Been spending as much time as I can working on the character sheet tonight. It's still not quite finished, but a lot of the painful stuff is done.
One problem with working on character sheets for me has always been that I'm a little bit too methodical, but I think that works out to be a strength in the end. Back in the day I used to alter and make form-fillable character sheets for games that didn't have them. I remember in particular working on Shadowrun and Eclipse Phase character sheets, though I don't recall exactly what I've done.
In any case, I did that in Scribus, and the sheets I'm working on now are also done in Scribus.
It's a little more work, but it's much better than working in .odt or .pdf; Scribus allows very precise formatting (unlike .odt, which is more difficult to do well and then export to PDF), and my PDF editor doesn't get quite as much prevision as Scribus does either.
I'm basing the character sheet in part off of Twilight 2000's and in part after the style of an old military manual I have (a 1989-issue field manual). That makes it a little idiosyncratic, perhaps, but I say it builds character.
Some things I notice here immediately are that the lines for text are thicker than they need to be (will be a slight pain to fix, because they're actually from the same vector that makes up the section designation designs), and that those designs are too large. This is actually nice, because I think that it will make a better character sheet.
It's a WIP, what can I say?
With that said, I'd appreciate any feedback. I'm printing this out and will try using it for (part of) a character to see how well it works practically.
The best part of Scribus is that once everything's done it will be relatively trivial to make this sheet form-fillable. That means that you'll be able to fill it out online or in print.
Unlike previous Hammercalled character sheets, however, I'm doing print first, then making the form-fillable version. Footnotes are placeholders.