PDF publishing

[Ryan Ary]

If you guys (Bailey, Paul, who ever else is interested) want to take it to another thread thats cool by me but I don't want to "talk business" in this context.

Later
Ryan

[Ben Morgan]

Regarding art in games:

As an artist, I'll admit that the presentation and design is one of the things that draws me in as a customer. It's what got me to buy Vampire all those years ago (can't believe it's been 8 years now!).

[mahoux]

I totally agree that PDF is not reaching its potential.  Working in the printing industry has made me see a lot of jobs that could be done in PDF format and distributed that way, thus diminishing the need for printers.

As far as publishing Inspectres, a PDF version that would be cool (for me) would be the actual text– laid out in a pleasing format, considering how horribly text heavy some things look this is a must–, a good eye catching graphic or logo for the game, and by all means, provide a character sheet.  It doesn't have to be fancy, but I tend to design my own character sheets (full-blown) in the absence of one.

I think for several people, nothing needs to be overly artsy, but aesthetically pleasing and polished is a must.  Single column Helvetica text going on and on and on is boring.

Finally, I wrap up my rambling by saying that the Inspectres web site (and for that matter many other Memento-Mori pages) are great.  Just apply that aesthetic on the no-frills stuff and you should have people beating a path tto your (virtual) door.

[Jared A. Sorensen]

Re: character sheet.

InSpectres characters have 5 stats (4 of which never ever change) and a name. So the character sheet's value is of limited and dubious value. Instead, it's going to count as a piece of art (in the guise of an InSpectres ID badge that the player can wear).

You can jot down your character's 4 main stats and variable Cool rating on the back of your hand if you want... :wink:

[Clay]

PDF documents have a lot more potential than people are using them for.  One of the coolest things I've seen is a PDF form that could be filled in and printed.  This would be ideal for character sheets.

Another thing most games don't seem to do is hyperlink the TOC and in-text references.  I understand that this is a major pain in the butt with most design tools, but some of the SGML markup tools like WordPerfect and Corel Draw, coupled with free typesetting packages like Jade, should be able to make respectable hyperlinks.

I do all of my designs with LaTeX and turn them into PDFs with a neat little utility called dvipdfm.  Any in-text citation of a page number or section in the book automatically gets a hyperlink.  Even footnotes get a hyperlink.  The TOC is completely hyperlinked, and if I were willing to create indexes (I'm not, they add a lot of work and don't give so much in return), those would be hyperlinked too.

I'd like to see more of this hyperlinking in PDF documents.  I find it really useful, and one of the compelling reasons to use the PDF format.

[Adam]

Another thing most games don't seem to do is hyperlink the TOC and in-text references.  I understand that this is a major pain in the butt with most design tools, but some of the SGML markup tools like WordPerfect and Corel Draw, coupled with free typesetting packages like Jade, should be able to make respectable hyperlinks.

I've said this before, but I was really disappointed when not only did Pariah by Rogue publishing not have a hyperlinked TOC in any form, and didn't even have an in-text TOC or Index.

I'm pretty sure that Quark has the built in tools to create a TOC based on the text set to certain styles; I know PageMaker can do so without a problem, and automatically builds hyperlinks and suchlike when the file is printed to PDF.

I'd hardly call it a major pain in the butt. There's some finicky bits and quirks, but overall it's just part of the process.