So, because I'm insane, I tried monkeying around with the layout of the 2012 Army Compendium, tweaking the layout, changing the font, reducing the margins, trying to work out some of the things Apocolocyntosis was commenting on, testing A4 vs Letter and Landscape vs Portrait. I only worked on the Table of Contents and the core Marine list. Oh yeah, took out almost all the colour too.

Still some oddities pop up, like, despite setting most of the font sizes to 8-point, Acrobat turning them into 7.89-point... ?!? And I still don't know how I have a -0.03 Character Spacing!

So, converting to Letter and/or Portrait for everything is really going to be a pain with the current setup.

Take a look, especially Apoc, and let me know what you think.

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new design rule.

no unit entry mahe have more then 200 characters in the notes section.

Oh I know! If that damned "step over things" War Engine ability was just a regular old "special rule" it would save a LOT of wasted characters.

Prefer the Landscape, I don't care much about the Letter vs. A4 distinction; I'll scale to fit if need be.

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Have to admit that portrait A4 is my dream layout.

Maybe for next year.

I like portrait, the stats and rules are closer to the name and so it has always (for me) been easier to read and reference

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I'll muck around with that and see what I can get to work.

i'd definitely prefer the layout all be portrait, or failing that, all landscape. makes things a lot easier on my poor little tablet

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Although i am a fan of landscape, looking at it on the iphone makes me think that portrait is very handy.

Great work chroma

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we could just do that you know. nearly every list has titans

-30% char spacing in all of them still, hmm. So in word/pub everything is normal, then the pdf negatively char spaces? Have you all been using the same pdf save/export method? if so try something else, like a pdf printer. Does this happen with other documents, or just the compendium doc. Also double check there are no conflicting paragraph/character/font formatting styles in master doc applying negative spacing. Never encountered this before, or at least not to such extremes, tiny type size/tracking changes sometimes happen, but not -30% tracking The table columns will need a tweak again once tracking is resolved if it is a master document side problem not the pdf converter, as that is a significant amount of compression and all entires will get a longer.


I entirely agree about trying to cut the excessive and often repetitious special rules, this would make the table layout far more flexible.

Landscape/portrait – I appreciate that swapping it all over to one will be vast amount of effort. Despite my preference for having a doc that does not swap orientation every other page, it is probably best left as it is this time. Unless phone/tablet/ereader is a large user base, in which case it might be worth changing if someone has a lot of free time.

Type size is much much much much much better
I never claimed it was impossible to read, i even directly said that i could read it. My point is that as it was formatted, it was harder to read than it needed to be (too small, negative spacing), for no reason (plenty of free space in the table). I often print 2 to a page as well

Some layouts posted here are going to have elements that hit printer margins, but im assuming these are just roughs.

And again, my sincere thanks to Dobbsy for all of his hard work. I am not trying to undermine your achievement. I just feel (quite strongly ) that the usability of your document could be increased with a few adjustments (like larger type).

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Because this rules as well as critical hit effects are usually in the unit's Datasheet and not in the Reference Sheet.
Also the Datasheet mebtions which units can be transported, the Refernece Sheet usually only mentions the numbers.

As the Compendium don't use Datasheets (as well as no "How to use this army" section!) you have to cram everything in the Notes section of the Reference Sheet.

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Imo drop pod mechanics and other repeated, list specific, 'special rules that are not just called by name but explained' could be in the "common special rules" section of each race/list. ATSKNF is explained once for all marine lists in the common special rules section. Do the same with drop pod and remove the description of game mechanics from the unit entry.

*edit should to could

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BRILLIANT!