Thursday, December 17, 2009

A Brief Reprieve


I actually printed up a couple pages of my Companion today to compare to the original B/X sets and it appears I've got some extra room to work with...my margins on top are a little large. Hey, at this point every bit of space I can scrape together will mean more room for adding illos.

Also, the font seems to be the right size, but for some reason Moldvay, etc. were able to cram more lines in per paragraph...maybe I need to reduce it to 9 or 9.5? Some experimentation could definitely be worthwhile.

Talking with the Doctor tonight (my buddy, Kris) I got pretty excited about stuff. But then I went out drinking with my in-laws, and forgot all about the book in the entertainment of the moment. Maybe I'll have some time to work on it tomorrow morning...I don't have to go back to the office till the 29th but I've got a ton of plans between now and then...

3 comments:

  1. Check the settings for space above and below paragraphs in your word processing software. I use OpenOffice, and it often puts in extra space above and below paragraphs. Word has settings for it as well, but I don't remember it doing it by default.

    Anyway, that can free up some space to put in extra lines per page. Check your chart settings for it as well.

    When I put together my house rule Player's Book I saved lots of space by fiddling with those--especially for the charts.

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  2. There's also line-height to consider. The distance from one line to another can be different even though the font is the same size. The joys of typography. :)

    If you ever want to dive into the topic and learn more than most people care to learn, I enjoyed the book The Elements of Typographic Style.

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  3. @ LG: I've got all the line space dialed down to zero.

    @ Alex: I have a feeling I'd be drowning if I dived into the deep end of typography.

    This morning I spent some time actually figuring out the font size based on re-copying the original text of the Basic and Expert books into the proper dimensions on a Word document. The Basic book appears to use a 9.5 font, while the Expert book varies between 9.5 and 9, sometimes within the same chapter...at least it appears to. One thing I hadn't noticed before is the original style of both books is JUSTIFIED text. That's something I haven't been doing! Decreasing the font size to a uniform 9.5 is going to save me a ton of space, and we'll see how it looks justified.

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