In-Game Text Editor and Printing Press

[lonnarin]

Somewhere down the line it would be interesting to see our current document-creation system be a bit more streamlined into the new graphical interface. We could include a word processor window complete with nifty fonts and spellchecker as a seperate GUI screen so that we could have dedicated authors in game who sit down and write their tales to parchment without having to limit the number of characters per line or using the coded syntax prior to each one. Then you could save your writings onto a parchment, perhaps even publish them ourselves by taking those written parchments to a gnomish printing press firm to have transcribed into books. The word processor program could even have language-based encryption! So when you read a book tagged as written in elven and you don't speak it, it comes out as "illew bel'rinewlla nnosl'naris...", but if you DID speak elven, it would read out in English. This idea could also be used for in-game signs and letters found in quests, etc.

I'd love to see people with actual novels and journals in game, and authors making money off their original works in game. They could protect their investment by making the gnomish inventor only copy original parchments rather than finished books, so that way unless one were to painstakingly scribe by hand the entire book, it would be difficult to mak a counterfeit. The finished books could also hold some author's signature data so one could determine if said book was actually penned by the author or a counterfeit as well. Kind of a scribing watermark, so to speak.

Above all, the methods both for writing books and reading them could use some visual loving. One of the things I like best about Elder Scrolls: Oblivion was the sheer volume of printed lore they had to read, all of those short stories about other people's adventures and that it looked so nice when you were flipping the pages in the book which popped up and took up most of the screen. The NWN books are in such a tiny little window that reading beyond a few paragraphs gets painful.

[Eight-Bit]

I like this idea. A lot.

[zenvidar]

I'd love to see people create newspaper press groups. There would be a little building in your favorite town where you and your friends use this system to write down your tales and use different crafting machines around to create your papers. Then, the NPC paperboy or maybe you yourselves can sell the new editions of your newspapers or your novels.

[darkstorme]

I suspect that refinements of this level of detail will take quite a while - that if a book-binding system/printing press is developed, it will be placed with the rest of the crafting systems, or in a library, rather than being placed separately in every city as a "newspaper office".

That's not to say it's not a neat idea... but one step at a time!

[EdTheKet]

As a side note, the printing press has not been invented on Layonara.

[lonnarin]

Ah, then replace "Goranite printing press" with "Aragenite Scribe" then. There were copies of the bible over a thousand years before Gutenburg. Maybe make the roll based off the scribing CNR skill, and scribes in game could make their own copies and novels. If magic spells could be transcribed witht he craft, mundane non-magical writing might even be much easier.

[OneST8]

Spell checker? Different fonts? Probably not. Language based Text-Editor? Probably. Patched updates with neat-o additions for "scribing" types? Most likely.