I want to experiment with making my own character sheet for a campaign I'm running, and was wondering if anyone has had good or bad experiences with any particular kind of software in that regard?

It has to be something that allows for greater freedom than just moving around elements. I want to make my own graphic elements (boxes and things) rather than move around some predefined elements.

I use Office Publisher for all my needs on that.  I'm sure there's comparable freeware (OpenOffice or LibreOffice?  I haven't looked at them in a while), but between enterprise discounts from work and Office365 as my kids got old enough to need instances for themselves I've pretty much stopped looking for any alternatives.

What exactly are you trying to create? That is...

Do you want a character sheet that you print out and then fill in by hand? Various portions of Microsoft Office or LibreOffice will take care of you for that. In LibreOffice, they have Draw, Impress (slides/presentations), Writer, and Calc, which have all been used for character sheets. Microsoft has Publisher, PowerPoint, Word, and Excel.

Do you want a character sheet that you use on a tablet or other computer? Here there are two choices again: do you want a sheet that does calculations for you or that simply allows you to type stuff into it?

Scribus is free, and will probably do what you need. It's not quite as nice moving things around in it as in other programs.

Microsoft Publisher costs money, but is a little easier to manipulate content in than Scribus. On the other hand, it has this bizarrely inaccurate snapping behavior that makes it very hard to line things up correctly on the first try.  On the whole it feels like a weird blend of PowerPoint and Word.

InDesign is like a Formula 1 car - it's the most expensive (or was, now you rent it by the month), has probably too many controls for the casual user, but it's super powerful and the nicest to use.  Snapping is a dream - little guides spring out of nowhere in case you want to line up the thing you're moving with the edges or middles of other nearby objects.  The complexity is offset by the fact that everyone on the planet uses it for professional publishing, so nearly everything can be looked up quickly on Google.

Inkscape is an Adobe Illustrator type vector product - FOSS. It works perfectly fine for doing vector-based layouts.

Im working on a system now and using it to make the character sheet.

Adobe InDesign, Illustrator... The Creative Suite is only $50 a month. :-)  

NBOS makes a character sheet generator. I think it makes the whole process much easier for those who are less-inclined to dabble in professional tools.

Quote from: Battle Mad Ronin;858179I want to experiment with making my own character sheet for a campaign I'm running, and was wondering if anyone has had good or bad experiences with any particular kind of software in that regard?

It has to be something that allows for greater freedom than just moving around elements. I want to make my own graphic elements (boxes and things) rather than move around some predefined elements.

There is a learning curve but Inkscape is the way to go. http://www.inkscape.org

And it is free and open source.