New Publishing Concept: Electronic Format, non-PDF.
Wordman:
To expand on what Jerry said (hey Jerry! Long time no see!), if you want to go this route, it's the format, not the software. PDF succeeds (well, one reason) is that the standard is public, if not open. Your best bet would be to find similar standards that have some traction and write to those.
I can think of the following:
Microsoft Compiled HTML Help has a lot of the features you want in terms of hyperlinking, indexing and so on. It even has readers on other platforms (e.g. Chmox).
One of the many eBook formats. Each of these will no doubt have one or two of the feature you want. One might even have all of them. I'd look at Monipocket, TomeRaider and eReader first.
Clay:
So far you haven't made a compelling case to use something besides PDF. PDF allows hyperlinking, and it's pretty easy to do in any word processing program or layout software. PDF also supports javascript, so you can make a character sheet with calculated fields without any real problem.
I write software for a living, and I love gaming software, but I don't see the point of writing software that duplicates, poorly, features already existing in other more standard formats. Also, distributing and supporting software is a much bigger pain in the butt than you realize, if you haven't done this before. PDF, on the other hand, doesn't require any support for the technical aspects of it. That leaves you free to focus on supporting the game instead of the delivery mechanism.
If all you really want is hyperlinking, I think you might be better off distributing the thing as a web site that sells access. Contact me via email (see my profile) and I can show you some nice tools for doing that aside from rolling your own. And rolling your own might be fun, but this problem has long since been solved.
btrc:
I concur that the specialized reader software is a bad idea. Acrobat has its warts, among them that Adobe changes the list of advanced features it supports with every new version, but for a document that virtually any computer can read and display properly, it's the way to go. Viruses or other malware are always going to be with us, and very, very few people will refuse to use Acrobat because they are afraid their computer will catch a bug from a pdf. I suspect they would be more afraid of a custom piece of software they have never heard of (like your display program).
Greg
BTRC
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