There are three things that I find important to creating notes that look visually pleasing.
- A proper use of Headers and Indented paragraphs (Outlines), especially since you can collapse and expand entire blocks of content this way
- Hidden Tables
- A page background that isn’t a boring white.
The solution to #3 is to use an image as a page background.This isn’t a photoshop tutorial, so I’ll just skip to saying that this is ultimately what I try to create:
I try to keep the bulk of the background detail concentrated in the top-left of the images. I try not to make this detail too strong, as text will still need to be readable on top of the backgrounds. The detail then fades so that by the time we get to the other 3 corners of the image it is just a flat color (one that matches the page background). This will let the pages scroll endlessly in those directions with no sharp transition in background.
Note #1. You can also use a transparent png image like this so that you can swap out the background colors as needed. However this will result in a larger filesize for the image, which will likely impact the size of the Notebook size as well. The official support will actually recommend not using any background images for page templates for this reason, so consider me a rebel 😎. Whenever possible I try to stick with heavily compressed JPGs for the images I insert into my notebooks, whether its the page backgrounds or the artwork I place on top, which is why I include the page background color in the image itself.
Note#2. If you’re using the new UWP / Windows App version of Onenote (or the browser version), I don’t think it supports background colors so it might look horrible when opening older notebooks that rely on them. For this reason I would advise sticking to whiter background images.
Once you have a Background Image ready:
Assigning a background image inside OneNote is easy enough. You can place the image wherever you want, right-click on it, and choose to set it as the background. This will lock its position and prevent it from being selected or edited (you can always unlock it through the same right-click menu).
The hardest part is actually positioning the image. You need to place it in the appropriate corner (top-left), however if OneNote detects content too close to the edge of the page then it will try to automatically adjust the page size to compensate. Chances are you will think you have the image perfectly placed, but as soon as you apply it as a background a noticeable white margin will suddenly appear along the top of the image (or the left of it, or both). If you have Onetastic installed, you can simply edit the page’s XML to set the image’s coordinates to 0,0. Otherwise, this step will involve some trial and error, but after a minute or two you will get something you’re happy with. When you have the image locked as a background and are happy with it, you can then turn it into a page template.
This is really only a problem if you use OneNote’s automatic page sizes. If you decide to lock down the page’s physical dimensions then you can easily just create an image to match those specific dimensions.
Page TemplatesA template is a pre-designed layout that you can apply to a new page to provide a level of consistency and save time. Basically when OneNote is told to use a template for all new pages in a given section, it will create an exact clone of the Template Page whenever you click on the New Page button. You could create a default character page and set that to be the template used for all new pages created in your Characters tab. You could do the same with locations, so that each new location shares a similar layout, etc. My templates contain the background, custom title font, an example paragraph or two for formatting, and a footer.
Turning a Page into a Template: Applying Templates: |
Thank you for your effort on building and sharing these tutorials. For some time now, I am seeking a good tool to do two things: a) organize my games and b) make parts of it shareable with my players. I had tried OneNote more than once, and never get satisfied with the results.
I had also tried Obsidian Portal and almost purchased Realms Works, because both are great tools but I gave up because of the long-run cost of keeping them.
Now, I am coming back to OneNote, and after seeing your templates, I am definitely giving it another try.
Hey Cry, this may seem redundant and I do apologize for that. But if you could refer to me any instructions on how to have the nice highlighted background for your narrated segments, that would be fantastic.
I’ve used your work as inspiration (I haven’t figured everything out yet!) and it’s helped my games run so smoothly that there’s hardly any downtime or interruptions.
That is table shading (the narration block is a single 1×1 celled table).
https://support.office.com/en-us/article/add-or-remove-shading-in-a-table-62580400-ad23-484b-8ee0-8e6df730e51e
I use table shading a lot, so I have the icon pinned to my quick access bar.
I tried to register and it keeps saying I’m a bot. Is there perhaps something I can do to fix this?
If you mean registering for commenting on this site, the first comment a person makes needs to be manually approved.
Hey Cry.
First of all, I love your OneNote Notebook, which is why I’ve spent so long trying to fix this. I’ve been all around the internet, reddit and discord in an attempt to find a solution for the backgrounds.
Your template has over 1.300 pages of amazing information, but each and every page has a white background image which makes it nearly unusable when everything else is set to night mode.
Initially I made a macro which let me “Cancel set background” and delete the image a few seconds afterwards.
This required me to:
– Select a page
– Click the macro
– Click the now selectable background image
– Click delete
– Select the next page
And so I started going through all pages one by one. After an hour my fingers were hurting and I realized that I hadn’t even scratched the surface.
Do you per chance have an edition which doesn’t have the background image on all pages…? I’m not lying when I say I’ve spent more time on this than is healthy. This is my last, desperate attempt at salvaging something in the hopes that these many nights figuring this out haven’t all been in vain.
Hello. Unfortunately the only version I have without a background is severely outdated in terms of its content and layout.
It may be quicker to create a macro (or even a batch of some sort) that goes through all the XML files for the pages and removes the background image that way.