New Frank & K Tome pdf

Surgo · Post by **Surgo** » Wed Jul 30, 2008 12:50 am

OpenOffice is crap for typesetting. If you have that much crap, download the sources for this PDF and look at how we did it.

edit: The link doesn't work? Argh...don't think I can fix that for another two weeks.

edit 2: There, it should work now. Or at least, the sources link does. The two should be the same.

Psychic Robot · Post by **Psychic Robot** » Wed Jul 30, 2008 2:56 am

CatharzGodfoot wrote:You should be able just just 'export to PDF'. That won't create bookmarks or anything, but it would keep the document formatting.

Aye, I can do this, but I was hoping for something that would help with formatting and whatnot.

Absentminded_Wizard · Post by **Absentminded_Wizard** » Thu Jul 31, 2008 7:15 am

As long as all you've got is plain text, Word should be able to do all the major formatting stuff you'd want (change the font, make it larger, bold, center, etc.). If you've got pictures, InDesign is probably the way to go if you know how to do it. The trick is to stay in pasteboard mode and use the text editor as little as possible.

Surgo: Open Office is worse than Word for typesetting/layout?

And, for anyone who doesn't have an Export to PDF option in Windows:

Primo PDF

Surgo · Post by **Surgo** » Fri Aug 01, 2008 1:23 am

I didn't mention Word anywhere in my post...but since you did, I'll talk about it. Word and OpenOffice are about equally bad when it comes to typesetting.

For this project, I would not want to use InDesign, Scribus, or anything in that genre. Those programs are really good at laying out a poster or a newspaper, but are really bad at typesetting a book. Making edits to the text after it's all done will be nearly impossible. An edit on page 103 that makes it slightly longer doesn't cleanly carry over to 104 (as they're different frames), so now you edit page 104, then 105, then...it quickly becomes a nightmare to maintain. Newspapers, posters, these are things that programs like InDesign or Scribus are very good for. But not books.

To typeset a book, you'll want to do it the way the F&K pdf is done: in LaTeX. There's probably alternatives, but they're proprietary and I don't know their names.

For reference, I've recently made three very different documents using very different tools. A short story and a research paper, which I did in OpenOffice. A 38x46 poster to present my research done at NASA this summer; that was done in Scribus. And the F&K pdf, that was done by writing the stuff in LaTeX (in a text editor) and using the LaTeX compiler to make the pdf.

Word, InDesign, etc. are all good tools. But you want to be using the right one for the job, and Word/OpenOffice/InDesign are all going to be absolute nightmares when it comes to maintaining the document once it's written (or writing it in the first place).

AlphaNerd · Post by **AlphaNerd** » Sat Aug 02, 2008 5:12 pm

The beauty of something like LaTeX is that it is highly configurable, and it has an metric to determine how to lay things out, without user input. This means that if you don't attempt any optimization, it should still come out looking pretty decent.

There are some other alternatives to LaTeX mentioned in a recent slashdot article. No idea if they're any good.
http://science.slashdot.org/science/08/ ... 9201.shtml

http://kile.sourceforge.net/
http://lout.wiki.sourceforge.net/FAQ
http://www.99b.org/wyneken/

But seriously, if you want a good looking document that's easy to maintain, LaTeX is seriously a good way to go. The commands that are in the "entire.tex" file probably go a long way to getting you started.

For instance, right now, all the spells are written as such \spell{SpellName}, which comes out to SpellName. If I had just used italics \emph{SpellName}, and for some reason needed to change this to bold, that would suck in most editors, but now I'll just change the definition of \spell. Now imagine this applied to every table, list, section header, etc. I'd prefer to change it once, and have it work everywhere rather than changing it every place.

Of course, there is a fair amount of overhead getting a document like this working, but I think it's worth it for something the size of a book.[/i]

Absentminded_Wizard · Tue Aug 05, 2008 10:06 am

Surgo wrote:For this project, I would not want to use InDesign, Scribus, or anything in that genre. Those programs are really good at laying out a poster or a newspaper, but are really bad at typesetting a book. Making edits to the text after it's all done will be nearly impossible. An edit on page 103 that makes it slightly longer doesn't cleanly carry over to 104 (as they're different frames), so now you edit page 104, then 105, then...it quickly becomes a nightmare to maintain. Newspapers, posters, these are things that programs like InDesign or Scribus are very good for. But not books.

Well, you can link text frames to avoid that problem, but it would be a pain in the ass for for a 300+ page project like PR's.

LaTeX looks kind of interesting. So is the basic idea that it's easier to create as many different kinds of headline and paragraph styles as you want and change them easily? That sounds cool, though the fact that everything looks like a computer program is a little intimidating for me. Still, if it's easy to preview things, it might work better than InDesign with its crappy text editor. (In addition to being a *lot* cheaper, of course).

CatharzGodfoot · Post by **CatharzGodfoot** » Fri Aug 08, 2008 2:31 am

In the alignment section (PDF page 25), the line "Now that we're all on the same page (page XX)" should probably read "Now that we're all on the same page (page 104)".

Surgo · Post by **Surgo** » Fri Aug 08, 2008 2:37 am

Thanks for that. That's actually an error in the original document.

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Fri Aug 08, 2008 3:41 am

Surgo wrote:Thanks for that. That's actually an error in the original document.

You can also give the Kantian Paladin a spells-per-day table by copying the one from the Assassin. They get exactly the same progression and spells-per-day.

AlphaNerd · Post by **AlphaNerd** » Fri Aug 08, 2008 6:02 pm

So is the basic idea that it's easier to create as many different kinds of headline and paragraph styles as you want and change them easily? That sounds cool, though the fact that everything looks like a computer program is a little intimidating for me.

That's one of its advantages. I still think the fact that it actually thinks about how to set things up without my input is awesome. (note, there is still some control). It is certainly obnoxious to get started, and your document refusing to "compile" is really obnoxious. I use WinEDT (a shareware editor $30) and MikTex (a free windows LaTeX engine) to do my editing, which makes it pretty painless (keyboard shortcut) to view a document you are editing.

Code: Select all

\documentclass&#123;article&#125;

\begin&#123;document&#125;
Hello World!
\end&#123;document&#125;

That's not too bad, right?

I actually was just noticing that Knights have a few spells that need italicizing. Protection from evil (Angelic) and planeshift (elemental).

You can also give the Kantian Paladin a spells-per-day table by copying the one from the Assassin.

Actually, Surgo maybe should create a \bardspellprogression macro. Copying is bad.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Fri Aug 08, 2008 8:00 pm

CatharzGodfoot wrote:In the alignment section (PDF page 25), the line "Now that we're all on the same page (page XX)" should probably read "Now that we're all on the same page (page 104)".

You know, that actually as supposed to say "page XX" - it's a joke.

-Username17

Aktariel · Post by **Aktariel** » Tue Aug 12, 2008 3:36 am

Surgo, three things:

1) Apologies for not finishing proofreading; my summer has been insane, and quite frankly, my OCD lost out to the "it's usable and I have more important things to do" feeling.

2) When is the next version coming, and will it include some of the missing material?

3) In keeping with the prior version numbering, this would be version 0.6?

CatharzGodfoot · Post by **CatharzGodfoot** » Wed Aug 13, 2008 12:48 am

FrankTrollman wrote:
CatharzGodfoot wrote:In the alignment section (PDF page 25), the line "Now that we're all on the same page (page XX)" should probably read "Now that we're all on the same page (page 104)".
You know, that actually as supposed to say "page XX" - it's a joke.

-Username17

I don't get it

Sma · Post by **Sma** » Wed Aug 13, 2008 2:09 am

There's a long tradition of editors missing page references and leaving the placeholder XX in. This is especially true for RPG's where there tends to be even less money alloted for crossing the t's, dotting the i's, playtesting and catching mistakes like a missing reference.

At least that's what I think Frank is alluding to.

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Wed Aug 13, 2008 3:43 am

Actually, I just found something.

The Stone Sphere is slightly mangled. It reads:

Stone
Special: You gain the Tremorsense ability, allowing
you to detect and target anything touching the ground
within 60 feet of yourself.
1: Earth Glide
3: Spike Stones
5: Stone Shape
7: Stone Tell
9: Wall of Stone
11: Move Earth
13: Transmute Rock to Mud (special bonus:
15: Transmute Mud to Rock)
17: Earthquake Meteor Swarm
19: Genesis

And should read

Stone
Special: You gain the Tremorsense ability, allowing you to detect and target anything touching the ground within 60 feet of yourself.

Level, Benefits

1 Earth Glide

3 Spike Stones

5 Stone Shape

7 Stone Tell

9 Wall of Stone

11 Move Earth

13 Transmute Rock to Mud (special bonus: Transmute Mud to Rock)

15 Earthquake

17 Meteor Swarm

19 Genesis

Draco_Argentum · Post by **Draco_Argentum** » Wed Aug 13, 2008 10:23 am

Sma wrote:There's a long tradition of editors missing page references and leaving the placeholder XX in. This is especially true for RPG's where there tends to be even less money alloted for crossing the t's, dotting the i's, playtesting and catching mistakes like a missing reference.

At least that's what I think Frank is alluding to.

Frank wrote:Getting everyone on page XX has been a dream of mine for some time.

Thats his response from when I asked the question when the Tome of Fiends was first released.

AlphaNerd · Post by **AlphaNerd** » Thu Aug 21, 2008 12:59 am

The armor section could use some work. It'd be great if the bonuses/penalties were listed in with the armor. Also, the sections could use some delineation.

I do recall working on this for a longish while, and not having too much luck with bending LaTeX to my will. (well, really, figuring out how to layout this information at all in a nice way)

Orion · Post by **Orion** » Thu Aug 21, 2008 4:27 am

I think the joke is that we are *not* actually on the same page, which is why he couldn't even give a unified alignment system, but the skeletons of several...

Aktariel · Post by **Aktariel** » Mon Sep 01, 2008 4:24 am

I hear mutters of version 0.6.

I also hear that you overwrote the boot sector on your hard drive, Surgo, or we would have had it already.

GRUB or LILO? And what distro, out of curiosity?

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Mon Sep 01, 2008 4:32 am

Sma wrote:There's a long tradition of editors missing page references and leaving the placeholder XX in. This is especially true for RPG's where there tends to be even less money alloted for crossing the t's, dotting the i's, playtesting and catching mistakes like a missing reference.

One of the Malkavian Clan books has a Page XX in it, because of people pointing out the number of times they left references to Page XX. It doesn't, of course, pose any relevance to those references, but they thought it'd make a good joke. Sadly, the layout of that book came across as "lol malkavs are crAzy like gurr omg i luv Invader Zim, lol i guess this is why this board is called random!!!!!! XD"

And we feel sad when people decide they want to play an insane character, and play them as just random and stupid.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Wed Sep 03, 2008 2:32 am

but what about playing them Giant Frog?

Surgo · Post by **Surgo** » Wed Sep 03, 2008 3:04 am

Aktariel wrote:I hear mutters of version 0.6.

I also hear that you overwrote the boot sector on your hard drive, Surgo, or we would have had it already.

GRUB or LILO? And what distro, out of curiosity?

Grub, Debian. I got my boot sector back and now successfully boot both Windows Vista and Linux again.

I'm having some other Linux issues, though. (New computer, yay). I finally got my USB mouse working (forgot to compile something in the kernel), and had X started up and working fine. Problem is I'm using a Radeon HD4850 graphics card, and the fan is retardedly stuck at about 20% so the thing idles at 78 degrees Celcius. ATI provides a proprietary Linux version of their own drivers (with which I can change the fan speed to a more reasonable 40% so I idle at 45), so I downloaded that and tried it and now I can't get X to start up again when it's using that driver. Sigh.

Once -that- gets fixed (probably tomorrow, I only have one class) I can finally get to work on 0.6.

Also I can't get my Linux partition (ext3) to show up in Windows because the wonderful third-party driver that lets you do that doesn't support dynamic block sizes (in this case 256 bytes, which modern distros are using; the driver is statically set to 128 bytes). Which is very annoying, but unrelated to the current problem I'm having.

Aktariel · Post by **Aktariel** » Sun Sep 07, 2008 6:10 pm

Radeon? Ouch.

You're going to have nothing but trouble with ATI and Linux. It's like trying to claim that the core fighter is "good" on these boards. Sure, you can get away with it, but you're just going to be in a world of hurt.

If it's a laptop, I'm sorry. If it's not, I highly highly recommend getting an NVIDIA card.

Good luck with your tech woes.

And as always, awaiting the next release.

Surgo · Post by **Surgo** » Sun Sep 07, 2008 8:44 pm

Unfortunately, ATI has won this round of the video card wars when it comes to both price and performance. Maybe Nvidia will win next time. Until then I'm stuck with ATI.

I just want to change the bloody fan speed, not get super-performance in Linux by using their drivers instead of the open source drivers (I only care about super-performance in Windows). There has to be a way to do this. Arg.

Aktariel · Post by **Aktariel** » Sun Sep 07, 2008 11:32 pm

Unfortunately, ATI sucks in terms of Linux compatibility. They are hardasses about keeping their drivers proprietary, and as a result they don't generally play nice in terms of Xorg, or anything else.

It's definitely a second rate choice for Linux, and since you want performance on the Windows side, and for you ATI has won this round, it's something you're going to have to work around or deal with.

Ah well.

Any idea on the ETA of 0.6?