As my editor knows, I’m using LyX for the game’s type-setting. It is not an easy program, and it was made for creating scientific documents, not role-playing games, so I’m stretching it a bit, but after a few battles with it, I think I am finally getting a hand on how to use effectively.
I know there are applications better used for that. But they cost around $1,000 and I’d rather pay that to the artisans who are helping me with the illustrations, proof-reading and, now, adventures. And to be honest, when I started, I never thought I would make it this far, selling my own game in a foreign language over the Internet. I had wild dreams as a kid, but not those.
Anyway, I chose LyX because it creates beautiful typography and for nada it creates automatic indexes, table of contents, you name it. It’s tricky to add columns and setting images and tables can be a pain at times, but it works as heaven with references and links. In any case, I won’t be using multiple columns (they make no sense for an e-book) nor a fancy background (which dries your ink cartridge and makes the text less readable), so that was not troubling me much.
But then, there was the issue of the cover. Remember the part about adding images being a pain? Well, apparently, the document LyX and LaTex produced weren’t meant to have a colorful cover. Instead, they are supposed to have a title page with little but the title and the author’s name and so on.
Until I found a little trick where I less expected it: an e-book on Scribd with this catchy name “How to create and publish your own ebooks using free, open source software“. Sorry if I look like an advert: but the e-book is free and it’s good. The hack is simple: convert your cover image into a pdf file, the merge it with your previous file and it’s done. It’s a bit more complicated than that, but the details are all in the e-book, so here my post ends, hoping it can be helpful to other role-playing artisans.