What is the target output for our PDF?

[Lokathor]

What is the target output for our PDF?

[SqueeG]

US Letter sized paper. Considering a few people have mentioned printing pages off for their groups.... and most of us are US based.

My 2c.

[Tarkisflux]

I support 8.5" x 11", which should look like any other pdf copy of a book I have already if I wanted to put it up on a monitor, tablet, or phone.

[ExplosiveRunes]

I also support 8.5" x 11" Do we want single or double columns?

A note about the 'nice' version we might make. I did a little research, and its fairly easy to add background images to a PDF using PDF editing software, while its a straight up bitch to work with images in latex. If we we wanted, we could set up chapter starts and whatnot to simply leave a standardized area of blank space and add any art we wanted as a background. Same thing with fancy borders or column divisions or whatever. For example, if someone did a races lineup drawing, we could just format one of the pages in the races section to leave the top 1/3 of the page empty, and insert an background image that had that artwork in that area. It wouldn't be perfect, and it would no longer be completely latex, but it seems like it would be simple.

[SqueeG]

I was just looking up adding background and border images last night. Using yhe wallpaper library doesnt look too bad.

[Tarkisflux]

I strongly prefer double columns, but that makes table placement a bit annoying I imagine.

Not really - LaTeX can handle it just fine. In fact, there's a whole major journal out there for computer science (STOC, to be exact) which only accepts two-column entries, and it looks fine to me.

[ExplosiveRunes]

Eh, it does make placing certain types of tables more of a hassle, but it can be done, usually by placing the table outside of the multicolumn format and having it appear at the top or the bottom of the page (an example of this being the contact other plane table in spells.tex which displays fine in conjunction with the two column environment, though it does need to be moved)

[Lokathor]

Two-column is a bitch to place tables and figures within. It just is. The only sane way to do it is to end the multi-column that you've got going, place the figure, and then start a new multi-column. This means that even for incidental tables you can't flow words around the table. Unless the table is SO small that it fits inside of a single column, in which case you can just put it in the column.

Single Column is far superior in terms of making tables and figures easy, and also if you have to zoom in because you're on a smaller device then you don't have to scroll down then back up over and over as you go from column A to column B on each page while reading. The downsides of Single Column are that you end up with more trailing whitespace if a paragraph ends early in a line, which can make the text seem slightly less compact overall. I don't think that's a huge deal though.

The only section of the book that I think we'd want to go with double column on would be the Spell Entries appendix.

Lokathor makes a valid point with respect to scrolling and reading in a two-column format. As someone who reads game books on a laptop, I can certainly see his point.

[Tarkisflux]

Closing with the following resolution:

Single column (except maybe spells), 8.5x11 inch paper. Tables remain annoying.