🚀 go-pugleaf

I'm designing character sheets for my (free) Multiclass RPG system
with Microsoft Publisher, and I'm trying to make a sheet that will
contain all the relevant information on a single page (A4, which is
approx. 20 cm x 30 cm or 8" x 12").
  The handwriting of the players must fit onto the lines, of course,
this is where the problem is, how dense can I make the lines/boxes?
Since a large part of the sheet is devoted to skill lists (Multiclass
is skill-based, despite the name) I don't have any absolute
requirements, but I'd like to have room for as many skills as possible.

Ordinary Danish writing paper has a line distance of 9 mm, my
parents and my sister has tested a sample page I've made and found
that 7.5 mm is workable (my sister said either 7.0 or 7.5 mm)
I've tested 6.5 mm and 7.5 mm, and found 6.5 to be workable, but
perhaps not if you have to fill out an entire character sheet
(or worse yet, 20 sheets, for NPC's!)

What do you think? I'd like my sheet to be usable by people who doesn't
have good handwriting skills (I'm a terrible handwriter myself)
  So? Is 7.5 mm between each line enough? Should I go a little higher
(8.5) or lower (7.0, maybe even 6.5)?

conversion to Imperial system: 1" is 25.4 mm

6.0 mm = 0.236"
6.5 mm = 0.256"
7.0 mm = 0.276"
7.5 mm = 0.295"
8.0 mm = 0.315"
8.5 mm = 0.335"
9.0 mm = 0.354"



This may sound completely trivial, but take a look at this

dist.	lines	lin(exact)
[mm]
5.5	50	50.4
6.0	46	46.2
6.5	42	42.6
7.0	39	39.6
7.5	37	36.9
8.0	34	34.6
8.5	32	32.6
9.0	31	30.8

With 3 columns on the sheet, the difference between 6.5mm and 7.5mm
is (42-37) x 3 = 15 skills. That's quite a lot, but... is it
workable?

I know some people will make their own sheets, and with the character
generator software I'm working on, there will be little need for
sheets that have to be filled out by handwriting, but... there are
always the Mac users, and sometimes you want to play (or fiddle with
character design, or make NPC's) when you don't have a computer
handy.
  And people are lazy, so if I provide character sheets for download,
I expect more people to try out my RPG system.

What line distance are you comfortable with, when writing with a biro
or pencil? If I can squeeze another 9 or 15 skills onto the sheet,
I'll be vary happy, but if it makes the sheet uncomfortable to
use for a lot of people, then I'd accept having less room for skills.

-- 
Peter Knutsen
The URL to my homepage is:
http://home1.inet.tele.dk/peter.k/