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I write "Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH" fan fiction as a side hobby, and part of the style is that, apart from the sentient rats, everything is/feels realistic.

What I want to do is create fictional product datasheets. Something you would expect to find on sites like "alldatasheet.com". Right down to that "corporate style" text layout, strong dividing lines (including the ones dividing the header and footer from the body), etc. Make it genuinely LOOK like a datasheet made by microchip, ST, TI, etc. Even right down to it being a PDF.

I'm not asking how to WRITE a datasheet though (the actual text content), I feel like I can pull that off.

Is Open Office the only thing I need?

qwerty keyboard
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  • What exactly are you planning to do? Are you looking to make the sheets separately and include screenshots in your fan fiction? Embed directly? Something else? – Laurel Dec 19 '23 at 23:06
  • AO3 supports external links (as far as I know) so I'll use that. – qwerty keyboard Dec 20 '23 at 19:17

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While you can incorporate all the elements you'd need for a datasheet in Open Office, the control over typesetting will likely cause you a lot of frustration.

Desktop publishing tools would give you the needed control to emulate the look and feel of something like a St Micro or Texas Instruments datasheet -- watermarks, iconographic trademarks. Unfortunately, publishing tools are expensive. There is Latex, which is freely available. But it has a steep learning curve.

The image below is taken from a Latex based template for creating electronic datasheets

enter image description here

EDL
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