Printing questions.

[Sir Loris]

Just wondering what, if any, plans are in the works for better character sheet printed output? The HTML sheets look good on screen, but I'm one of those anal people that like to have nice little binders full of nicely printed characters.

Is a printing export template on the horizon? I was thinking of making a script that parsed and XML export, or *.hdc file and merge the data with a Postscript template (there may be many better ways of doing this but this is how I know how to do it right now). But this is a lot of work and I don't have ton of free time in my life. I don't even want to get started on it if it's something that will be appearing in the main HD line within 6 to 8 months or so anyway.

Also I'm sure that are others with the same frame of thinking are working on it. Why duplicate work.

I'm still mostly( at lest for PCs) using Metacreator because my 5e templates print out so nice. But there is just no future in it.

[tiger]

This is gonna sound like a really stupid question. You know you can simply print from the html that pops up.

You can also go into print setup and make changes to better fit the screen, unless it's a really long character.

[nblade]

Well I guess it depends on what you mean by better character sheets for output. As Tiger as pointed out, you can print the exported template from an application that read it. (In most cases its HTML, so most web broswers). Now the HTML outputs have some issues with some characters depending on how many powers/skills/talnets. Still most characters I've seen will fit on the 3-page default sheet. If you are looking for single sheet printout, you might want to look at the 2 or 3 column templates and modify them to meet you needs. If that still doesn't work, I'd start with the HTML barebones and modify as you see fit or import that into a word processor and edit it there.

[Sir Loris]

Yes, I know and most of the time that is good enough for quick notes and NPC printouts. But no matter how you tweek it the browsers printed output looks like crap.

I want to have the output so that if I have a character with many skills or powers or whatever it will be continued onto another page with clean page breaks and layout. That will never happen using html. Well, it could happen I guess if you ran it through a pre parsing to format it for X number of pages in you're browser of choice. But then you need a template for every web browser on the market. even then there are still many problems getting nice output.

I wont even bother you with the details of printed dpi vs. screen dpi or the font issues.

[Monolith]

You could always write a print template yourself and then have it put up in the free section for us all to enjoy.

[Sir Loris]

Most likely it will come down to that. What ever I come up with will not run out of the box on a non-unix based platform though. *Maybe* cygwin. May not be an issue, sounds like a lot of you run linux at lest half the time. But still blows a hole in the cross platform thing.

I'm just wondering what other work was being done in that area already.

If I do it my self don't expect it any time soon.

[nHammer]

I'd like to be able to print a character on one page.