I raised this somewhere that it was not really relevant, so here it is somewhere more suitable. There are plenty of people on here who are better at this than me, I’m just a student, but given the lack of anything else currently, here are a few suggestions.
I don’t know much about the rules details of epic, but I see a lot of you making massive threads on rules development, with a lot of time effort and consideration involved and then...just, well I don’t know, just tap the results into MS word without thinking. Some of you produce great documents, some of you produce poor documents, these are just some general points to consider, that seem relevant from looking at some lists. Some of you won't care, that's cool, but if you're interested then I hope this helps:
Some simple document design and typography pointers:Why should I care? Really, why? I put 10 months into my list and now you’re just here to criticize my font choice?You should care because you are creating information heavy reference material. You have a lot of information to communicate (stats, rules, army list etc). People will be using your document in situations where speed of reference and accuracy are vital. You need your reader to be able to easily find the correct part of your document, find the information they need and read it accurately without it getting mixed up with other information.
TypefacesGenerally fine, good, readable serif and sans text faces, but
No? ok, then don’t use them on army lists for those races, even just for the title...
Make sure that your leading (the space between the lines) is not too tight and that ascenders and descenders do not clash.. Some typefaces included condensed fonts, these may be useful in tight tables but make sure that where employed, they are used consistently.
Use styles and be consistentLearn how to use styles/style sheets in your chosen application. If you do not know what they are then look it up, it will save you vast amounts of time, especially if you change your formatting, it also makes it easier to keep text consistent. If you do not know how to control some of the variable mentioned here, you probably don’t know how to use styles. Even if you’re doing things wrongly, at least be consistent about it.
Line length and columnsLarge blocks of text with very long lines can be hard to keep track of. 60–70 characters per line is a good ‘traditional’* point to aim for with a single column, this will look fairly short, make sure you keep it comfortably under 100. Therefore if you are setting a full page text of A4 with modest margins you will probably have some columns. Make sure you have sufficient guttering. Do not do this:
The guttering is far too small (and other things are wrong, see below). Yes you can see that as a block, there are two columns. However, combined with justified setting, the guttering between the columns and the spacing between the words gets very confused. If in doubt, 5mm
minimum gutter.
*It is not entirely clear from research if line lengths within sensible bounds (e.g. under 100) actually make much difference.MarginsYou need margins, they give the page space and both lock in place and give breathing room to the text. Some epic army lists seem terrified of margins larger than 6mm (even cheap, dense paperback novels have larger margins than this and they’re on much smaller paper). There are various ways to calculate margins with paper size ratios etc etc, just be sensible, keep you bottom margin larger than the rest and keep them all over 10mm. Tiny margins and tiny column guttering are an especially nasty combination.
Heading hierarchy spacingTry not to just hit the return key before and after everything. Have more space above a heading than after it, separating it from what preceded it and connecting it with what it refers to.
The paragraph indent should not be the same as the default tabAn indentation in the first line of a paragraph marks the beginning of that paragraph if other spacing is not used. This indentation should not be 1 inch long and made by just pressing the tab key at random. Around an Em of space is good.
Tables are buggersThere are some really nice tables in epic documents, minimal rules nice alternate shading etc. Keep furniture to the minimum required, use as and when it improves legibility. Use sensible text alignment within each cell, the most common problem with tables in epic documents seems to be crazy use of centred text and excessive furniture.
DashesThe vast majority of documents linked on tac-com contain en dashes and hyphens. Pretty much all of them use them wrongly and inconsistently. They are different and should have different uses.
For example the net EA marine book has this on every page:
Quote:
NetEA Army Compendium – DRAFT - SPACE MARINES v1.1 - 1
This is impressive
, we have two hyphens and an en dash in one line, all of which should be ens.
Hyphen – this is for hyphenating, hyphens hyphenate things, a small separation to show that two words are connected.
En dash – this is what you should be using in most cases where you are not hyphenating words. The en dash is longer (and often a tad higher), use this. In a numerical ranges e.g. 11–9 (generally without a space) and also – despite what you may see in many places – as punctuation, with a space (people often use hyphens for this incorrectly, you want to suggest a pause – so use this longer dash not the tiny hyphen!). If you see a double hyphen -- it is usually someone trying to indicate an en dash is to be used.
Em dashes – here use varies somewhat with geographical location and time period. In older books the em dash (without spacing) is used instead of the en for in-text punctuation. I think that Americans still use the em dash? In the UK the em dash is now generally not used in most instances, although the em is still useful in some places, such as indicating a null value in a table of stats.
Subtraction – more complete typefaces may included specific subtraction symbols, if it exists, use it. Likewise you will probably find a multiplication sign ×, where present use it instead of the x.
x ×Do not use word art, do not use gradient fills*, do not use Photoshop filters*They will look like word art, gradient fills and filters. You might think you’re Photoshop filter looks arty, chances are it just looks like a Photoshop filter...
*Unless you actually know what you are doing. 
Do NOT use GW publications as referenceIf you’re stuck, looking at other, well designed, books and documents is very helpful. Unfortunately this excludes many things published by GW. A lot of it is great, almost all of it
looks great, but a lot of it is inconsistent in detail. I don’t know if GW have a house style, if they do they don’t stick to it. Take a modern WD, a codex from 5 years ago, any random rulebook and a WD from 10 years ago and enjoy the way that the use of en dashes or consistent full stops falls in and out of vogue.
Some stuff still sticks in my brain so that i still can use it. But i'm not used to the english terms 
