D&D Sheet: Print to PDF Beta Feedback

We just launched Print to PDF for the new D&D Fifth Edition sheet! It's available both in-VTT and in Roll20 Characters . We tested this pretty heavily internally, but as a small team there's no way to cover every possible character configuration. Over the next few weeks, if you spot anything weird, drop a screenshot in this thread. Stretch goal: include a link to the game or Roll20 Characters sheet and that helps us even more! Thank you so much!!

Great feedback! We just deployed an update that should solve for this. Can you try again and let us know if that's better?  Terry W. said: The layout for spells sure uses up a lot of paper.

That's really interesting -- especially those black bars forming on the edges! Can you tell me the following?  1. Which browser are you using? 2. Are you using the print button, or cmd/cntrl-P? 3. What application are you using to open / view that PDF? Thank you! RPGeezer said: Scaling pages too large (one page continues into the top portion of the next,) and if I try to adjust any print settings it reverts to looking like the webpage…

Thanks Terry! We've been playing with some placement since internal testing, and your notes on this are really useful! Terry W. said: Spells are better, the page count for my test warlock dropped from 27 to 18 pages... But moving Notes to a new row underneath the Name/Casting Time/etc. line and allowing it to use the full width of the page would be better. Or changing Name/Casting Time to a stack in one column, giving more room for Notes in a second column. In the 2 column Inventory section (Equipment and Possessions), a little balancing of the columns would also save some space.  Personally, I'd be thrilled with options to PDF, like Markdown or JSON. 

Aikepah said: Third, just thinking out loud... the spells in combat reference get a bit verbose with the "notes". I understand the sentiment on having them there but honestly I don't think it's worth the space. Perhaps combining the cantrips/prepared spells page with the combat reference would be more space/page effective. It's easy enough if a player doesn't remember the specifics of a spell to know they need to flip to the spell reference later in the sheet. The other alternative which would be a pain for you guys to do is add another spell description that gets rid of all the fluff that can be put in these notes. That doesn't seem reasonable though, it's just what I would I would do to my own sheet data if I was playing a spell caster (or making a sheet for someone else). Thanks for all the detailed feedback! This is something I wanted to call out in particular, because it's something we considered but didn't do for the first round/beta version of this...when I used to handwrite all my character sheets, I obviously didn't write out all the spells. I would write down "Cure Wounds - touch, 1d8+3 heal, 1d8 lvl+" and called it good. Add VSM if your DM is especially strict on those. We did consider adding a new field that a player could fill in for each attack or spell that basically amounts to "what you'd see when you print" so people can add their own shortenings, or later on we could go back into the data and add something "official" to make it a shorter print. Our compromise on that was to leave the Notes section blank on page 2 so people can just add spells there and fill in the shortenings and not bother with the other pages at all if they don't want. But that option is still on the table and doable...I can't commit to anything because that requires sustained, continual work outside of just myself to maintain but I wanted to make sure you knew that we're on the same page.

Thank you all for all the reports! We've gone through and fixed quite a few of these issues. Firefox printing should not result in a bunch of empty pages anymore - this was something we encountered during development, fixed, and then regressed after release because I was trying to clean up the CSS and remove the parts that "did nothing" but I was testing on Chrome during that step, sorry :( This should also fix any border alignment issues you may be seeing in Firefox. VSM and RC should now both be represented in the Spells page under the Tags column. Two-column tables like inventory and features now push each individual cell to the next page if it's going to split pages, to make them easier to read. Heals no longer have a damage type of "Healing" next to their rolls. Actions no longer have an useless "Effect" column. On page 2, the Backstory/Personality section no longer has a big empty space if you have an item there with a name but no description. Most of the feedback that's still outstanding falls into one of two categories: Feedback on the first two pages that recommends we change what's displayed there or how it's displayed. I can't guarantee that it will be this way forever, but one of the pieces of feedback that we've heard a lot on the 5.5 sheet's design is "we want it to look exactly like the paper sheet, so it's familiar and matches what we'd see if we filled it out ourselves". We took that to heart and the first two pages are as close to the 5.5 paper sheet as we could manage. Your feedback on this topic is still very welcome and may influence future decisions on how we handle those pages, but I wanted to be clear on our goals and why some feedback has been implemented and some has been recorded but not immediately implemented. Feedback that goes beyond a quick bug fix, mainly on customizability of which parts to print and how. We had a lot of debates on how to handle the simple fact that there's just a lot of data on the Roll20 sheet, and there's no easy way to show it all without the print view ballooning. Spells have descriptions. Each attack, save, action, or heal under that spell also has its own description, which may differ from the spell description and may have custom content that each user entered. Items have descriptions, sometimes surprisingly long for a mundane item like rope or tinderbox. Your ability score improvement feat has a description. Part of the design ethos of the 5.5 sheet is that we don't care specifically what these things are for maximum flexibility, we just take the data and display it. We considered hardcoding some guardrails (for example, just looking for a feature named Ability Score Improvement and not displaying it on the printed sheet), we considered a larger overhaul of sheet data (for example, allowing you or the data team to write in a very shortened version of the description for print-only), we considered print-specific settings (for example, asking when you print if you care about the descriptions of your mundane items), we considered just not printing some of the data like full descriptions so you would still need the digital version to play the game. In the end, we landed on "show them everything and let them only print the pages that matter to them" for MVP, but more feedback on what you'd like for this topic is very helpful. We may not act on it immediately, but depending on the volume of feedback and the popularity of printing, this is something we may circle back to. So the feedback is very appreciated and taken seriously even if you're not seeing change today. Thank you for everyone who has tried this out and given us in-depth feedback!