LaTeX for tabletop

In the following months I will be releasing a series of blog posts regarding the usage of LaTeX in tabletop publishing. If you want to see a particular topic covered, let me know.

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Oooooh, a very exciting topic! I’ve had to use LaTeX for a couple of things in the past, but I’d be very curious to see more discussion about using it for TTRPG applications! Looking forward to future posts.

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Excited to learn more about this. I’ve been wondering how to implement something similar, but it’s always settled at the bottom of the to-do list.

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Wow, thank you for all that work! Just diving in now…

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I almost did the LaTeX dive, but most of the stuff I have been doing is short form and I like having different layouts. Up until recently, I have been doing everything in Canva. This guide is perfect and I bookmarked it, it might have swayed me earlier when I was slogging through tutorials for academic writing.

Thanks for sharing, and I’ll follow this post!

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One of the projects I’m currently experimenting with, is a LaTeX template to imitate the typewriter style of old homebrew RPG zines. The demo pages of the current state of the package are presented below.

If you have any ideas or wishes for the features, the package should be able to do, let me know.

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I’ve personally been enjoying Typst instead of using latex. There’s also Sile which has some familiar ergonomics of latex, but with lua for scripting.

Here’s a screenshot of a Typst document I’ve been plugging away on:

The biggest downside of Typst (at the moment) is multi-column float support—it doesn’t exist. Definitely necessary to be considered “production-ready” for RPG devs. However if you are fine with single column documents then Typst is a really nice option. I really enjoy its syntax compared to Sile’s or Latex’s (I’m a software engineer by trade and it just kinda familiar). It also resembles markdown the most, which makes it quite approachable in my opinion.

Regardless, would love to see more RPGs made in these kinds of tools instead of proprietary ones like InDesign or Affinity Publisher.

BIND (which stands for BIND Is Not D&D) is an GPL-licensed RPG made entirely with Latex and public domain images: bind / BindRPG - Core Rulebook · GitLab

Templates are generally a great help, so thank you for working on it. I’m still struggling with the basics of LaTeX, so I have no wishes yet.

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Inspired by your series, I‘ve installed LaTeX and compiled my first experiments.

If I can ask one (possibly stupid) question, it would be this: How would you go about creating a character sheet in LaTeX, using tables I suppose? Are there any examples to be found anywhere?

Well, maybe a subject for a new blogpost. In the meantime, I guess I have more than enough material to work through already.

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Either tables, or the grid-system package. It all depends on the complexity of the sheet.

Also, take a look at https://github.com/Vladar4/itdr/blob/master/itdr_charsheet.tex for some ideas.

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