Binding BRP

[Peter Fitz]

Some time ago I got a copy of Basic Roleplaying when the PDF was on sale at DriveThruRPG for 99c.

I printed it full-size and bound it in a fan-glue binding (the green one). The BRP Quick-Start rules were free, so I did them too (the floral cover, on the left). Both of those bindings have been around for a year or so, and since then I've also bought a PoD paperback edition of the rules.

Recently I thought I'd like a copy in a more compact form, so I printed the Big Yellow Book in A5 signatures, and stitched and bound it into a Little Big Crimson Yellow Book, on the right.

Now Chaosium have released the shiny new edition of BRP, with the editable RTF text block available under the ORC. However, even without any illustrations, and with all the text at 10pt, an A5 production of that comes to somewhere around 700-800 pages, so it might be a while before I get up the gumption to lay that all out and print it in signatures.

[PananCooks]

Those look incredible! 

[Mugen]

How did it cost to print each of those books, approximately ?

[Atgxtg]

9 hours ago, Peter Fitz said:

Now Chaosium have released the shiny new edition of BRP, with the editable RTF text block available under the ORC. However, even without any illustrations, and with all the text at 10pt, an A5 production of that comes to somewhere around 700-800 pages, so it might be a while before I get up the gumption to lay that all out and print it in signatures.

Your bound to cover it eventually.

Edited March 10 by Atgxtg

[Peter Fitz]

On 3/10/2024 at 7:32 PM, Mugen said:

How did it cost to print each of those books, approximately ?

The large-format BRP cost me a lot, because I didn't realise at the time that my laser printer would print in just black & white, and I thought I had to replace a couple of colour toner cartridges to get the job finished. If I had taken it to a print bureau, I think it would have cost me about forty Kiwibucks, which would have been only a modest saving over just buying the PoD softcover (though that wasn't available at the time).

As for the small format version — I don't really know. I don't know how much of my black toner I used up on it.

[Peter Fitz]

On 3/10/2024 at 7:44 PM, Atgxtg said:

Your bound to cover it eventually.

I'm in the process of reformatting the US Letter RTF to A5 ODT in LibreOffice right now, which is a lot more work than I'd hoped because there seems to be some weird glitches with LibreOffice's import of the RTF's formatting. I'll get there eventually.

[Atgxtg]

7 hours ago, Peter Fitz said:

I'm in the process of reformatting the US Letter RTF to A5 ODT in LibreOffice right now, which is a lot more work than I'd hoped because there seems to be some weird glitches with LibreOffice's import of the RTF's formatting. I'll get there eventually.

That's true with Word as well. Things can move around, in part because of how, where and to what stuff get's anchored to. If you really want to page layout to stay consist while changing page size, you need a desktop publishing program. Scribus is free. It won't help you much now, but might be worth it in the future.

 

 

[SDLeary]

8 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

That's true with Word as well. Things can move around, in part because of how, where and to what stuff get's anchored to. If you really want to page layout to stay consist while changing page size, you need a desktop publishing program. Scribus is free. It won't help you much now, but might be worth it in the future.

 

 

Shouldn't be that hard with RTF if all you want to do is reformat to a different page size... but if you want to go further, the fact that there are NO Paragraph Styles, and apparently some missing section headers does make it something of a time sink.

I've pulled it into Pages earlier, to try and make it more user friendly and have started to apply styles in order to create a rudimentary TOC.

SDLeary

P.S. – Apparently there are Styles there already! They just get borked if you import into something other than Word?

P.P.S. – Not styles, but certainly encoded in such a way to create a Character Map in Word... otherwise everything shows up as Normal style

P.P.P.S. – Its a single document Word Outline

Edited March 14 by SDLeary
P.S.

[Peter Fitz]

I've more or less completed the players' section, and am as far as the bestiary in the gamemasters part. I'm going to have to go back though and completely reformat all the equipment tables though, as they just won't fit on an A5 page.

[Edit] And now I've reached that stage where I wonder why I ever thought it would be a good idea to do this at all 🙂

Edited March 14 by Peter Fitz

[Atgxtg]

19 hours ago, SDLeary said:

Shouldn't be that hard with RTF if all you want to do is reformat to a different page size... but if you want to go further, the fact that there are NO Paragraph Styles, and apparently some missing section headers does make it something of a time sink.

Yeah but I doubt it's just a straight RTF, as the book has tables, text boxes, headers, footers, page numbers  and  such. I suspect he's probably reformatting things  to look nicer than an RFT and something got lost along the way, especially if it's being turned into a PDF. I got Scribus because I was frustrated with how something that looked fine in Word got moved all around when converted to a PDF. I think there is a 15 year old thread about in on the forum somewhere (most likely the Pendragon forum). I forgot who recommended Scribus, but it did solve the formatting issues at the time. Modern word document software (LibreOffice in my case) seems to have solved most of those issue.

 

19 hours ago, SDLeary said:

I've pulled it into Pages earlier, to try and make it more user friendly and have started to apply styles in order to create a rudimentary TOC.

Why? I mean the UGE should print fine as is. Going from 8.5x11 to A4 or B4 etc. shouldn't require a change. The width to height ratios are similar enough for it to work. That's why Drivethru doesn't usually post rulebooks in multiple formats. Now if you are doing something like a landscape version or some such...

19 hours ago, SDLeary said:

SDLeary

P.S. – Apparently there are Styles there already! They just get borked if you import into something other than Word?

Yeah that i Microsoft S.O.P. The same hold true for Excel spreadheets. I had to manually cut & paste some formulas from Open/Libre Offic Cal to Excel for some game stats I sent to people because Word wouldn't import them properly. 

I believe it is by design and it goes back decades. I remember back in the day we gamed with someone who worked at Microsoft, asking them when the next version of Excel (around Windows 3 era) would come out and being told "not until Lotus 1-2-3 won't run the spreadsheets." So I wouldn't be surprised it anything imported from a non MS format has issues of some kind. And to be fair they don't have to make Office compatible with anything else. 

 

 

19 hours ago, SDLeary said:

P.P.S. – Not styles, but certainly encoded in such a way to create a Character Map in Word... otherwise everything shows up as Normal style

P.P.P.S. – Its a single document Word Outline

Again. Word is probably deliberately sabotaging the file for not being in a Microsoft brand format. 

Edited March 14 by Atgxtg

[SDLeary]

5 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

Why? I mean the UGE should print fine as is. Going from 8.5x11 to A4 or B4 etc. shouldn't require a change. The width to height ratios are similar enough for it to work. That's why Drivethru doesn't usually post rulebooks in multiple formats. Now if you are doing something like a landscape version or some such...

No, more for easy navigation for those not using Word, or perhaps for those using Word, but not wanting to deal with all the Outlining nonsense. I can understand people using it because it makes it easy for them, or because its required by their work or a specific job they are on; but it makes it damn difficult to get from point a to point s without a lot of scrolling.

Landscape... nah. Horizontal books are for pictures; the only word there to describe said pictures... otherwise my brain short circuits a bit! 🙂 

SDLeary

[Atgxtg]

11 hours ago, SDLeary said:

No, more for easy navigation for those not using Word, or perhaps for those using Word, but not wanting to deal with all the Outlining nonsense. I can understand people using it because it makes it easy for them, or because its required by their work or a specific job they are on; but it makes it damn difficult to get from point a to point s without a lot of scrolling.

I think that is because digital formats have evolved from an intermediate step before printing a physical book, to being a final form, but they don't have the same easy of handling or the ability to "flip through" that a book does. What we will probably end up with is a PDF with better tabs and some sort of way to flip through pages and stop when you see what you want.  It will probably take a few more years to figure it all out.

As far as the RTF goes, I'd probably have tired using Calibre to  convert it to EPUB or some such for better navigation. But wait, this is going to end up a bound print copy, so I'm still missing something.

 

11 hours ago, SDLeary said:

Landscape... nah. Horizontal books are for pictures; the only word there to describe said pictures... otherwise my brain short circuits a bit! 🙂 

Or monitors. One of the things about books in digital format is that screens don't come in the same sizes s paper. So a case could be made for formatting an RPG in 16:9 or 16:10 format for monitors and tablets. Or maybe even make games available in multiple formats for different devices. 

 

[SDLeary]

12 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

Or monitors. One of the things about books in digital format is that screens don't come in the same sizes s paper. So a case could be made for formatting an RPG in 16:9 or 16:10 format for monitors and tablets. Or maybe even make games available in multiple formats for different devices. 

In DTP, that's called a layout (or a spread)... and there is a line going down the middle where the two pages meet, one to left and one to right! 😉

Pages still in portrait. LOL

SDLeary

Edited March 16 by SDLeary

[Peter Fitz]

On 3/14/2024 at 8:10 AM, Atgxtg said:

That's true with Word as well. Things can move around, in part because of how, where and to what stuff get's anchored to. If you really want to page layout to stay consist while changing page size, you need a desktop publishing program. Scribus is free. It won't help you much now, but might be worth it in the future.

 

 

I do have DTP programs available: Serif PagePlus and Affinity Publisher. I've used InDesign in the past, but the cost of ownership of that is just too high. However, none of these are all that useful for laying out a publication that is light on illustrations and heavy on tables; none of them handle tables all that smoothly.

The best DTP program I've ever used for technical publications was Ventura Publisher (later Corel Ventura), but they stopped making that, and the ancient versions stopped working with one of the versions of Windows — Win2k I think. It was a while ago.

For my purposes, LibreOffice works just fine. It's just a pity that Microsoft doesn't work or play well with others.

[g33k]

*roff4evah!

👹

[Peter Fitz]

On 3/14/2024 at 12:25 AM, Peter Fitz said:

I'm in the process of reformatting the US Letter RTF to A5 ODT in LibreOffice right now, which is a lot more work than I'd hoped because there seems to be some weird glitches with LibreOffice's import of the RTF's formatting. I'll get there eventually.

Here's a screen-shot of the layout I've chosen to go with for my A5 version (that would be Digest for US people, I think). Even with all the text at 9pt, and no illustrations at all, it comes out at about 650 pages, and I haven't made a start on any table of contents or index yet. I've had to break most of the tables up and reformat them, because they mostly sprawl out horizontally too far otherwise, and to fit them in to an A5 page I'd have to drop the font size down to only 5 or 6 pt, which is basically illegible.

 

[SDLeary]

8 hours ago, Peter Fitz said:

Here's a screen-shot of the layout I've chosen to go with for my A5 version (that would be Digest for US people, I think). Even with all the text at 9pt, and no illustrations at all, it comes out at about 650 pages, and I haven't made a start on any table of contents or index yet. I've had to break most of the tables up and reformat them, because they mostly sprawl out horizontally too far otherwise, and to fit them in to an A5 page I'd have to drop the font size down to only 5 or 6 pt, which is basically illegible.

 

It would make the book a bit longer, but some of the tables could be rotated 90° and fill the page. At least, that way you wouldn't have to reformat so many.

SDLeary

[Peter Fitz]

49 minutes ago, SDLeary said:

It would make the book a bit longer, but some of the tables could be rotated 90° and fill the page. At least, that way you wouldn't have to reformat so many.

There are two reasons not to do that.

First, and most important, it would make the book a lot harder to read, especially if you're looking at a PDF on screen.
And second, because rotating the tables in floating frames is a recipe for disaster in a word processing application, and wouldn't be much less trouble to lay out in any case.

Edited March 21 by Peter Fitz