I was wondering if it might be possible to get a printer friendly version of the SOS character sheet made available? The regular sheet looks great but, with all the dark colouring in the background, it can be pretty ink intensive when printing.

Greyscale is not really an option as that's not really print friendly either.

Even better would be to include a print friendly version in the regular character sheet (having the different backgrounds selectable as layers).

Making different backgrounds selectable as layers is a good thought. I'll play around with Adobe Acrobat and see if I can figure out how to get it to do that.

If you have any problems feel free to let me know. While I'm not an expert I have a reasonable amount of experience with Acrobat and have created documents with layers before.

I took a look at the source file, and it appears that when the designer sent us the character sheet, he sent it to us as a single JPEG. That makes it difficult to create PDF layers, as JPEG isn't a layered format.

Creating a printer-friendly version also would mean basically opening up Photoshop and editing the source image. I'll give that a shot, but there's a reason I'm not a visual artist.

If you want to try your hand at it, I'd be happy to send you the source JPEG as well.

I agree that, if the character sheet was sent in as a single jpeg, it's going to be very difficult to tweak the pdf.

Is there any chance the designer might be prepared to share any of the individual design elements of the sheet with you? I find it difficult to believe the sheet was designed as a single jpeg - it was most likely converted that way from a layered document.

Worth a shot. I'll send him an email and see if he still has the source files he used.

To keep you in the loop, I heard back from the designer and he sent me a EPS (Adobe Illustrator) file for the character sheet, which is the only file he kept.

Illustrator comes with our Adobe Cloud license, but I don't currently have it installed. So I'll download that in the background today, and investigate its suitability for turning into a layered PDF sometime tonight or early tomorrow.

Hmmm…shame I'm pretty sure the EPS format is quite old and doesn't support layers. I have the Adobe Cloud license as well so please feel free to contact me if you need any help. I'm not an expert but it may be possible to fabricate something that works by using a mix of software.

I was really hoping this might be a simple thing to fix…guess I should be careful what I wish for

Having opened up the EPS file, it's kind of a mess inside.

I'll email you a link to the file. Maybe you'll have a better idea of what to do that I do at the moment.

Meanwhile, let me also email you a link to the character sheet we used during the beta test. It's not a pretty as the official sheet, but it's a lot less ink-intensive and gets the job done.

Understood. I'll take a look at the EPS file and see what I can do - no promises at this time

Thanks for the link to the beta sheet as well.