Happy weekend DD people,
I've made some good progress on the annotated V5 this week: the Annotated Book I fits!
Sort of :)
As alluded to in previous posts, I've been working toward a coil-bound, wide-page (landscape-oriented), annotated version of Book I, with the normal page content on one side and the notes in an extra-wide margin. With a bit of fussing around, I'm now looking at a book 1 build with every note in the margins, and even some space to spare.
How we got Here
A few weeks ago, it looked like there were way too many annotations to fit into the space, even with two columns of smaller type along side the main text. The spells section was especially difficult, with some pages having twice as much notes text as the main prose. But I've made it work, and the main fixes were:
One note replaces 75. I replaced seventy-five instances of a "SRD spell name." note with a single blanket statement that says: DD5 uses SRD spell names unless noted otherwise. That saved a ton of space where I needed it most.
Leaner citations. The Stephanus-style citations I posted about last week are mostly in for the core LBB and Chainmail citations. There's a long tail of infrequently cited sources still to migrate, but the primary sources have already delivered most of the savings, and they look honkey!
Tightening the notes. I standardised a dozen or so stock phrases ("DD5 presumes", "Per the SRD", "cf." etc.) across 100 or so notes, trimmed 80 notes that only barely overflowed onto the last line, and rewrote 20 of the longest notes (each a mini essay!) to be more focused. There are more savings to be had in this department, if needed.
Illustrations. A full page illustration in the main text also provides a full page of margin space that notes from previous pages can flow into, and notes from later pages can backfill to. A couple of strategically placed illustrations at the volume pinch points really helps.
Backfilling unused space. Some pages have more notes than others, and this leaves some margins half empty, while others demand more space than there is. E.g., the Equipment and Encumbrance pages are big tables with few notes, so their margins are mostly free space. The answer is to allow notes from the busiest pages (e.g., some of the spells pages) to backfill those empty margins with a "Continued on page…" pointer to wherever the notes are. This needs a bit more finessing to get right, but it works in principle. So now it's looking something like this:
What's Next?
I want to do a few more tweaks to the note re-flowing, and do something about a front cover, before I have a look at a coil-bound alpha from Lulu. Let's see how this puppy will play out in real life :)
Fight On!