On PDFs

So, after releasing Octale, I thought I'd talk a little bit about the tech bits of making it.

Primarily... it's a PDF. But it's a PDF sized to be readable on a phone. The whole TTRPG world releases stuff as PDFs, and I hate it because none of them are readable on a phone. They're all two-column, and reading them on your phone is immensely annoying. When I did Borealis I made an ePub as well, for exactly this reason, but ePubs are a bit disappointing; you get all the text, but basically none of the design. Usefully, though, the DM's Guild have a description of making what they call a "Phone PDF", which is basically "a PDF but the page size is 2.5”×4” instead of A4", and this actually works really well!

I used LibreOffice Writer to make it; it's got some annoying wrinkles, and it's not great at what we used to call DTP, or desktop publishing, in the old days, but it's good enough for this; one of the advantages of making something with only 36 words in it is that you don't have a lot of text to do layout on. So I set up the page to be 2.5x4 inches in Format > Page Style, and then added images (anchored to page in Image Properties and Wrap > In Background), and that was all. File > Export as PDF takes care of making a PDF, embedding the fonts and images, all that. Very useful.

I'd love to see more people make PDFs that are actually readable on a phone. People use their phones! A lot! For a proper-size TTRPG document, making an ePub is a good idea as well; even if you lose all the beautiful design, being able to reference the doc at the table, or read it on the train, is amazingly useful and I don't get why everyone doesn't do it. Still, perhaps this will help someone else see that it's possible and adopt the idea themselves too.