Dressing Wulf Bold

My idea about typesetting the most important facts in a boxed text in either bold face or italics, an idea I was (well, still am) really wedded to, was liked by some, disliked by others.

That gave me the perfect pretext to procrastinate a bit regarding my writing to do a bit of LaTeX programming instead, which now allows me to switch on and off certain features of the layout so as to examine what things look like.

Meet Wulf Bold, one of my characters, without any kind of dressing:

You may wonder about some repetitions in the text: the text under the three bullet points repeats the contents of the bullet points. In the original layout, these bullet points would be typeset as a special sidebar for "facts, clues, and secrets," to provide the reader with the most important information at a single glance -- the bullet points are meant to be read instead of the text for getting a quick overview of the NPC. Let us add that sidebar, along with a second sidebar for the NPC's description. Also, let's switch on inline markup of NPCs (notice below the "Lord Vatseer" in bold face with the little hand symbol next to it.)

To make it easier for readers to find NPC descriptions, I have added a square with the NPCs initials in the margin ... which also can be used in the inline markup for highlighting a mentioned NPC:

Finally, I have a feature that adds markup to the inline "facts, clues, and secrets" sidebar, allowing the reader to see where the contents of thee corresponding sidebar stems from.

Putting all four variants side by side we have:

Once more, I bothered the friendly members of Sly Flourish's and Teos "Alphastream" Abadía's Discord servers for their opinion, this time asking about any thoughts regarding the layout they might have.

One respondent, a veteran of more than 30 years in publishing, strongly argued to drop all markup, not only because of the cost of colored printing for the ribbons (currently, seeing my work printed is a very wild dream) but also because he judged the markup to be visual clutter that added no information. He also alerted me to the fact that in the section containing the character description, I should better write But Also rather than But also, because it is essentially a title. Finally, he advised me to use two-letter abbreviations for the stats rather than sideways letters to save horizontal space for better readability.

Others did in fact like the ribbons for the sidebars -- most liked the third variant best (maybe without having the NPC's initials also repeated inline.)

Indeed, just to avoid confusion for the reader about repetitions in the text, I think, I will need some kind of markup for the "facts, clues, and secrets." Or maybe not: One member of Sly Flourish's discord suggested making the facts, or rather the text under it, less repetitive: the text should only add to the facts rather repeating some of them. Thus, the reader could get some more background by reading on after the facts, without re-reading things one already knows. But I am not sure that is doable (at least for me and my abilities): There would be a bit of information to be added to the fist bullet point, some for the second, yet some more for the third ... I don't think that would come together as a meaningful text that is enjoyable to read. In essence, it would be a concatenation of footnotes.

Of course, I could simply leave the "facts, clues, and secrets" away and only reproduce them in the appendix for the NPC overview. That actually was my original plan: the facts, clues, and secrets would be highlighted with inline markup in the main body of the text, but -- this is were all this pondering on layout got started -- not everybody likes the inline markup.

I don't know, yet, what I will do with the feedback. One disregards advise by somebody with more than 30 years of experience in publishing at one's own peril. On the other hand, there is so much published material for D&D (or, rather "5e", since we already have "Level Up Advanced 5th Edition" and will get Kobold Press' "Tales of the Valiant", Cubicle 7th's "C7d20", and probably a few more) and much that material looks very much the same, often aping WOTC's layout. So looking a bit distinctive is a must, I think. But maybe not for the price of really bad typesetting? On the other hand, there were voices that did like some of the markup ...

For now, I shall go back to writing -- I have a mind to add some more NPCs for the city of Pentée and also want to create adventure hooks for its locations.