My group is starting back on Tome again, which is causing me to revive work on my Tome compilation project (here). Before I just made it as a PDF sorta out of habit, but recently I learned that GitHub lets you do web pages and have them hosted as part of your project. I hadn't previously considered a web-page because I had been using Google Sites and they are rather inflexible with the format of a site; Github Pages leaves the formatting and arrangement of the site entirely in your hands.
Would people use a web page over a PDF? Would it feel the same as the DnD Wiki? (whichever wiki is the current one, I always forget). If it were a web page, the two main things I'd care to focus on would be:
Mobile Friendly - No large images, no CSS that makes the text too small to be easily read on a phone or tablet, mostly just text with hyperlinks to other sections and the occasional table (such as for a class entry, or a skill modifier listing in a skill entry).
Static Content - Unlike a wiki, the final set of pages produced (possibly via a pre-processor) would be a static set of files, so you could download a zip of the content and view it offline if you wanted.
Thoughts on PDF vs Website? Or is some other format I'm not even thinking of perhaps the ideal?
I kind of like what D&D Tools did before it got shut down, with a website that also had an app.
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.
You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
Lokathor wrote:I've never heard of DnD Tools, you should explain it a little more. Did the app just have all the same info as the website?
It's an online database with all of the classes, feats, and spells indexed and searchable with a bunch of different filters to make it easy to find what you're looking for.
The app is the same idea, just formatted and portable. It didn't talk to the site all the time, it downloaded the database once and you can look things up regardless of connectivity or site status. There were some issues with the site, like not having races/monsters or items, and some of the filters not working as well as they could, but in general they're very helpful.
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.
You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
I'm a big fan of TEX source and PDF output. You could probably add HTML output using relatively little effort by invoking HEVEA, latex2html or tex4ht in a Makefile.
I have no experience with any of those programs except very tangentially with latex2html: it seemed to keep pretty utilitarian websites up and running with little oversight. It might be a good fit given the goals you've articulated.
Upon closer observation, latex2html hasn't been updated since I last looked at it (2001) and the maintainer of tex4ht is dead. Given that information, I might hook my horse to Hevea.
Since I've already got Tex and PDF output, I'll have to look into Hevea over the weekend. I guess it depends on if it can produce multiple pages well, such as one chapter per page, or one section per page, or some such.
A webpage can add some features not available within a PDF, such as being able to click a button on the Monk Unarmed Style Name table and have it roll a random style for you, or possibly other fun little things a person might want.
Last edited by Lokathor on Fri Mar 20, 2015 11:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.
I'd go with a PDF for core rules (e.g. combat maneuvers, exotic proficiencies every level, magic item systems, etc.) and maybe your setting specific info and a website for everything else.
The trouble with PDF is that it's a poor format across devices, because it's page based instead of flow based. The PDF that looks best on a PC will work poorly on a tablet or phone.
Hevea might solve some of these problems though, by allowing the same codebase to compile to both formats.
I think a mobile-friendly website is better than a PDF, but a PDF is better than a run-of-the-mill site (Ex: I hate reading D&D wiki on my phone) and you can get it offline.
DSMatticus wrote:Again, look at this fucking map you moron. Take your finger and trace each country's coast, then trace its claim line. Even you - and I say that as someone who could not think less of your intelligence - should be able to tell that one of these things is not like the other.
Kaelik wrote:I invented saying mean things about Tussock.
Looks like Hevea won't do the chapter per page thing, but there's a companion program called Hacha that will chunk Hevea output into linked webpages. They're apparently controlled by a common configuration file but I'm having trouble finding Hacha docs except for a quick reference inside the Hevea manual.
You might be able to use inline logic in TEX to add bits of Javascript or whatever into the HTML output. tex4ht officially supports this through remapping macros in configuration files, and its documentation appears to have been written by a better English speaker than Hevea. Despite the dead dev., it might be an OK tool too.
I'd found the Hevea link, not the other one yet though.
tex4ht wrote:to HTML, various XML flavors, braille, etc.
One of these is not like the other...
...You Lost Me wrote:I think a mobile-friendly website is better than a PDF, but a PDF is better than a run-of-the-mill site (Ex: I hate reading D&D wiki on my phone) and you can get it offline.
Offline availability would be key. My intent if I went the website route would be to have it all be static pages. In other words, HTML pages that you can put in a zip file and open on another computer and see the same thing. The reason that you can't do that with a wiki is because the wiki makes calls into a database to generate pages, and you can't just take the database with you so easily.
I think that being able to print out the SuperTome and have tangible copies you can physically hold in your hand is an important step in making the Tomes more accessible to less savvy groups.
Features a PDF brings to this use-case are:
One-step printing of everything at once, in a manner almost everyone can understand.
Unified page-numbers across all platforms, allowing easy reference to rules. (Dead-tree to digital, and digital to other-digital)
Honestly, there's no reason (ok, ok, except laziness/better shit to do) that you couldn't just put a pdf file on a website for people who want to print it out.
Or static pages that will print nicely, whatever.
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.
You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
DSMatticus wrote:Again, look at this fucking map you moron. Take your finger and trace each country's coast, then trace its claim line. Even you - and I say that as someone who could not think less of your intelligence - should be able to tell that one of these things is not like the other.
Kaelik wrote:I invented saying mean things about Tussock.
The new tiddlywiki is node-based and is a self contained wiki app that is platform independent.
It has support for it's own wikitext, markdown, HTML and can be styled with css and extended with JavaScript.
It does support other markup if I remember correctly. You can also extend language support with other JavaScript parsing libraries, if you are capable of writing js.
In theory you could set up a flat, file based, tiddlywiki on a git repo, push tex-to-HTML converted pages to that wiki, then let people download the all-in-one converted format.
Pandoc is also capable of converting to HTML, but that takes some amount of configuration.
I've tried TiddlyWiki, both the 2.x and 5.x versions, and was excited about the idea at first. After having used them a bit I came to the conclusions that it's kinda a nightmare, and I don't think worth the editing hassle. It assumes you've got a much deeper understanding of CSS and JS than I do. Also very very poorly documented, and hard to separate out current documentation for TW5 from older TW2 docs. Also, I don't actually like any of the default presentation styles for how opening new Tiddlers works. I'd rather just have each section that's going to be a different page actually be a different page.
I think ease of printing is only a big deal for smaller files or in cases where someone has access to free or extremely discounted printing. Currently the cost of a low end tablet is about the cost of printing out 600 pages at Kinko's - so within a year or three it will likely be cheaper to buy that one player without a smartphone or laptop a reader device than it will to print hardcopy for them.
"But transportation issues are social-justice issues. The toll of bad transit policies and worse infrastructure—trains and buses that don’t run well and badly serve low-income neighborhoods, vehicular traffic that pollutes the environment and endangers the lives of cyclists and pedestrians—is borne disproportionately by black and brown communities."
Josh_Kablack wrote:I think ease of printing is only a big deal for smaller files or in cases where someone has access to free or extremely discounted printing. Currently the cost of a low end tablet is about the cost of printing out 600 pages at Kinko's - so within a year or three it will likely be cheaper to buy that one player without a smartphone or laptop a reader device than it will to print hardcopy for them.
I was assuming that everyone already had a computer. There's just something about having a physical book at the table...
Here are some quotes from lulu.com:
600 page Hardcover book; letter-size, black-and-white, with dust-cover: $31.65
600 page Hardcover book; letter-size, black-and-white, and casewrap: $28.65
600 page Softcover book; perfect-bound and black-and-white: $10.75
