Printer-Friendliness: Threat Or Menace?!

Thanks to all the great feedback on my last blog post about e-publishing. Here's one that someone brought up: printer-friendliness. This is a really interesting topic. It is facile to just say "be sure your product is printer friendly!" or "include a printer friendly version!" Because really this gets to the core of one of the biggest problems in RPG publishing for the last 15 years: the battle between usability at the table and attractiveness as a product, and to think there will only be one answer to this topic is to think you've solved something that nobody else has, and probably nobody ever will.

Me, I am a luddite and a grognard and a mean old man. I am interested primarily in playing the games I buy, not in being "inspired" by fiction or artwork. I am one of those nasty personages who says "shouldn't the GM decide what the visual style of a game should be instead of some artist thousands of miles away who has never seen the game?" And the strong answer the market has given to me is "no you are wrong shut up shut up shut up shut up." Mounds of art and fiction in gaming books is the industry standard now, however worthless and waste-of-time-and-money it may be to me personally.

So all right. Given that this is the strong preference of the market and arm-crossing tut-tutters like myself have been marginalized in every way, forever, the end, what are we to make of the demands for "printer friendliness" in electronic publication?

Well, you can read too much into it. A lot of people just like printing out stuff and having something physical. They are not looking to do what I do which is to write all over them and make them entirely my own. They just want to have something they can read without a gadget. Okay. That's one group. Another group is like me, we want to have something easy to print out because I want something easy to mark up, fold, spindle, and mutilate. Still others simply resent that you're selling them something electronic in the first place and can't understand why you don't print 50,000 color glossy copies in China and sell them in Borders.

Your struggle with "printer-friendliness" decisions as an electronic publisher has to start before you even get to questions of who's buying your product, though. You have to decide what your project is really about. I'm going to say something that might seem very controversial here:

You absolutely do not have to produce a printer-friendly version of your electronic product if it would not benefit your product to be printed.

The fact of it is, if you intend for your product to only be used on a Kindle, laptop, iphone, or whatever, even at the table, then you should make your product the very best it can be in that format. The main issue is that nobody is really doing this yet. How many products are sized and organized to be used on the dimensions of a laptop screen? Virtually none - they are still wedded to the 8 1/2" by 11" PDF format. This is a half-hearted nod to the idea of printing out your product without actually making things any easier to print things out. If you want the person who is using your product to be using a laptop at the gaming table, that's fine - first of all, you should say so, second of all, you should make your product with laptop screens in mind, and third and most importantly, you should take advantage of the fact that there's going to be a laptop at the table! Why have a random monster table when you can just sell a random monster generating tool? Why describe a horrific sound when you can sell a horrific sound effect? If that is how you want to go, go all the way!

Let's say that you are not wedded to the idea of the reader of your product using a device whenever they want to use it. You think "hey, it's at least as good a print product as it is an electronic product". Cool, there's nothing wrong with that. Now you come to the question of printer-friendliness and it makes a bit more sense. You know where to look to figure out how to do this. Why would someone print out your product? What parts of your product are they most likely to print out?

Questions of layout begin to take on added importance. If you're using color, art, typography and borders to make an attractive, usable product, that's a very different layout toolbox from one that just uses typography and borders, or different kinds of art (line art, for example). You may end up taking on an entirely new layout and editing process to support printer-friendliness. This is not a simple undertaking, but remember, we've already decided that this is the best way to support the use of your game at the table.

Let me give a few pointers here, using some images from some recent PDF releases.

Here's a small clip from White Wolf's PDF-only release Goblin Markets:
This is a clip from the first actual page of the PDF, the traditional White Wolf "intro fiction section". What is the purpose of a piece of introductory fiction? In a print product, you are trying to draw in casual browsers into the emotional world of the product, but in an electronic product, your main goal is to set the stage for what is to come and get the reader interested in your point of view. Let's talk about what this clip does right first. Typography and layout is important here. White Wolf uses a very recognizable font. As you can see on the right, this font is the same font for all of its (new) World of Darkness products. You only have to read a few lines of a page to realize "this is a World of Darkness product". The outer border is recognizable because it is repeatedly used for Changeling: The Lost products. If you're acquainted with Changeling, it's another method of identifying the product from a quick glance. "I am looking at a Changeling product".

The inner border looks a little weird in the clip, but it only exists around the introductory fiction. That sets it off and makes it easy for someone flipping through the pages to say "Oh, this is the fiction bit". But look at the background color here! Not only would a printer chug through this color background, but it would have to have exceptional contrast and precision in order to be readable. In other words, these pages are not just printer-unfriendly in terms of the ink it chugs through, but because once it's printed, you're going to have to squint to read the dang thing. Worse, if someone really loved this fiction and xeroxed it to give to their players to get them in the mood (illegal, by the way, but let's just pretend), a Xerox of the fuzzy printout would be even more unusable.
Compare this to a clip from later in the work:
Here, you can see that same border from the top has been supplemented with a "thorny" border with no space between the two. The background is now white and there's good contrast in the source material. The headers are clear. And at the bottom you can see a well set-off sidebar. The only part of this that isn't "printer-friendly" is the border itself...or is it? What is worth more to the user who wants to print out a supplement to use? Clear identification of the product (outer border: "this is a Changeling product", inner border: "this is game material") or printer strain and time? It's not an easy question. Each consumer will have a different point beyond which they will say "this is too much stuff for my printer to handle" and before which they will say "this material adds value to the product". So it's a tough decision for an e-publisher. Some people (luddites like me) see no value in art in gaming products whatsoever, remember. Others enjoy it a great deal. We all fall somewhere along the curve. What's important about the art decision in this clip is that unlike the background color in the earlier clip, the border art in this clip provides information. It may not be valuable enough information for everyone to say "yes, the expense/trouble of printing that border is justified", but it at least conveys something.

By the way, if you like Changeling (and if you don't, what's wrong with you?!), BUY GOBLIN MARKETS. Thank you.


Let's move on to another product I recently got: The Bones of Chinatown
This was a contest-winning Savage World scenario that was put together and published by Kenzer. Here is a slice from the middle of page 4:

Wow, isn't that map cool-looking? I mean, completely a bear for printers to chug through, but it's freakin' cool. It has little icons for the locations of the events in the story, and it really shows San Francisco's layout well. But remember my questions above: what purpose does the map serve in the intended use of the product? This one really falls down because, and I quote from the scenario: "If the heroes decide to walk, the distance is about a mile up and down the streets of San Francisco and anyone with the appropriate background can make a Common Knowledge roll to navigate easily enough." There is no chase scene that could be enhanced by saying "you wheel left past the Standard Oil Building!" or "Up ahead you can see Union Square and crowds of parkgoers!" There is simply no game reason to include this map. The only thing it might offer is a bit of period flavor - it's a map from that time period, and looks like it, but that flavor is somewhat diluted by the decision to put obviously modern game icons on it. So the decision to include this map was not a printer-friendly decision and if they wanted to do a printer-friendly version, they would cut the map (as you can see, that would be a major layout change to the product). I do want to point out something good about this clip, though. See in the lower left where there's some "boxed text"? Notice that it is very faintly greyed out. This provides clear visual information ("this is what boxed text looks like") AND it's so faint that your printer's contrast would have to be really screwed up for it to interfere with reading the text. Other good choices are the crisp, clear font for both the text and the header.

By the way, if you like Savage Worlds (and if you don't, what's wrong with you?!), BUY BONES OF CHINATOWN.

One final clip (I shrank this one down a bit because I'm more focusing on layout issues), this one from Alluria Publishing's Remarkable Races: The Mogogol for Pathfinder.

This section illustrates a big challenge for those working with supplements to existing games. The shaded left-to-right racial trait section is highly visually recognizable to those who have worked with or played Pathfinder, D&D3, or D&D4. It quickly conveys information: look here for a stat block. At the same time, it's likely to be one of the most printed-out or copied sections. If I'm playing a mogogol (and who wouldn't want to be a frog warrior after playing Chrono Trigger!), I'm going to want to print out that bit and have it attached to my character sheet to remind me what all my abilities are. For some consumers that shaded color section is going to be too annoying, for others it will be just fine and will help them mentally match up the stat block from this supplement with other stat blocks in other games. One last thing I want to point out about this clip. Look at the far left side. See how there's an index phrase telling you immediately where you are in the product? How amazingly user-friendly is that? And yet how rarely do we see index and usability features like that? Half the time we're lucky to even get page numbers - here, if I'm flipping through a stack of printed-out Pathfinder supplements looking for mogogol stats, I will know immediately the page I want, it's written right on the side.

By the way, if you like Pathfinder (and if you don't, what's wrong with you?!), BUY THE REMARKABLE RACES SERIES.

The main things I hope to get across in this blog post are these:

"Printer-friendliness" should not be a goal for all electronic products. If you don't think printing your product is how it should be used, don't worry about it - you should, however, then worry about how to best adapt your product to the device you wish it to be used with, whether it be a printer or not.

If "printer-friendliness" is a goal, think about what purpose layout and typographical choices have in your product and decide things accordingly.

Finally, "printer-friendliness" is not a binary, on-off thing. What one consumer may value in layout and art is not what another one will.