Hi everyone
So, I started to read the PDF and saw those new action symbols and monsters' statblocks. As I tend to create my own help sheets as a GM and for my players, I need to be able to copy past elements from the PDF.
But I can't select action symbols, and even if I select everything around those, I only end up with a white space.
Also, when I try to copy/paste a monster's statblock in Microsoft Word, the header is completely broken and all action symbols are absent.
I can work with the header being broken (it's just the matter of deleting a line and add tabs, or I could screenshot the statblocks but this will hurt my printer pretty quickly), but non-pastable action symbols are a no-go for me. This would mean I'd have either to search where are every missing symbol and replace them with either another symbol or a screenshot of the right symbol. I guess this was made like this to prevent people from stealing graphics, but as I said you could just screenshot the symbols.
Another problem I see with non-selectable action symbols is for accessibility. I know people who rely on vocal synthetizers to read books on their computers because they are blind.
Hmmm. Accessibility of the PDF is low, as expected--the icons don't have any text associated with them, so in the event you're using text-to-speech you can't tell what's an action, what's a reaction, and so on.We are preparing a separate accessible version of the PDF that should be available soon.
Chief Technical Officer
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For the playtest documents, the action symbols are images. This means they can't be manipulated with the text tools of your PDF reader, but they can be with the image manipulation tools.
Assuming we keep symbols for the finished product, they will likely not remain images. (Jason came up with a super clever idea—which we have yet to test—that might make them work really well with text selection and text-to-speech.)
Great ! Thanks for the info Vic :)
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Pick a (public domain) font and...
A = Action.
A\ = two Actions.
A\\ = three actions.
/A = reaction.
A (with strikethrough) = not an action or free action.
Just a suggestion. But I'm a guy who's long used superscripts, subscripts, and font sizes to make standard statblocks that much more readable.
fireball^R13 (superscripted R13) denotes a Reflex DC 13 save really well without taking up a bunch of text space. But I digress.
I like that. I was doing 1A, 2A, 3A and RA.
I copy everything into OneNote, so I have the whole thing on one page and was having an issue with the action icons as well.
I use:
[A] = One Action
[AA] = Two Actions
[AAA] = Three Actions
[F] = Free Action
[R] = Reaction
Good ideas. Letter based markers are also easier to parse than the symbols. As I'm reading the rulebook I am having to really stare at the 2- and 3-action symbols to tell them apart.
I use:
[A] = One Action
[AA] = Two Actions
[AAA] = Three Actions
[F] = Free Action
[R] = Reaction
I'm using this as well, though I'm not opposed to:
[A] [A\] [A\\] [/A]
I was using low-numbered unicode special characters for the three symbols for my references.
So
☃ is Action
☂ is Reaction
☀ is Free Action
I don't think this is a good system but it amuses me and that's what matters.