Quite a bit of idle here. Well, trying to get back to it. Skipped ahead to Modern Knights in the project list.
So, Let’s restate the problem. As I said originally, http://oss.copy.to/2010/12/whats-this-all-about/, This is about rebuilding old projects originally done in Pagemaker 6/6.5 in Scribus. While I will be using SVN scribus, everything else will be stock versions from my Linux Distro. In this case, Fedora 16, though I do not doubt that the number will increment as time goes on. I may, from time to time, install latest/unstable versions of an application for comparison, but I intend to limit the “headaches of unstable code” posts to Scribus. I’ve also added one more task to the list I didn’t have before. Generate a competent “E-Book” in one or more non-PDF formats. E-Pub being the main target.
Back to the present. Never did find a good outlining tool. Closest I found was Outline mode in OOo and/or LibreOffice and those both were.. not adequate for the task. I really needed something that behaved more like the old Dynonote app. Along the way I got the urge switch to Modern Knights. I blame Icons, BASH, Supers!, and the veritable horde of similar weight games that have come out since Modern Knights was originally released as a PDF but never hit the same level of recognition, despite being, IMO, a game with very similar qualities.
The cover is one of the bits I’m reworking as I was unable to find proof I had purchased a legit license to use the type face I have on the older cover. I found some similar faces but that really lost lustre. I’m currently trying out the most excellent BlamBot face Wicked Queen BB, though I may have to find another as the licensing terms make it difficult to use in the book block, if the format requires embedding the file in a manner that is theoretically extractable. As this is a very readable, IMO, header face, I’d rather like to use it that way. So far as I am aware that requires embedding the font in an extractable way that will require a different tier of the license. One that is more than this book will likely gross.
This was done very simply, as the art was drawn and colored by the Most Excellent Christopher Andrew Bates. The lettering was added on text layers for a hand-built drop shadow for the title. In Photoshop that would have been a simple layer effect, but that’s not really an option here – yet.
I did a massive reorg on the Rules chapters from the source documents which was a hard task than expected. The source was from a text file written on Unix-like environment ( lord knows which one ) and as a result of various assumptions, was full of hard CRs at the end of a line, hard tabs, and other things that do hardships for wrapping in paragraphs. LibreOffice had a hard time consistently handling the search and replaces for this task. Sometimes it acted as expected, sometimes it would massively hang. Using regex search and replace didn’t seem to alleviate this problem. Ultimately I ended up resolving this by putting the text into Gedit, fixing it up, and pasting it back but that is, shall we say, suboptimal, particularly since I have version/edit tracking on. I suspect that, actually, is why it is frelling up – at least with the hanging. Has anyone else seen this?
Progress is progress. I hope/expect/intend to have the previous editions “Rules” reeditted for better clarity and online for preview by the end of the calendar month.
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