Google Docs vs. ODT?

[Koren_nRhys]

Perusing the board this morning, I took a look at the thread on the Spanish translation effort, and what caught my eye was the comment that he's working in Google Docs, and only exporting/converting to ODT periodically. In an age where more people are using online tools, working form Chromebooks or what-have-you, is it time to look at a style guide and/or template in Docs format?

For myself, I've moved to using Google - Drive, Docs, etc almost exclusively. IT's come a long way - we've finally got columns (YAY!), lots of fonts to choose from and so on. It's not full Word or OpenOffice, but for most people it's more than sufficient. I found that importing ODT docs was somewhat messy and lost some formatting. Obviously, there are font issues and the ODT files make heavy use of styles.

Is anyone else using Docs to create BF content? What fonts are you using that are closest to Soutane, SoutaneBlack, FritzQuadrata, etc?

[magicedit]

I just coincidentally did a ton of research on libre fonts for the project from the perspective of finding acceptable fonts for LibreOffice, which means I have already spent a lot of time comparing the glyph charts available on myfonts.com (here's an example for Friz-Quad) to the glyph charts on Google fonts. Hopefully this is a little helpful.

The Souvenir/Soutane font families are for some reason extremely underrepresented in the free culture world. I suspect it's because they were so overwhelmingly present in the 70s/80s that they were really out of style for the last 20 years. I think there are a couple workable Soutane replacements on Google Fonts but they each have problems. [urlhttps://fonts.google.com/specimen/Quando]Quando[/url] only has one style, so you can't get bold, italic bold, italic, or black. There are several options in the Averia font family, and I'm not sure if Averia Serif Libre or Averia Libre is a better choice. They aren't quite as nice a fit as Quando, but they have many more styles, even though they still don't have a black weight. Depending on which of the Averias you pick, you can probably just kind of fudge it by bolding a bold style to make a fake black weight.

I tried looking for a Friz Quadrata replacement on Google Fonts just now, and so far, hoo boy that is a rabbit hole of near misses.

URW Gothic L is a libre font that might be a good Century Gothic replacement, but I don't think it's available as a Google Font. Moreover, it seems that there are only 4 Gothic font options at all on Google Fonts.

This thread has some more discussion on the topic of fonts.

[Koren_nRhys]

Thanks for the comments and links. I guess I'm not as particular about my fonts, because Quando looks good enough to me. I'd have no problem using that for anything I create or use "in-house." I know it's not proper typography to just bold or italicize a font when there is a proper bold/italic/black style available, but I'm fine with doing that for my own use.

I suppose if I got something to the point I wanted to share it here, it wouldn't be too much work to import it into OpenOffice and reformat it "properly." Chiisu is great at cleaning up peoples messes, but I'd feel bad expecting him to fix it for me.

[Solomoriah]

The problem with Quando is the lack of bold, bold italic, italic, and "black" styles.

[Koren_nRhys]

No, I understand that. For your purposes, with styles, you need proper separate versions of the font. I'm just saying for my home usage, to produce stuff in Goigle Docs that look like "real" BFRPG supplements, I can use it, and make it bold, italic, or both for headers and such. Granted, I wouldn't have a black version. Good enough for casual use or playtesting. Like I said, if I was going to share it here, I'd dump it into OpenOffice and reformat it properly.

It's just too bad there's no easy way to replicate your style in the online tools.