InDesign Templates and Beginner's Guide

Forgot to add I'm willing to pay some money for your time.

Hello, yes you can use this template to create modules and books to sell on the DMsGuild, or elsewhere.

Thank you so much!

I would love to tell you it's compatible, but I won't lie to you. I am not a Scribus user, so I just downloaded Scribus (1.5.7) to test importing the .idml file in it, and sadly the software crashed.

oh well thanks for trying it out for me.

Hello Wesley, thank you for your purchase!
If you don't mind video learning I highly recommend checking out the "Free Adobe InDesign Course for Beginners" on the "Bring Your Own Laptop" Youtube channel.

Thank you for the response.
Hope it's alright if I still have one or two issues if I respond again, but this is still a big help.

Of course, you can message me here or via email at: contact (at) barkalotdesigns (dot) com and I'll do my best to answer your questions.

So for Heading 2 (the one with an underline), how would you change the colour of the the underline? I'm using a slightly different colour page for the background and the default colour doesn't look quite as nice on it.

Right-Click on Heading 2 in the Paragraph Style panel and go to Edit "Heading 2...", then in Paragraph Rules click on the drop down menu to select Rule Below. You can now select a new color swatch in the color field. If there is no color swatch if the color you would like, you can create a new swatch in the swatches panel.

Thanks again.

Hi Jesse, this is odd, I haven't updated the template since your last questions in February of this year.
Would you mind contacting me via email at: contact (at) barkalotdesigns (dot) com with the names of your version of the template and if possible screenshots of your file before exporting, after exporting and the export settings and I will take a look.

Hi, for simplicity's sake to make a read-aloud text box I made the paragraph style "Boxed Text", it will give the text a background color (by default light green) and and black borders on the left and the right. It doesn't look exactly the same as what you find in official books, but it far easier to use.
If you're really set on editing the sidebar bars to a different design, feel free to email me at the address provided in the guide and I will go over how to do it with you.

Thanks very much for the quick reply! I'm not set on the bars matching perfectly, the sourcebook is just for my group. The design WotC uses is almost indistinguishable from plain bars anyway, so it doesn't really matter! So long as it's easily distinct from sidebars is all that matters.

Hi Jesse, the top and bottom borders of the sidebars are anchored at the beginning of the text frame, if you remove ¥ characters the borders will disappear as explain in the "Sidebar Text Box" section on page 2 of the guide:
"Be careful not to remove the anchors for the top and bottom graphics, they are symbolized by a ¥ when you show Hidden Characters (Ctrl+Alt+I)."
If you wish to change the stat block background color you can do so by editing the object styles. In the Object Style panel [Window -> Styles -> Object Styles (Ctrl+F7)], right-click one of the Stat Block styles and choose "Edit", in the "Fill" tab of the new window you can pick a color swatch to assign to the background. If none of the existing colors fit your needs you can go to the Swatches panel [Window -> Color -> Swatches (F5)] and create your own color swatches.

Ah I see, thanks! I appreciate that you are always available to answer questions. Do you have a shading and border recommendation to match the rulebook as closely as possible?

Also, I found your YouTube video on adding watercolor graphics to the rulebooks, very helpful! Only problem I'm having is that when I go to export as PDF, it just exports a bunch of blank white pages. Have I maybe done something wrong?

I figured it out, wasn't using the right job option!

Hi, I do not have one, but I know of this one https://myaccount.lightningsource.com/Portal/Tools/CoverTemplateGenerator

Hello Alexander, first thank you for your purchase.
From the screenshot the only issue I see are the missing fonts. Freight Sans, Adobe Garamond Pro and Classic Comic Regular are fonts available through the Adobe Creative Cloud subscription, I am not at liberty to include them in the download file. If you don't have a subscription, you can replace them with free alternatives: Freight Sans by Lato, Adobe Garamond Pro by EB Garamond and Classic Comic by Comic sans (or other fonts to your liking).
For the 4 links to sources that are missing issue, everything should be included, but can you check your Links panel and tell me which ones have either a red question mark icon or a yellow exclamation mark?

in the Links there are two "Page Decorator-Arches" it seems

Okay, I just checked the folders uploaded to the DMsGuild, the file should be inside the links folder, it's an Adobe Illustrator file called Page Decorator-Arches.ai, if you don't find it on your computer, have you tried re downloading the files?

Just found them, were not extracted from zip somehow. Thx for timely answers, the templates are great, as well as beginners guide being very usefu!

Hello Ben, thanks for the kind words and for taking the time to let me know about the graphics. I can't seem to be able to see the issue you are talking about, could you send me screenshots to the email address listed in the beginner's guide?

Hello Charles. This is peculiar, the zip shouldn't need anything special. In case your operating system cannot open .zip on it's own, might I suggest a program like for example 7-zip.

Hello Jesse! I removed the printer-friendly specific template and instead added how to export your file in a printer-friendly manner in the beginner's guide (How to Export as PDF, page 11).

Hello Brendan, boxed text is an option the template offers. It is setup as a paragraph style. I updated the quick and full-size previews to show the various paragraph styles available in the template.