hehe Thanks Tehill, you'll get to see your name in italics soon. :shock:

The guides will be in B$ at some point (I hope anyway), although I might just do the beginner guides. But first of all I need to write a proper XSLT for DaiML, and find out a bit more about the technical limits of the Book GUI (ie, how many chars per line, lines (or pages) per book, etc. I'm also not sure if the image tag will be implemented or not (it'd be nice, but the guides don't rely on images). Blah blah blah. So it might be a little while.

Awesome work Smacky (I will have more to say when I have actually read them and had myself some coffee).

How does the new format of Character[/i] suit?

The search function still doesn't work. I submitted the site to google a few days ago but it's not indexed yet. How long does it normally take? I'd be grateful if someone could look at the HTML for that page (I write very clear HTML and even use comments :shock: ) just to make sure I haven't screwed up the form (it's the first one I've written) or left out a vital piece of google-information.



I've made some minor concessions to printers via a stylesheet (eg, no TOC and no underlined links). Anything else?



Like I said, I like this idea. I won't do it for a while, but I'm thinking one or more pages in PDF format. Should this be per guide, or compiling as much info as possible from all the guides into as little space as possible?

Smacky, I had a quick look at your guides and will be returning to read more fully later. From what I've seen - great work!

The one minor comment I have is to do with navigation. If it would be possible to add some navigation buttons (or just text links - it doesn't have to be pretty!) so I'm not left relying on my browser's Back button, that would be great.

Jeff.

OK heres an endoresment for you:

"I wish I had Smacky's Guides when I was a newb...all I had was Longir!"

@ Grommit, TY. Yes navigation has been on my wishlist for a loo-o-ong time. ATM DaiML has no inter-document navigation features, so unfortunately you do have to rely on your browser buttons. Oh, I ought to add that I'm the one responsible for fulfilling my wishlist (as Cher is playing about with that silly map editor thing ). I'm working on it, but other stuff keeps getting my attention instead.

@ CD, you do realise that's the third endorsement you've posted? hehe Thanks again.

I have changed the sitesearch from Google to a CGI thing called Entropy. Google is just taking too long to get the site indexed.

The Entropy search appears to work, although the default template isn't exactly pretty. Maybe I'll have a look at that. Oh, also it's currently only accessible from the main page, which is a little inconvenient. I hope to change that at some point.

This new site is great. Smacky's Guides are what I read when I cannot play Daimonin.

@Smacky: Sorry, didn't see that you were addressing me Re: the Character guide -- yes, it looks better now. Re: the print.css stylesheet -- I think you could go a bit farther in stripping away extra stuff... go to one of the appendices within Game Mechanics and you'll know what I mean. You could do this by assigning screen.css to media=screen only, then having this for print.css:

...or somesuch. While I'm talking about the CSS, I don't know what it looks like on your end but the text in the .toc seems a bit small to me... perhaps you could increase the size a bit? (I suppose you'd have to increase the width accordingly, as well.) And one more thing -- I like how the headers stand out with the background-color and all, I just don't know if you ought to do them for all headers (it's a bit overpowering) -- maybe just for h1 and h2. Also, perhaps the h2's could have another background color (gold, or dark turquoise).

Finally, re: reference PDFs -- well, first, I like what you've done with the Appendices at the end of the Game Mechanics guide. (I don't know if they were there before the relocation but they seem new.) Data in tabular-ish format was what I was thinking. Yes, I think you should have several reference sheets. They don't have to be anything fancy -- just the facts. For starters, everything in Character: Stats could be bundled into such a sheet -- maybe something like:

The eventual format is up to you, but hopefully something short and sweet like that

Another sheet you could make is one listing all the dungeons in the Daimonin world, and what the recommended levels are for each. I know we already have a bitmap in the wiki that gives that information, but a text-only document would be more concise, of course

Finally, if you make a PDF, then I'd think there should only be one, but it should be separated into subdocuments, for the multiple reference sheets.

(Whew!)

Actually, I do have media="screen" for screen.css and media="print" for print.css already.

Hm, when my printer has stopped playing silly buggers I'll print out an Appendix and see what you mean. The problem (?) with your amended stylesheet is border-collapse: which is CSS2. As much as I'd like to go with later standards (CSS3 offers page columns I think) I'm trying to stick with CSS1 as it's most widely supported by UAs (I'm a bit obsessive about standards conformance ).



Hm, my original concept was to provide three 'ToCs' across the top there. From left to right: a list of all Smacky's Guides, a list of all documents within the current guide, a list of all sections on the current document. Obviously this would require a width of about 30% each. Also, as you increase width so you increase height -- the current size seemed optimal from that perspective. But obviously if people are finding it difficult to read it's no good. So any suggestions how I could address all of this?



Good point. One thing I want to do is provide alternate stylesheets at some point. I don't want to use too many colours on one sheet though as it soon looks garish and hideous.



Yes, the reason for suggesting PDFs was that (AFAIK) that format gives me control over page size, etc. (I'd have to plough through the specs first, but their 1200 page length puts me off! :shock:



NEVER! Nasty spoily stuff.

Thanks for your suggestions.

Looks interesting!
Looking good Smacky

TY Dwarrior and clobber.

@ Weimar (and anyone else who cares), OK, I've made some quick changes to screen.css to remove some of the heaviness from the headers (h3+). I'm not sure if it's better to have links consistently coloured, or headers consistently coloured. ATM I've gone with the former (shown on smackys_guides/index.html).

Also have a look at eg, game_mechanics/index.html. The subsection headers (h3) have the background colour remove while section headers (h2) do not: does this look strange or is it ok?

Lastly, as an afterthought I may or may not have slightly increased the font size in the ToC. You tell me.

EDIT: Woot! Got into Google at last.

You do? Oh, print.css just contains repeated stuff, I see.

Well, that's fine, I'm a standards compliance freak myself, and in any case border-collapse is just a luxury anyway. In fact you could just remove the table{} section altogether, it looks fine without it when printed.

Well, I'd say if you're going to include that much information, it ought to be away from the main content somewhere. I see three options: 1) You could fully list the three ToCs in a left sidebar (either framed or frameless). 2) You could have collapsible lists in a left sidebar (either framed or frameless), where only the "On this page" ToC is uncollapsed, and collapsedness would be toggled when the ToC name is clicked on. 3) You could have pop-out menus in a topbar (either framed or frameless), where a ToC would appear when the name of the ToC is rolled over.

With that said, I found out that listing the ToCs on the side, due to having to shorten the width of the main content, will mess up pages like Character: Character creation, where you have a big image and then a table right-float'ed; the table ends up going past the right margin. This could easily be fixed with CSS, however. As for listing ToCs as pop-out menus, the Javascript to do so would have to be either obtained or written from stratch, and I don't know if you want to go that far. HTH...

Just saw your second post, Smacky. Yes... that's a bit better. Er -- that seemed to accentuate all the horizontal lines you have going now, actually (specifically, the border-bottom you have every .section). Okay, I'm nitpicking I guess... Perhaps you could remove the border-top from .section h4, .section h5, and .section h6, at least... This should make both smacky_guides/index.html and game_mechanics/index.html look a bit better.

The ToC is still the same size I think, lol :wink: Is font-size: 80% too big on your end? (It may just be me... I've fiddled around with the font settings in my browser.)