Printing solution for Linux?

[Bill_CCHKK]

Does anyone who's using HeroDesigner under Linux have a good printing solution? Currently, as far as I can tell, there's no good way to export a print-ready character sheet. I generally export to one of the RTF templates, and then fiddle with the document in OpenOffice until it looks good enough to me, then print it.

So, has anyone come up with a way (either through another export template, or just a reproducible procedure) for any of the following:

(1) generate HTML that looks like a character sheet (like the Default Character Sheet HTML export template) that breaks properly when printed from Mozilla.

(2) generate PDF that actually looks like a character sheet as presented in the GMB. Really, this is the ideal solution, generating output in a device-neutral, OS-neutral format.

(3) generate RTF that works well under OpenOffice.

Anyone have any suggestions? I've started looking at a couple of PDF solutions, but neither are particularly simple. One is HD -> Docbook XML hde -> PDF. The other is HD -> XML hde -> XSL-FO -> Apache FOP -> PDF.

TIA,
- Bill

[lemming]

So far I've liked fiddling with character sheets so I haven't had a problem with doing the Open Office route.

[Heroman]

I don't use the HD under linux, but have found for (1) that Netscape 7 does do the page breaks like IE (for html which use the page break in the sheets).

I actually looked at XSL-FO, but the current version does not allow you to link up multiple areas (in a 'newspaper format') which IMHO would be required to handle overflow (like skill lists which would go beyond the area allocated for it).

[Heroman]

Also, as a FYI, it should be noted that the OpenOffice format is just a zipped set of XML files (change the extension from sxw to zip and see it uncompress). I have not delved deep into it, but I would guess that you could design up a nice sheet in OO and then see what parts are static and which could be completed by xml outout from HD.

[ferat]

You could always beg someone into creating a postscript output template.

Super simple to convert postscript to pdf for those without a postscript printer, and is rather os neutral.

[Tasha]

Try opening it in Konqueror.While I haven't used Hero Designer in Linux yet, I do use it in Mac OSX. I find that Mozilla doesn't render the Character Sheets well. When I use Safari (The apple version of Konqueror) the sheets look right.

Tasha :)

[TechnoViking]

The latest beta of OpenOffice (beta 1.1) can print Geoff rtf templates without crashing.

Mike