I made a change to the reference manual so if a section had only a single item then it automatically expanded the article under it. Since I was in there and Zeph provided me with new and improved fonts, I decided to give it a 4E reskin.
I just submitted them yesterday. v2.0 is in testing so they may or may not make it into final.
The files changed do not conflict with any of the files which were changed by other 2.0 changes except the font and frame files (very minor). So there's a chance it could make it into 2.0
As for the changes to mark up none are required. All this change does is swap the existing FGII fonts and frames with versions designed to closer match 4E publications. Arcane Empowerment, Arcane Rejuvination, and Healing Infusion are just enclosed by the standard header brackets.
Speaking of fonts, I found this one that includes the dice symbols and 4e attack icons. If you were to add these in FG, would it allow the monster manuals to parse with these symbols?
You could switch the attack icons out (they are in the graphics file (look for "basicattack" and you should find them). Using an extension would probably be your best bet.
The dice are eaten by the parser. It removes the special characters and replaces them with a string that reads 6, 5-6 ,4-6 , 3-6 , etc. The ruleset has been designed to handle that. I suppose work could be done to make it support another format just to throw dice up there, but it's not on my radar at the moment.
FWIW, I started to make an extension with these graphics but by the time you shrink them down to the required size, it's difficult to see what's going on. I think the colour in the 4E_JPG icons helps here.
I had tried previously to make some icons myself a while back and had that problem where they were too hard to read, but using the version I linked they came out really well.
But when I was messing with the fonts, mentor sans is what the D&D body text is supposedly based off of, but it comes out too blocky inside FG at the base font size. Increasing the base font size to 12 works for readability, but then I found that links did not match up with the text correctly any more. So I was curious what fonts were used for this conversion and where they might be available.
The basic text uses a modified Candara. It scales to smaller sizes much better than mentor. However the numerics do not align with the text quite the way you'd expect. Zeph Ponos created a custom version of it that fixes the alignment.
Internally, I changed all the stat block references to use fonts named statblock and a combination of type and size type is b|i|bi|r size is small|med|large
This makes it fairly easy to swap them via an extension or by editing bmpfonts.xml. It also isolates the changes from changing other windows unexpectedly. Changing something like "narratorfont" which is used in dozens of classes is bound to cause spacing issues.
The reference sheet (shown in this post) follow a similar pattern, they are reference-type where type is: type is b|i|bi|r|h with h being the "header" style of font.
I plan to go through and do the same with story and any other fonts I replace.
Reference and story use specialized DND fonts that were assembled from various PDfs.
Who knows, some day I may get bored and try and make the npc sheets look like the green stat blocks.
9 comments:
Looks really good. Is this something we will be able to do after the next release?
Wow, very pretty. I'd love to use this to update my old modules. Does this kind of output require extensive markup?
I just submitted them yesterday. v2.0 is in testing so they may or may not make it into final.
The files changed do not conflict with any of the files which were changed by other 2.0 changes except the font and frame files (very minor). So there's a chance it could make it into 2.0
As for the changes to mark up none are required. All this change does is swap the existing FGII fonts and frames with versions designed to closer match 4E publications. Arcane Empowerment, Arcane Rejuvination, and Healing Infusion are just enclosed by the standard header brackets.
Speaking of fonts, I found this one that includes the dice symbols and 4e attack icons. If you were to add these in FG, would it allow the monster manuals to parse with these symbols?
http://www.mad-irishman.net/font_gameicons.html
You could switch the attack icons out (they are in the graphics file (look for "basicattack" and you should find them). Using an extension would probably be your best bet.
The dice are eaten by the parser. It removes the special characters and replaces them with a string that reads 6, 5-6 ,4-6 , 3-6 , etc. The ruleset has been designed to handle that. I suppose work could be done to make it support another format just to throw dice up there, but it's not on my radar at the moment.
I see. Are the fonts you are using available for download some where? I haven't been able to find any good 4e fonts.
FWIW, I started to make an extension with these graphics but by the time you shrink them down to the required size, it's difficult to see what's going on. I think the colour in the 4E_JPG icons helps here.
I had tried previously to make some icons myself a while back and had that problem where they were too hard to read, but using the version I linked they came out really well.
But when I was messing with the fonts, mentor sans is what the D&D body text is supposedly based off of, but it comes out too blocky inside FG at the base font size. Increasing the base font size to 12 works for readability, but then I found that links did not match up with the text correctly any more. So I was curious what fonts were used for this conversion and where they might be available.
The basic text uses a modified Candara. It scales to smaller sizes much better than mentor. However the numerics do not align with the text quite the way you'd expect. Zeph Ponos created a custom version of it that fixes the alignment.
Internally, I changed all the stat block references to use fonts named statblock and a combination of type and size
type is b|i|bi|r
size is small|med|large
This makes it fairly easy to swap them via an extension or by editing bmpfonts.xml. It also isolates the changes from changing other windows unexpectedly. Changing something like "narratorfont" which is used in dozens of classes is bound to cause spacing issues.
The reference sheet (shown in this post) follow a similar pattern, they are reference-type where type is:
type is b|i|bi|r|h
with h being the "header" style of font.
I plan to go through and do the same with story and any other fonts I replace.
Reference and story use specialized DND fonts that were assembled from various PDfs.
Who knows, some day I may get bored and try and make the npc sheets look like the green stat blocks.
Post a Comment