"Rule Layout in Digital Format" Topic

I am revamping some 22 year old rules. I am planning on doing them in digital format. My thought is to lay the rules out in "portrait (Vertical)" but the reference charts in "land scape."

How do you like your digital rules to be laid out?

Not sure what "digital format" you are planning to use, but I wouldn't recommend using both portrait and landscape. Nothing more annoying than having to turn the page through 90deg to read it.

Personally my ipad lives in landscape mode – and if you are looking at iBooks (which has much better layout capabilities than Kindle) you get the most control that way …

You might find something useful here ibooksauthortips.net

Thanks all, good insight. Teppsta, thanks for the reference!

Brave New World and all that.

Also, if the page is 90 degrees to the rest of the book you have to turn off the reorientation in your hardware otherwise turning the iPad just has the software "rotate" the page. Not sure they would ver be readable (tho anyone playing would print them out but stilll)

I'm posting from a nook hd in landscape mode.
The price of 7 or 8 inch android tablets will likely tell over the next couple of years. £69.00 GBP for the one my brother bought in november.

I was brought up cold recently when I decided to do an e-format game book. I was astonished at how much work was involved.

First, all the different tablets use different page sizes. So you have to do a layout that works for all of them, or do three or four different layouts. (There are lots of online tutorials for how to do this, using the various page layout apps like Adobe In-Design or Quark.)

Second, rulebooks require text and graphics to hang together closely (so that the section on "rolling to hit" is right next to the illustration showing how it's done….) But that's very hard to do in e-text, because the text automatically scales and flows depending upon the zoom that the reader uses. So you have to "anchor" all graphics to certain bits of text (see problem #1 above for doing this in three different formats), and then make sure that when it flows that way, it doesn't get discombobulated from some other graphic.

Third, if you try to get around all of that by just doing a "Smart PDF" (i.e., an interactive PDF with links, etc.) then you still need to make sure that your smart features work in the different formats. I created some buttons that worked great when read on a computer screen, but didn't work at all when my wife tested them on her iPad.

In short, it's a pain in the ass. Doing layout for old fashioned books is actually a lot easier.

(And books don't require you to give 30% of your profits to the Apple Store, for the privilege of using their format!)

+1 what Sam said. Its not as easy as it looks, and a level or 2 harder than publishing for print.

I would seriously recommend using a "reactive layout" for any digital format publication. That is, the layout of the content re-formats itself to suit the changing orientation of the device, or viewed on any of the huge variety of devices that might be used to read it.

When creating digital content, you cannot afford to make assumptions about what sort of device is going to be used, or how the reader is going to use it.

Thankfully, there are some really well thought out tools / libraries and things that do 90% of the hard work for you. (and they are all free / opensource too).

Tools along the lines of twitter bootstrap, or any of the modern HTML layout libs are worth getting used to.

Publish in HTML5 format, and dont waste time messing with proprietary rubbish like the Apple Store, and life becomes so much simpler.