[DERP] Booklet creation. Font size. Margins. Boring stuff.

[machfront]

I'm attempting to make a small handful of things: house rule documents for S&W:WB, OD&D-inspired RISUS stuff, etc.,etc.
Anyway. I'm at a total loss as to how to format such things in an OD&D booklet format.
I mean the simplest things. If I'm creating in a standard word doc that I wish to to covert to pdf in a resultant (print) font size and margins comparable to OD&D booklets (or thereabouts) then what sort of settings (font size, margins in inches or pips or...what the heck ever) do I need to float around in the area of?

Note that I'm an idiot and I can barely and clumsily bang about in the likes of AbiWord (because Open/Libre Office is too hard for someone as dunce-cap-covered as me).

HELP.

Help?

[bea]

I have no idea how the OD&D booklets are formatted so I can't help you there, but I love how you totally just introduced [DERP] as a category of discussions

Also, I'm decently savvy at libre office, so I can give some tips on how to achieve the results once you know what you're after.

[Scott Anderson]

It depends on how professional you want it to look. I find Word does what I want it to do. It doesn't look slick, but it's readable and useable. Use a 10 point font if possible. Margins don't have to be huge- even the "narrow" setting is fine if you mirror your indents.

[sinenomine]

If you want good old-fashioned LBB stylings, it's going to be necessary to work at it a little. It can be done for sure, but you're going to need to learn some of the specifics about typesetting and page design that you'll need to actually put your own original material down in the classic style. It's not insurmountable by any means, but you'll want to prepare to spend a few hours on it.

First, grab a copy of the free Scribus layout software. It's not fabulously friendly, but you don't ever want to use a word processor for laying out documents. You write the stuff in a word processor, you lay it out in a layout program. The latter allow you to position text and images much more easily and precisely than any word processor.

Next, grab this here- rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/144651/Exemplars--Eidolons . It's a playable game, but more importantly, it's a set of template files for creating LBB-style booklets. You can import the .IDML InDesign Markup Language source file in Scribus to get all the styles and object types, then just delete my stuff and put in your stuff with the paragraph styles provided.

Lastly, go to this Google Docs folder: drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B4qCWY8UnLrcVVVNWG5qUTUySjg&usp=sharing . Download the guide to TSR Book Design to get a very specific discussion of margins, fonts, table styles, and so forth. There's also an .IDML file you can import to get the styles. There are a bunch of other general resource files in there too- feel free to grab them if they're useful, though there's a fresher version of "The Smoking Pillars of Lan Yu" free at DTRPG, and I'd make a few adjustments to the guide to small publishers if I were updating it now.

I wrote this material to help other publishers make their own stuff, so all of the styles and object types and other template files can be used as you wish, whether personally or for commercial products.

N.B. If you really don't want to go to the fuss of full-dress production for this and just want a table handout, the TSR Book Design file has details on the specific fonts, sizes, and margins used in the LBBs. You can faux those up in a word processor without too much fuss, though the results will be more appropriate for table handouts than a finished product for the public.

[makofan]

Just a shout out to sinenomine, my favourite game designer! Thanks for all your efforts over the years.

[Koren n'Rhys]

Mar 12, 2015 7:15:46 GMT -6 sinenomine said:

Next, grab this here- rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/144651/Exemplars--Eidolons . It's a playable game, but more importantly, it's a set of template files for creating LBB-style booklets. You can import the .IDML InDesign Markup Language source file in Scribus to get all the styles and object types, then just delete my stuff and put in your stuff with the paragraph styles provided.

Lastly, go to this Google Docs folder: drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B4qCWY8UnLrcVVVNWG5qUTUySjg&usp=sharing . Download the guide to TSR Book Design to get a very specific discussion of margins, fonts, table styles, and so forth. There's also an .IDML file you can import to get the styles. There are a bunch of other general resource files in there too- feel free to grab them if they're useful, though there's a fresher version of "The Smoking Pillars of Lan Yu" free at DTRPG, and I'd make a few adjustments to the guide to small publishers if I were updating it now.

Question for you on these Kevin. As an owner/user of an older version of InDesign (CS2) I can't use open these templates. Can you "save-as" and share them in an older back-compatible format? I don't even know if that's possible in Adobe products.

Good to know they open in Scribus, I didn't realize that. Might be a workaround means of still using your templates.

Thanks!

[sinenomine]

Mar 12, 2015 10:15:29 GMT -6 Koren n'Rhys said:

Question for you on these Kevin. As an owner/user of an older version of InDesign (CS2) I can't use open these templates. Can you "save-as" and share them in an older back-compatible format? I don't even know if that's possible in Adobe products.

Good to know they open in Scribus, I didn't realize that. Might be a workaround means of still using your templates.

Thanks!

Have you tried opening up the .IDML file in CS2? I believe those should be back-compatible with earlier editions of InDesign, which should only pull in the markup it recognizes.

[Koren n'Rhys]

I have tried in the past and got a lot of error messages. I'll try again through - maybe play around with some settings if that's an option.

Thanks for the reply!

[sinenomine]

Just took a look at home, and it looks like .IDML only works with CS4 or later, and there's no option to save it in an earlier file format. You might try loading it up in Scribus and then just looking at the paragraph and object styles there, so you can recreate them in InDesign CS2 if that's more comfortable to work in.

[machfront]

Wait. If one uses a ten point font, then prints the pages of the document in booklet style (four pages on a single sheet of paper front and back)...wouldn't the font be incredibly tiny? Wouldn't it be necessary to use a much larger font or is there something I'm missing here?

[sinenomine]

Nope- 10 point Futura seems to have been the font size for the LBB in question, and the E&E PDF shows what each page will look like. It's actually slightly larger than conventional trade paperback font sizing, which often goes with 8 point body text. Since each template page is 8.5 x 5.5 inches, it precisely maps to four pages per 8.5 x 11 US letter sheet when printed with Adobe's print-to-booklet option.

If you'd like an example, just grab book I of the LBB reproductions and turn to page 8. In the E&E template, using the LBB Body Text style, make a 4.25-inch wide text box object and start typing in the elf race description. You'll see that it tracks exactly to the printed reproduction until line 4 or so, when the tiny differences in this version of Futura and InDesign's built-in paragraph composer start to diverge from the hand-set tracking of the original. Also at fault is the little wobble I put into the text styles, allowing each glyph to vary from 97% to 103% of its baseline size, so the paragraph composer can fit the hyphenation and internal line spacing more gracefully.

[talysman]

Mar 12, 2015 18:17:44 GMT -6 machfront said:

Wait. If one uses a ten point font, then prints the pages of the document in booklet style (four pages on a single sheet of paper front and back)...wouldn't the font be incredibly tiny? Wouldn't it be necessary to use a much larger font or is there something I'm missing here?

A point is a fixed measurement, not relative to the page size. There are 72 points to the inch. A 10-point font has letters that are about 1/7th of an inch high.

What you may be thinking of is the ability of the end user to scale pages when printing. If you have a PDF intended to be printed at a5 or US digest size that uses a 10-point font, and you check "scale to page" when you print on a4 or US letter, the font will wind up larger, effectively a 20-point font. If you scale an a4 or US letter PDF down to fit two pages on a landscape sheet (2-up,) the text will be smaller. If, however, it's scaled to a5/digest and you print it 2-up, it will print at the intended size.

[machfront]

I'm fairly certain I'm actually more confused than before.
It's as though there's a wall up in my head. The info simply isn't sinking in. Embarrassing. I apologize and I truly appreciate the patient answers. I'm trying to soak it up.

I don't really need anything precisely like the OD&D booklets themselves. Simply the same basic principle/size/etc. Heck, one of the things I'm doing is only my own house-ruled fantasy RISUS (which is honestly just the RISUS rich text doc that I've changed here and there and wanted to print out as a home-made booklet for fun.

I ran a search or two for making booklet-sized documents and looked over a couple things on WikiHow for doing so in Word and that didn't really help either (Word has all this fancy stuff that AbiWord doesn't and I've never needed/used/know anything about).
The extent of my experience and knowledge in this area is: writing, changing fonts and font size, inserting an image, hitting 'Print' and that's really about it. If I ever had to insert/create a table I'd probably explode.

[18 Spears]

Mar 13, 2015 1:54:17 GMT -6 machfront said:

I'm fairly certain I'm actually more confused than before.

Dont know if these'll help you'uns or no but here is Lulu has to say = downloadable templates www.lulu.com/create/books#templates
more information www.lulu.com/blog/2013/09/new-lulu-book-templates/

[bea]

It could be that the method most fitting for your needs and experience is to simply write everything the way you usually do in Word, with the page set to letter format (that's standard in the US, right?) and the text at about 20 points size.

Then just tinker with printer settings. Most printers that can print double pages have an option to print in booklet format. It'll take your letter-sized document and resize to fit four on sheet of paper (two per side) and reorganize the page sequence to make it fold-friendly.

You have print shops in the US? One of those could probably help you in that case.

[machfront]

Mar 13, 2015 2:05:52 GMT -6 18 Spears said:

Mar 13, 2015 1:54:17 GMT -6 machfront said:

I'm fairly certain I'm actually more confused than before.

Dont know if these'll help you'uns or no but here is Lulu has to say = downloadable templates www.lulu.com/create/books#templates
more information www.lulu.com/blog/2013/09/new-lulu-book-templates/

Darn.
No template for digest with saddle-stitch binding. Only perfect.
Downloaded the template to take a look-see anyhow. Unzipping resulted in something stubbing it's toe and Windows giving me some crap about this or that wouldn't transfer and...encryption...and blah,blah. So it wouldn't properly unzip. *shrug*

[machfront]

Mar 13, 2015 2:19:08 GMT -6 bea said:

It could be that the method most fitting for your needs and experience is to simply write everything the way you usually do in Word, with the page set to letter format (that's standard in the US, right?) and the text at about 20 points size.

Then just tinker with printer settings. Most printers that can print double pages have an option to print in booklet format. It'll take your letter-sized document and resize to fit four on sheet of paper (two per side) and reorganize the page sequence to make it fold-friendly.

You have print shops in the US? One of those could probably help you in that case.

I just don't know. I suppose. This is sort of where I was headed before I started the thread. I was hoping to side-step the whole 'make document in this font size...print...nope...make document in this font size...change margin(s)...print....nope....ahh...out of ink'.

[18 Spears]

Mar 13, 2015 3:20:28 GMT -6 machfront said:

Darn. No template for digest with saddle-stitch binding. Only perfect. Downloaded the template to take a look-see anyhow. Unzipping resulted in something stubbing it's toe and Windows giving me some crap about this or that wouldn't transfer and...encryption...and blah,blah. So it wouldn't properly unzip. *shrug*

Im no pro but for my own house-docs i used:

Inside 0.8" (inside is always wider to acoomodate binding/folding]
Outside 0.5"
Top 0.5"
Bottom 1" (for page number i put at bottom, if you put title at header you increased top margin too0)

Make sure your margins are mirrored to reflect the changing margin based upon whether the page is recto/right or verso/left


added -- this was for a saddledstich in digest size

[coffee]

Yeah, what 18 Spears said.

Also, make your page size 5.5 by 8.5 inches (as someone else said above). That way, when you convert to PDF you shouldn't have to fiddle with things.

[Koren n'Rhys]

Mach, I think coffee's got the point that confused you. If you create a document with full, letter-size pages at 10-pt font and then booklet print it, yes it will get tiny and impossible to read. You need to set your page size to digest (5.5 x 8.5) with whatever margin size you like and go from there. Printing that as a booklet on letter paper won't rescale anything.

Does AbiWord print to/save as PDF? Once you've done that, you can open the PDF in Acrobat Reader and use the booklet print function to actually print it properly.

[Koren n'Rhys]

Mar 12, 2015 15:55:28 GMT -6 sinenomine said:

Just took a look at home, and it looks like .IDML only works with CS4 or later, and there's no option to save it in an earlier file format. You might try loading it up in Scribus and then just looking at the paragraph and object styles there, so you can recreate them in InDesign CS2 if that's more comfortable to work in.

Thanks for taking the time to check on it. I will have to try that Scribus workaround at some point just to see what happens. I have a passing familiarity with CS2 from work, laying out some simple flyers and brochures for marketing purposes (no larger docs though) so it seems easier than learning a new program.

[Vile Traveller]

Mar 13, 2015 9:41:48 GMT -6 Koren n'Rhys said:

If you create a document with full, letter-size pages at 1-pt font and then booklet print it, yes it will get tiny and impossible to read.

I don't know about you, but at my age that'd be impossible to read even if I blew it up to A3.

[talysman]

Mar 13, 2015 1:54:17 GMT -6 machfront said:

I'm fairly certain I'm actually more confused than before.
It's as though there's a wall up in my head. The info simply isn't sinking in. Embarrassing. I apologize and I truly appreciate the patient answers. I'm trying to soak it up.

I don't really need anything precisely like the OD&D booklets themselves. Simply the same basic principle/size/etc. Heck, one of the things I'm doing is only my own house-ruled fantasy RISUS (which is honestly just the RISUS rich text doc that I've changed here and there and wanted to print out as a home-made booklet for fun.

I ran a search or two for making booklet-sized documents and looked over a couple things on WikiHow for doing so in Word and that didn't really help either (Word has all this fancy stuff that AbiWord doesn't and I've never needed/used/know anything about).
The extent of my experience and knowledge in this area is: writing, changing fonts and font size, inserting an image, hitting 'Print' and that's really about it. If I ever had to insert/create a table I'd probably explode.

OK, I thought about this in light of what you're looking for -- something really simple, basically something you can flow text into. And I think I have something that will work for you. It will require some downloading, though, and when you make a project, there will be a couple steps you will need to follow each time. They are simple steps, but involve copying and renaming a folder and running some stuff from a command line.

First, the downloads:

- Get Pandoc. It's a commandline tool that converts a bunch of stuff to a bunch of other stuff.
- Get MiKTeX. Don't worry, you're not going to learn TeX. Pandoc is going to use it to make your PDF.
- Get this template package I just made for you. It's a folder named "booklet"
with two LaTeX files already set up for 12-point font on 8.5 x 5.5 pages. OK, actually, it's a folder that shows that folder in it. You're going
to want to download the entire folder and save it somewhere you can find it, like in a Templates folder in your My Documents folder.

Install Pandoc and MiKTeX. It's been a while since I did it myself, but shouldn't be hard. I just let them use defaults.

Now, the steps you will do for each project:

1. Make a folder for your project. The easy way to do this is to copy the entire "booklet" folder you saved somewhere, go to another folder
   where you keep all your book projects, and paste the copy there. Then, rename the "booklet" folder to a short name that will remind you what
   the project is. Avoid spaces in the name.
2. Write your stuff in Abiword. Don't bother with fonts and margins, just type, mark some things bold or italics or as a heading, put in number lists
   or bullet lists, simple stuff like that. Yeah, you can insert pictures, too.
3. Save it in your project folder, but as an HTML file.
4. Open a command prompt in your project folder. Windows 8 now does this from the file menu. Older versions of Windows usually had you do it from
   the Start menu, then cd to the directory.
5. Run this command at the prompt: pandoc myprojectname.html -o mydoc.tex
6. Now run this command at the prompt: pandoc main.tex -o mypdfname.pdf. Again, you can change the "mypdfname" to whatever you want the
   PDF name to be, but don't change the "main.tex", and make sure you use the "pdf" extension, since that tells Pandoc you want a PDF. MiKTeX may ask
   if it can download and install some packages the first time it runs, but that's OK. It won't do it again unless you change "main.tex" or "mystyle.sty"
   to do something else.

I set up main.tex and mystyle.sty to use default 12-point fonts, 8.5 x 5.5 page size, inner and top margins that are 1/9th the page width
and outer/bottom margins that are twice that, no section numbers, figures and tables are numbered but don't include the chapter number, and with a couple
extra packages loaded in case you ever do something fancy with tables. There's more you can do, even without learning LaTeX, but I think this will hold you
over for a while.

[Zenopus]

Mar 12, 2015 18:17:44 GMT -6 machfront said:

Wait. If one uses a ten point font, then prints the pages of the document in booklet style (four pages on a single sheet of paper front and back)...wouldn't the font be incredibly tiny? Wouldn't it be necessary to use a much larger font or is there something I'm missing here?

As far as I can tell, the Holmes Basic rulebook uses a font that is slightly smaller than 10-point Futura. I used 9.5 in that Third Level Spell sheet that you looked at. I don't have any trouble reading stuff this size.

If you are just doing this for house rules I would suggest just playing around with Word, matching font size, margins etc to what you want. You can easily import images. It will look good enough to use.

[machfront]

Mar 13, 2015 4:05:50 GMT -6 18 Spears said:

Mar 13, 2015 3:20:28 GMT -6 machfront said:

Darn. No template for digest with saddle-stitch binding. Only perfect. Downloaded the template to take a look-see anyhow. Unzipping resulted in something stubbing it's toe and Windows giving me some crap about this or that wouldn't transfer and...encryption...and blah,blah. So it wouldn't properly unzip. *shrug*

Im no pro but for my own house-docs i used:

Inside 0.8" (inside is always wider to acoomodate binding/folding]
Outside 0.5"
Top 0.5"
Bottom 1" (for page number i put at bottom, if you put title at header you increased top margin too0)

Make sure your margins are mirrored to reflect the changing margin based upon whether the page is recto/right or verso/left


added -- this was for a saddledstich in digest size

I'm just going to have to quit using AbiWord. There is no inside and outside margins. Only right and left options.
And....

Mar 13, 2015 7:59:30 GMT -6 coffee said:

Yeah, what 18 Spears said.

Also, make your page size 5.5 by 8.5 inches (as someone else said above). That way, when you convert to PDF you shouldn't have to fiddle with things.

AAHHH-HHAAA!!! That's the info I needed and from where all my confusion springs.
But...

Mar 13, 2015 9:41:48 GMT -6 Koren n'Rhys said:

Mach, I think coffee's go the point that confused you. If you create a document with full, letter-size pages at 1-pt font and then booklet print it, yes it will get tiny and impossible to read. You need to set your page size to digest (5.5 x 8.5) with whatever margin size you like and go from there. Printing that as a booklet on letter paper won't rescale anything.

Does AbiWord print to/save as PDF? Once you've done that, you can open the PDF in Acrobat Reader and use the booklet print function to actually print it properly.

So I changed the page size in AbiWord and all my work disappeared. It keeps changing inches to millimeters or something. Then after attempting to save it claims my (0.5") margins are "too large to fit on the page". Grr.
So I had to download the bloated and (for me) long hated and long since abandoned these past seven years, OpenOffice (since it was slightly less bloated than LibreOffice. I'll try again there.


Talysman's new info will have to be digested later. Gotta get the Tiny Princess to the dentist.

[Koren n'Rhys]

Mar 13, 2015 10:23:15 GMT -6 Vile Traveller said:

Mar 13, 2015 9:41:48 GMT -6 Koren n'Rhys said:

If you create a document with full, letter-size pages at 1-pt font and then booklet print it, yes it will get tiny and impossible to read.

I don't know about you, but at my age that'd be impossible to read even if I blew it up to A3.

Whoops! Fixed.

[Koren n'Rhys]

Mar 13, 2015 12:49:25 GMT -6 machfront said:

So I changed the page size in AbiWord and all my work disappeared. It keeps changing inches to millimeters or something. Then after attempting to save it claims my (0.5") margins are "too large to fit on the page". Grr.
So I had to download the bloated and (for me) long hated and long since abandoned these past seven years, OpenOffice (since it was slightly less bloated than LibreOffice. I'll try again there.

Talysman's new info will have to be digested later. Gotta get the Tiny Princess to the dentist.

That's really strange. What if you just create a new document and them copy/paste the text from your old document into it? I have no idea what the error is on the margins. I'd try again, setting the page size and margins first, then copying in the text.

As for the whole Pandoc and MiKTeX route... well, I know talysman is a fan and did a whole series on his blog about using them, but the whole things seemed convoluted to me. For the simple formatting and layout you want to use on a house-rule document, a basic word processor should be able to easily do it well enough. My 2 coppers anyway.

[Zenopus]

Mar 13, 2015 12:49:25 GMT -6 machfront said:

Mar 13, 2015 7:59:30 GMT -6 coffee said:

Also, make your page size 5.5 by 8.5 inches (as someone else said above). That way, when you convert to PDF you shouldn't have to fiddle with things.

AAHHH-HHAAA!!! That's the info I needed and from where all my confusion springs.
But...

This is something else that can be done with just Word. I usually use full-page for my reference sheets, but for the Balrog Sheet I set the page to 5.5 x 8.5 before printing to pdf. In Word for Mac 2011 this setting is under File -> Page Setup -> Paper Size -> Half Letter (5 1/2 x 8 /12 in)

[talysman]

Mar 13, 2015 13:29:00 GMT -6 Koren n'Rhys said:

As for the whole Pandoc and MiKTeX route... well, I know talysman is a fan and did a whole series on his blog about using them, but the whole things seemed convoluted to me. For the simple formatting and layout you want to use on a house-rule document, a basic word processor should be able to easily do it well enough. My 2 coppers anyway.

It looks convoluted, but it's not that convoluted. It all boils down to "here's a template so you don't have to mess with fonts and margins." I tried to keep other stuff to a minimum, because I don't know how much machfront likes, for example, adding commandline switches to alter performance. But maybe it can be simplified even further...

It's true I'm a big fan of Pandoc and LaTeX, but I'm a bigger fan of "save almost all the layout stuff for last and try not to get bogged down in it." Pandoc just happens to be the way I've been doing that lately. The ideal way would be to provide a template with everything set up and flow text into that, but I don't have InDesign on this computer (and it's too expensive, anyways,) and although I have Scribus, I haven't used it yet, so I'm not ready to set up a template for that. Templates for word processors like MS Word or OpenOffice/LibreOffice, in my experience, are quirky to use, because you have to replace existing text and you wind up with weird phantom formatting codes you can't get rid of. And from the sounds of it, even word processors are giving machfront problems.

Eventually, maybe I or someone else could make a dummy Scribus document set up for 8.5 x 5.5 with proper margins. I believe Scribus can import a Rich Text document, which is what machfront is saving as. If not, it can import HTML. Then, he could just open the template in Scribus, import his document, maybe change the global font but not on a line-by-line basis, and then Save As a project name and export as PDF afterwards. That would be the simplest.

[machfront]

Mar 13, 2015 13:29:00 GMT -6 Koren n'Rhys said:

Mar 13, 2015 12:49:25 GMT -6 machfront said:

So I changed the page size in AbiWord and all my work disappeared. It keeps changing inches to millimeters or something. Then after attempting to save it claims my (0.5") margins are "too large to fit on the page". Grr.
So I had to download the bloated and (for me) long hated and long since abandoned these past seven years, OpenOffice (since it was slightly less bloated than LibreOffice. I'll try again there.

Talysman's new info will have to be digested later. Gotta get the Tiny Princess to the dentist.

That's really strange. What if you just create a new document and them copy/paste the text from your old document into it? I have no idea what the error is on the margins. I'd try again, setting the page size and margins first, then copying in the text.

As for the whole Pandoc and MiKTeX route... well, I know talysman is a fan and did a whole series on his blog about using them, but the whole things seemed convoluted to me. For the simple formatting and layout you want to use on a house-rule document, a basic word processor should be able to easily do it well enough. My 2 coppers anyway.

Precisely what I figured I'd do. So I did. No joy. I went back to the open project I'd changed the page size to once I'd copied my other document and was confronted with a tiny box in the upper left corner of the page area. "HUH?", says I. So I close it and try again and it simply wouldn't allow me to paste in my copied info from the other doc. Sheesh.


Thankfully OpenOffice did so without a hiccup. Oh, I hate that thing. Now I'm gonna have to keep it.