even for tables.