Draw/Write text on an image?

[Moebius]

Hi, I have been browsing the forum without much luck, is there any way to be able to write text on to an image (so its stored as Drawings) Its useful to write labels etc. Also useful to quick insert a new sheet as an image (scanned from the rpg book) and just write text on top of the image and be stored as drawings.

Thx for the help!

[Griogre]

Why would you store a scan in drawings? When not just put it in images? Drawing images are reversed from normal images. Depending on what you trying to do you can add text with any art program. I'm pretty sure MS Paint will do it which is on all Windows machines. IrfanView and Paint.NET will add text to an image as well and both are free. If the DM is the only one who needs the labels then you can use a map pin on the image or drawing and then just move the mouse over the map to get the tool tip of the pin.

[Moebius]

Thx a lot for the reply and the interest. Ill explain a bit more, I dont have a clue about ruleset creation. The idea was to use a custom character sheet with the foundations ruleset without having to code it in XML.

Workaround idea:Scan the character sheet and then write text on top of it as drawings. That way I can keep track of character sheets as images and alter them within thr FGII. No xml hassle.

I can currently do that writing the text with a wacom digital tablet device (that would be digital pen and paper!) but obviously it would look better if I could just write the text in with the keyboard.

The idea you suggest does not let me erase things or edit from within the FG.

I dont need any functionality or logic tied to the sheet, just a place to store the character stats, and equipment. If there was a radial button to create a text box stored as drawing just as any line done with the mouse it would help a lot. I was wondireing if someone thought of this before and made an extension or something about it.

[Phystus]

I would agree text boxes would be very nice.

I tried writing on an image for an online game of Starfleet Battles once, and quickly gave up. You might be able to produce readable text with the tablet, but with a mouse I found it to be very difficult. We ended up making number tokens for filling out the forms for that game. It was an OK workaround for a quick game, but it was a bit cumbersome.

And we were just using numbers. If you had to use letter tokens too your sheet would probably end up looking like a ransom note! :D

~P

[madman]

you could always drop a token on the map that looks like a text bubble. then you type in the chat bar, drag the text to the token(It can be any token) and drop it.

And you have at least a work around for the problem.

Madman

[Moebius]

I did not know text could be dragged to tokens, would it be hard to code something so text could be dragged to images instead? Not as typing directly on the image but...

[gmkieran]

I'm not a coder, but I would imagine something like that would involve defining a token class with variable size parameters that would somehow be auto-generated when text was dragged from the chat window over an image and dropped. Probably not easy to code.

As an alternative, if you know ahead of time what the labels will be (ie you have a map and just want to add labels you've pre-determined so the players can see them), you could create small .png files of the label text on a neutral background and drop those onto your map from your token box. If you're using DrZ's awesome AdvancedImages extension (or once the latest release of 4e comes out that has the functionality incorporated), you could even place those in the GM layer, so that players couldn't accidentally affect them.

There *might* be a way to code an additional layer in the images extension that would allow typing directly on the map, but that's probably not a trivial addition, either.

Just some thoughts.
Cheers!
GMK

[joshuha]

Thx a lot for the reply and the interest. Ill explain a bit more, I dont have a clue about ruleset creation. The idea was to use a custom character sheet with the foundations ruleset without having to code it in XML.

Workaround idea:Scan the character sheet and then write text on top of it as drawings. That way I can keep track of character sheets as images and alter them within thr FGII. No xml hassle.

I can currently do that writing the text with a wacom digital tablet device (that would be digital pen and paper!) but obviously it would look better if I could just write the text in with the keyboard.

The idea you suggest does not let me erase things or edit from within the FG.

I dont need any functionality or logic tied to the sheet, just a place to store the character stats, and equipment. If there was a radial button to create a text box stored as drawing just as any line done with the mouse it would help a lot. I was wondireing if someone thought of this before and made an extension or something about it.

This is a project I want to work on the future but just don't have the time for it right now. I started it and it allows you to drag and drop text/number/label fields from a little control panel and build a character sheet on the fly. Only thing I hadn't done yet was to synch the data between the player and GM clients but its doable. Wish I still had the demo video I did on it, can't locate it right now.

[Moebius]

... it allows you to drag and drop text/number/label fields from a little control panel and build a character sheet on the fly. Only thing I hadn't done yet was to synch the data between the player and GM clients but its doable. Wish I still had the demo video I did on it, can't locate it right now.

Thats what I meant! A shame it wont see light soon... this would enable GMs to run different RPGs without the ruleset creation effort.. Quick and dirty, but functional.

[joshuha]

Well I just went and looked at my old code and rolled it into an extension for Foundations Core. I just recorded this little video demo (a little choppy on this computer sorry). https://dl.dropbox.com/u/4606305/builder.avi

Let me know if that's the idea you are going after, if so I can either release the code as public and someone else can finish or I might be able to sneak some time in the next few weeks to look at it.

[Moebius]

Yes, thats the idea. You nailed it!