Alright, dearest people responsible, or to whomever it may concern -
this will be hard, mean, come across as patronizing and wise-assing, and most definitely polemic, but polemics are all that I have left about this:
I want you to look at this thing you call a "Table of Contents".
Now I want you to look at it again.
And again.
If by now you haven't broken down in tears, admitting your shame and guilt, wheeping in the dust and asking a higher being forgiveness for being horrible human beings, then we have nothing more to discuss. You have broken my heart when you published Data Trails as it was, CGL, and now you have done it again.
I'm aware you probably have heard this multiple times by now, relayed from this thread alone, and I know it sucks to always hear a community complaining, but it cannot be said often enough: This is not smart, counterproductive, and, most importantly, I don't like it.
This is a core rulebook (even if we have a little bit of a fluff-incursion here these days - but fear not, dear freelance-fluff-writers, we still love you and still want your fluff - the reaction in the prior posts here alone said at much), and if I have to hear one of my players go one more time "I can't find anything in this! Where is that again?" and "With LaTeX this would not have happened!!" I swear to Dog, will have to go and submerge a bag of cyber-puppies in the Foundation.
Now, Mr. Hardy, or whoever is in charge of that, here is what I would like you to do:
Let us assume there is this freelancer or fiction writer. Let's name him Bob. Bob has just handed you his three to five pages of short story that are supposed to make it into this or the next book, because lord knows we need at least ONE of those per supplement for some reason, and you go to him, and say:
»Listen, Bobster - may I call you Bobster? - I can see you can type. You can write. You can probably also read, understand words, lines, and maybe even headlines and paragraphs, and know how to use a word processor.
Now, Bobster, I know you are a freelancer, maybe even a hobbiyst with an unrelated full-time job, but what I want you to do next time, the week before we are shipping this PDF to the printers/DriveThruRPG, you are going to sit down for one to two hours a day, each day for that week, and you go through one chapter per day, in your preferred word processor application of choice or whatever we are using for assembling these documents.
Now, you mark all those headlines, key them according to the layout, which admittedly may or may not be final because somebody will be handing in their text about 3 hours before this goes to the printer, but still, you go through what we have, and key them in layers, from 1 to X. You do that for all the dozen or so chapters of this book, and once you are done with this menial, but vital task, you go to Insert > Register > Build TOC, and watch that word processor put out a nice long structured list of entries and automatically generated page numbers.
You then give it to me, I give you the money I would have paid you or another guy for that short story we had to tragically sacrifice in exchange for this due to time and money constraints, and I give it to our editing and layout guy to put it into the front of our book, and make sure the page-numbers still check out.
Yes, Bobster, I am aware that some people, like that obnoxiously patronizing Remy and others on the internet, will probably still whine and moan because some page number was wrong for some reason, or we still don't have an index, but look at it this way: our product will still be ten times as usuable due to this effort in prioritizing our ressources in a way that is conductive to this particular product!
And as designers and game writers that want to deliver a complete and accessible product, we have our priorities straight!«
* * *
The irony is that I have probably typed this in the time it would have taken someone to toc-key a chapter or two, and yet I have still spend just a FRACTION of the time now I will be spending in the future browsing and text-searching through this book because it has neither an index, nor a classic TOC, nor a proper PDF-Bookmark-TOC.
All long-winded snarkiness aside, please CGL. Please. One less short story, or one or two pieces less of that amazing art you get for your books, or one week or two more delay till release, but gives us at least ONE of the things named above. :/
PS: You know I can't leave you, CGL. I cherished our time together we had with SR5 so far too much, and I want to keep cherishing it, but things really need to change in this relationship.
