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Getting Equipment to Appear on the PDF


Tywyll

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So I've made some fantasy hero characters and then exported them to PDF (because I can't find any other export that is usable as physical character sheet...i.e. that doesn't struggle with page breaks etc). Anyway, a big problem I noticed...non of the character's gear appeared! Any way around this?

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39 minutes ago, Simon said:

In short: no.  Print to PDF is not designed to print equipment.

 

You'll need to use one of the available export formats, design your own, or tweak an existing one to suit your purposes.

 

Are there any that export to a page sized pdf or rtf rather than html? Preferably for 5th ed? 

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You'll find RTF export formats available in the downloads section on this site...and can always tweak them or the HTML formats to bring them closer to what you're after.  Alternately, you can ask folks here for help.

 

It's unlikely that you'll find a PDF export format as it is not a plaintext protocol.

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46 minutes ago, Simon said:

You'll find RTF export formats available in the downloads section on this site...and can always tweak them or the HTML formats to bring them closer to what you're after.  Alternately, you can ask folks here for help.

 

It's unlikely that you'll find a PDF export format as it is not a plaintext protocol.

Sadly I wouldn't be able to tweak them as I have no idea how to do that. I have downloaded several exports but can't find any that are simply rtf or have proper page break function. I don't understand how someone uses one of the html ones with data split over pages. 

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No idea if this helps, but I did once find one that the format uses word, maybe there's a way to alter that if it allows you to edit it in word. It's certainly worth a try. Also, its not the easiest way of doing it, but since I know you can copy things from the designer (highlight section then ctrl+c) and paste in other places (ctrl+v) you can probably make a character sheet of your own in word and after taking the long time and effort of copy/paste, you can edit and make your own. Its time consuming, but it might be worth the effort if your really particular about your character sheets.

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There are css properties for page break behavior that can be used for clean pagination w/ html...however it is a pain w/ dynamically generated html such as is emitted from HD to figure out where to programatically insert the page breaks. I actually spent a couple hours about a decade ago now attempting to approximate something of the sort for one of my multipage HD html templates and did get something that more or less worked by just hacking around the problem but it was horribly brute force and unreliable so I just went with paginating by section and accepting that some edge case characters are going to have rollover. Playing around with printer zoom settings for certain characters to, say, set print size to 85-90% is usually sufficient for most characters that have rollover. On some characters with large chunks of text in their biographical fields, I often wrap the content in HD in <span style="font-size:smaller;">...</span> to help compress the text. And so on.

 

If you are trying to print out a "character" that is just a lengthy list of spells or equipment, or whatever, then you will obviously have pagination issues. However, you can use HD to output the HTML which does most of the heavy lifting, and then just edit the HTML directly to insert page breaks (and subheaders if you want them) where you want them. Rather trivial to do for something that doesn't require frequent updates.

 

Alternately, you could use multiple "characters", spreading the abilities across them in such a way that the print out of each takes exactly one page. Then you would just output all the files and combine them in the order you see fit to compose your "multi page list". 

 

And, if you just really like PDF's for some reason, if you can get something to first print to HTML in a format you can live with, you can generally render that via browser and then print to PDF from the browser...or use an online PDF converter. A bit time consuming, but doable.

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Thanks for the advice guys.

 

I noticed another issue with the export to PDF...it doesn't record Active Points nor does it print any Notes you write... 😢 That makes it functionally unusable for me

 

It doesn't have to be a PDF, I just need something that isn't going to look horrible printed since we play with paper at the table (I mean, one of my players uses a tablet, but they don't all have that option and I certainly would find it annoying if I were a player).

 

I remember there used to be RTF formats for 5e, maybe they were on the old site? I can't find them currently, just a few for 6e. Does anyone have a 5e RTF or Word export?

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8 hours ago, Tywyll said:

...I noticed another issue with the export to PDF...it doesn't record Active Points nor does it print any Notes you write... 😢 That makes it functionally unusable for me...


It does record active points and notes in pdfs, you just need to set the options for it in the designer. I am very visual oriented thus I will add 2 pics of where to find them. 1 is the window when you are creating/editing powers (for example as in pic 1) and the other is when creating a note (in same power for example).

Active Points.PNG

Notes.PNG

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On 10/12/2019 at 12:03 AM, Killer Shrike said:

" isn't going to look horrible printed "...that's kind of subjective...care to provide examples of something you like vs something you don't?

 

Something that looks like a character sheet or at least doesn't spread the info out across two pages if possible. 

 

Don't get me wrong, a lot of the HTML charactes look amazing, on the web. I just don't like sheets that have the info you need split over two or more pages. 

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On 10/12/2019 at 7:31 AM, Jayzon said:


It does record active points and notes in pdfs, you just need to set the options for it in the designer. I am very visual oriented thus I will add 2 pics of where to find them. 1 is the window when you are creating/editing powers (for example as in pic 1) and the other is when creating a note (in same power for example).

Active Points.PNG

Notes.PNG

 

Thank you for that, I have set it to do that. And if I use a HTML output it works. However, on he export to PDF it doesn't show either. 

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1 hour ago, Tywyll said:

 

Something that looks like a character sheet or at least doesn't spread the info out across two pages if possible. 

 

Don't get me wrong, a lot of the HTML characters look amazing, on the web. I just don't like sheets that have the info you need split over two or more pages. 

 

So...basically you want everything to fit on one sheet? 

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i probably have a somewhat similar multipage 5e version from WAAAAAY back in the day.

 

This is a little weird, but back while I was on hiatus from the Hero System,  before he passed away Hyper-Man asked me via email for my old templates. I sent him whatever detritus I could find with a few minutes of searching with no quality control...and he at some point posted them here on these boards at the below link...I think there is at least one paginated html template for 5e in the lot:

 

 

Now that I'm back doing Hero stuff again, I could make the time to be more selective if you don't find something useful in there. 

 

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