I recently stumbled across the EFF's dice lists which are designed for passphrase generation and instantly imagined that I could make them into a little offline booklet (A5 size; though I think A6 might be next) using tools that I'm already pretty familiar with.
As someone with a mathematics background, good typesetting is known only to come from LaTeX documents, hence that was my tool of choice. Equipped with macros in (neo)vim, I was able to quickly convert the .txt word list (I went with the 5-dice long word list) into something better suited for use with LaTeX's verse package. Next, I thought: "if it's going to get printed, it should be dense, legible and easily navigated". So, I pulled in the multicols package to split pages into multiple columns for density, then improved the offline navigation by adding subsections for each first-die increment and I was practically done! After a bit of extra fiddling to get the formatting looking nice, all that was left was to add some comments and some instructions for use offline and then we really were done!
The fruits of my labour
Here you go! You can download the most up-to-date pdf by clicking ⟶ here and you can find the tex source file in this ⟶ zip if you wish to generate it or make changes yourself (the zip includes the original wordlist.txt, my tex file and the EFF's lockup logo in red png which I use on the front page, but you can optionally remove both it and delete the corresponding line (line 24) to generate the pdf standalone). I'm pretty happy with how it looks and functions! and damn, check out that last page! How satisfying is that?
This is NOT OFFICIAL! but as best as I can tell, a permissable use of the source materials and use of EFF logo as per this page: https://www.eff.org/pages/trademark-and-brand-usage-policy. If there is any legitimate disagreement about this, I am happy to alter the work and take it down in the meantime.
If you're interested in learning more, there are some more technical details about the wordlists here and you can of course visit the primary source for the EFF's dice lists yourself.
What's Next?
Well, as I elude to in the pdf, if there's interest, I can do something similar for the other EFF-provided word lists, or at least make edits and clean up the formatting of these existing lists to those interested.
If/when I get the chance to print a physical copy of this, I'll be sure to update this post (or make a new one as a reminder) with some photographs. I'm already thinking that the pdf might benefit from having black+white photographs in its explanation too...
Passphrases are naturally so much easier for humans to type and memorise than random strings, so I'll let you all know which one I pick once my dice come in the mail. 'Til next time.