IntroductionI wrote several posts about Warlocks for 5e which I would notf1 turn into a finished product for sale, so I'm going to use them as and example of how I would format something like that up.

f1 Because 1) there's no 5e license yet and 2) Vestiges are an idea from 4e, and I would not steal and resell them without at least renaming them.

Original Text

Markdown

The original text of all 3 entries was in markdown, A method of formatting raw text which makes it easy to convert into a finished product. It also made it easy for me to combine the three documents into one big one.

Editing and RewritingI spend a little bit of time editing and rewriting the posts so they form one coherent doc. Boring, but necessary.

ExportingOnce I was ready, it was time to move it to something I could pretty it up with. Normally, I would just use pandoc to generate a styled word doc from a markdown file, but for purposes of illustration, I'll just copy and paste the text into Microsoft Word.

A Word on WordThis is not the best tool for the job. Not even close. But it's fairly ubiquitous and the tricks that work for it work for open office (and to a lesser extent, pages). If you want to go full-bore desktop publishing, that's a whole other thing.

# Raw Markdown This is kind of a mess, and what follows is a manual process of converting the formatting by hand. This is kind of exactly why it's better to convert the file, but if you can't, it's a matter of turning # into h1, ## into heading 2 and so on. In the end, it will look more like this.

This definitely looks a lot more orderly, and because everything is styled, It is not going to be too hard to re-tune the doc. Right now it just uses Word's default styles, but with just a little bit of tweaking, it looks more like:

Basic Layout

This isn't going to win any layout awards, but it's functional and hasn't required a lot of fiddling on my part. At this point, I just need to jazz it up a little.

I could totally go nuts with the fonts here - do something super fancy for the header, but I find that kind of tacky.

Art

There are a ton of ways to get cheap or free art, but I lack both talent and patience, so I dropped 5 bucks at drivethrustuff for 3 images that I think I can get good use out of.

Ok, maybe a little bit of stupid font

Bottom LineSo, with about an hour's effort, a working knowledge of Microsoft Word and $5 of stock art, I have something I could probably get away with charging a buck for on drivethru.

I wouldn't do this, of course. This is actually way over the top for my personal taste. But it's a fun illustration.