26 August 2013

Continued on page...

Gygax Magazine makes me smile. (As I write this, my PDF copy of issue two just arrived.) It’s like a issue of Dragon from my youth with content from today. (There’s content in there to annoy grognards and modern gamers alike.) Two observation that are meant to be neither criticism or praise:

On the one hand, you find things that betray its modern desktop publishing reality. e.g. There’s a table that wraps from the bottom of one column of text to the top of another column of text. Of course, modern desktop publishing could have addressed this, but it simply wouldn’t have happened when layout involved literal cutting and pasting.

On the other hand, you find things that are rare these days. The periodicals I read today (even those that are also available in print) tend to be fully digital rather than simply facsimiles of print. So, when I hit the “(continued on page...)” in this PDF, it surprises me.

(Although, I complained about that practice back-in-the-day as well. I get that it was to deal with tricky layout issues, but I’d rather a worse layout in favor of keeping all the text together. Besides, doing it still creates a lot of ugly layout in the back of the magazine.)

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