Easy way to do tables

[sakmerlin37]

I'm about to enter a large equipment table and searched the forums. Is there an easy way to do tables when creating a ruleset? If not, I'll sludge through the process; however, I'm hoping somebody has run into this and found a good, quick solution :P.

[Trenloe]

What kind of table are you referring to? A reference table in a library module or a rollable table within a campaign?

[sakmerlin37]

@Trenloe,

A reference table within a library. Doesn't need to be rollable; I found out how to make it drag-and-drop with XML tags; just looking for a way to avoid the drudgery of HTML table creation...

[Trenloe]

Find a WYSIWYG HTML editor that you like and use that to create the tables in the word processor like editor, then switch to the HTML code and remove all of the tags and HTML code that FG doesn't recognise.

Try this as a web based editor (press the "source" button in the top left to switch between HTML code and the WYSIWYG editor): https://www.quackit.com/html/online-html-editor/

Or, if you want a full blown editor, try KompoZer (free): https://sourceforge.net/projects/kompozer/?source=dlp

Both of the above allow the copy/paste of data from a spreadsheet (I tested with Excel and Open Office Calc). You'll need to do a find/replace to remove align, width, height etc. code but these should all be the same so shouldn't be too much of a problem. Then, copy the <table> .. </table> code from the editor and use this in your FG XML.

Hope the above helps and is a bit like what you were looking for. :)

[gmkieran]

How about DrZeus' 4e tables extension? Or is that just functionality for handling tables that has already been rolled into the base code?

[Trenloe]

How about DrZeus' 4e tables extension? Or is that just functionality for handling tables that has already been rolled into the base code?
Yeah, that's for rollable tables that is now in the 4e and 3.5e rulesets.

[Nickademus]

I believe this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3KCNFqIIFA)might be what you are looking for.

[Trenloe]

I believe this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3KCNFqIIFA)might be what you are looking for.
Good link, thanks. However, Fantasy Grounds tables cannot be done this way, the pseudo HTML code has to be manually created/pasted into the underlying XML.

[Nickademus]

Hmm. I haven't found tables that difficult. But I haven't touched the equipment table class, just the basic <table> that appears in the text windows. Might find a quick table parser for xml on Google unless FG equipment tables have a specific format.

Otherwise I'd just recommend grabbing a chunk of xml out of the equipment modules and clearing the data out. Then save it as a template and copy/fill as needed. Maybe five minutes of xml torture and then you just have the typing you'd have to do anyway.

[Moon Wizard]

An intern and I actually took a crack at a module building/editing tool last year, and I attempted to use it for editing the PFRPG magic item module changes I needed to make. However, I found that while the interface abstracted the need to understand XML and provided some FG data structure context, it was actually much slower to enter and modify data. I ended up reverting back to using Notepad++ with the XML Tools plugin for editing the module data.

If you are just building static tabular data, then Trenloe's suggestion of using an HTML tool is a nice way to do it.

If you are building table data to be manipulated and support draggable records, then it requires specific XML data structures in the module as well as support in the ruleset. This is how the equipment tables in the 4E/PFRPG/3.5E rulesets was written. In this case, I usually just use Notepad++, since it's the fastest for me.

In terms of converting data from print, spreadsheet or HTML format, I have only seen 2 successful approaches. One is manual entry of the XML data with lots of copy and paste. The other is to write your own program to convert the data from one format to the FG format. This is essentially what the community parsers on the forum do.

Regards,
JPG

[Zeus]

As moon_wizard has said you can do this very easily with the community developed bulk text parsers. Both the 4EParser and PAR5E tools support table creation for the 4E and 5E DnD rulesets and I am sure there are one or two others for other rulesets. In the case of PAR5E, you can add support for the ruleset your using by creating a ruleset library for the tool. This way you can create modules very quickly (especially if you have access to well formatted content in text format). See the 5E/PAR5E thread (https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/showthread.php?18123-Project-Par5e) if your interested.