Falling practice hammers
Being in possession of a new printer, an HP K8600 whose main claim to fame is that it is can up to print A31 (roughly 13”x19” – useful for prototype maps/boards), I spent a little time this evening messing with another new tool: Scribus. Scribus is a page layout tool akin to Adobe’s Framemaker. There’s little Scribus can do that I could not do and likely do better with my long standing favourites of LaTeX and LyX, but for quick, experimental and mostly throw-away tasks Scribus has a lower barrier to entry. The fact that it also emits SVG and PDF is icing on the cake.
My first test project was to draw shares for the 10 companies in Muck & Brass (EUR, B&GR, L&SR, L&MR, LB&SCR, CR, GWR, LNWR, NER, SWR). The assumption is that each sheet would be printed 4 times, each company on a different colour of paper, and then one of the non-merger shares for each company would be discarded. The final shares would be slipped into penny sleeves, perhaps with a card backing. This would give 3 non-merger shares and 28 merger shares per company, which is just barely enough.
Winsome Games uses rather nice coloured paper in a wide range of colours for many of their shares. I’ve not seen anything quite so pleasant at my local office supply stores. I wonder what I’m missing?2
As Ben Keightley graciously reminded me on #bgdf_chat, it would be better to put small images showing the position of that company’s home city on each share. I plead gross laziness and a knowledge of English geography! I can’t quite be bothered to gen 10 maps of England with highlighted cities, not when the above sheets merely required producing one master and doing search-and-replace with XEmacs to produce the others.