Reference manual extension

[rob2e]

I heard tale of someone creating an extension to create the reference manuals within FG. Couldn't find reference to it. Anyone know about this?

[madman]

The only one I know of is the Savage Worlds - Enhanced Library

Madman..

[Trenloe]

See under Documentation -> Sample reference manual creation here: https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/showthread.php?19202-Savage-Worlds-Enhancement-Extensions&p=152731&viewfull=1#post152731

[rob2e]

Trenloe, will that work for 5E?

[Talyn]

It's a pretty good tool. I used it for the last Savage Worlds DLC I did and it went pretty well. You'll need the Savage Worlds ruleset to run the extension but once you're finished with the reference manual you can copy the markup over to your 5E file, since reference manuals are a CoreRPG feature they all work the same everywhere. You'll have to go back into the XML to add the images but the base markup will be there for ya. That's a FG limitation and I think it's mentioned in the SWEL documentation.

[rob2e]

Hmmm, you don't suppose i could crack the XML in the ext and remove Savage worlds and see if it will load into 5e?

[Talyn]

No, SWEL is very deeply hard-coded into the Savage Worlds ruleset and its API for all the functions it does.

[Nickademus]

I was planning to make one eventually. Haven't gotten around to it yet though.

[Ikael]

Just to clarify, SWEL doesn't allow you to create Reference Manual using FG UI, it does allow you to write simple markup (content-first) which SWEL can convert into fully functional Reference Manual.

Creating UI for creating reference manual requires heck lot of work effort, especially if you plan to support block layouts. No to mention it's impossible when dealing with image blocktypes since you cannot write image datatypes (except blank images) with FG API.

The content-first markup was much more efficient to implement and use. It allows me to copy whole PDFs content into MS Word, convert certain styling into markup and generate reference manual from it. It takes me about 4h to convert 100 pages of content to reference manual with SWEL approach.