Doing RPG material in Page & Layout Designer

[John WS Marvin]

Anybody use Page and Layout Designer to do roleplaying game material? I need to do PDFs for both electronic viewing and printing, as well as print on demand. I want to do lots of formatting, using sidebars, images, and graphics. I need to do double page spreads (except for the front and back cover) and format the left side pages differently than the right side pages.

I'm going to start layout for a Numenera adventure soon, and am wondering if this is a better tool than MS Publisher or PagePlus, and why?

[mwenz]

You are going to get various opinions, including that from someone here that uses one of the Xara products for creating RPG books and materials.

My opinion is based upon using such an application for creating and/or manipulating graphical assets for use in a page layout application. I took a look inside some of the books from the publishers you mention. You can pretty much use any application, including Word and Publisher for this. As well as an Xara product, Adobe Illustrator, etc., etc.

The real issue is the degree of effort it takes to emulate the formatting for the titles that those publishers print. I see you also posted on the Serif forums regarding PagePlus. PP is the type of application I would use for this kind of work. I personally might use InDesign or QXP, but I have also done fairly large projects in PagePlus and, for its cost, it is hard to beat. For any page layout application of choice, I would write in a word processor and import, then format the work, bring in the graphic/image assets, etc, once I determined the majority or bulk of writing was done.

Good luck. Sounds like a fun project.

Mike

[John WS Marvin]

Thanks!

[Gamerprinter]

Though I agree with Mwenz, I've done page layout for all adventures and supplements for Rite Publishing's Kaidan setting of Japanese horror (PFRPG) using Xara Xtreme Pro 4 and now using Xara Designer Pro 9. I've mostly done 30-ish page supplements, though 3 of the modules were 96 pages long, each. And I'll be doing the layout for the Campaign Guides, at 250 and 150 page books. I will totally defend Xara's ability to create maps, as I use it pretty much exclusively for creating maps for tabletop RPG publishers and video game companies - as my thread might show!

My layout is pretty simple, though I do create custom made tables, and rely on a simple two column layout, sometimes I create text boxes in the columns and text boxes that stand apart from the column layout, so overly complex page layout is something I never do. I will state, that creating more than 10 page PDFs is a real pain with Xara, so I generally export 10 pages at a time, then stitch the multiple PDFs into a single document.

[Albacore]

John Mike has given you an honest opinion about different programmes used in DTP and I would go along with any one of these. When you say it is going to be printed how many copies are we talking about? Normally once you go over 1000 copies of a 30 page booklet with many graphics you are not talking about just taking in down to your local print shop to get it printed in a large format digital printer it has to go further into litho or into other costlier areas. PagePlus has the ability to impose a simple 4 page booklet but nothing more complex as you would need the power of InDesign or Acrobat Pro to do this for you or pay the print company to do it for you adding to the cost. If I was sending anything to the larger type of print company on a regular basis I would strongly recommend that you buy an old copy of Acro Pro to check colours, pages and preflight but you can buy and download cheaper and free PDF checking programmes.

[Gamerprinter]

As far as Albacore's point is concerned, I've used Xara Xtreme Pro4 to create 300 dpi PDF/X1a files that were sent to OneBookShelf and Ingram for commercial printing of RPG supplements that are being offered for sale at DrivethruRPG.com. So I've indeed used Xara for commercial printing page layout.

[John WS Marvin]

Thanks everyone. I've doing a licensed Numenera adventure, and am following their three column format. Two columns are big and the main text flows through them. The third is for sidebar notes. It's laid out so in a two page spread, the thin sidebar columns are to the outside of the spread.

You put information in the outside sidebars such as creature stats or environment details so the poor GM doesn't have to flip pages all the time.

I'm selling on DriveThruRPG.com and using their print on demand.

John

Oh, and I'm already using Photo and Graphic Designer for my maps.

[Gamerprinter]

Oh, and I'm already using Photo and Graphic Designer for my maps.

Good, then I'm not alone!

[ad1066]

I did the artwork for Spookybeans in Xara Designer Pro, so it made sense to use it for the layout as well (there were numerous occasions where I needed to tweak the art, and it was convenient to do it right then and there). It helped that a new version had just come out at that time that supported text boxes (wish I'd had automatic page numbering, though). At 120 6"x9" full color pages, it eventually got too unwieldy to export in one shot, so I broke it up into 10-20 page chunks, and combined them in Acrobat Pro.

When the time came to do layout for Tales From the Fallen Empire (200+ 8.5"x11" B&W), all the artwork was in the form of bitmaps from a 3rd party source, so I switched to PagePlus.

-- Ben

PS: I absolutely love Numenera.