Newbie question: Export to PDF

[Tovrin]

Hi folks,

I'm still a newbie to Fantasy Grounds and I'm trying to use it purely to plan and document my tabletop campaign. I'm not sure my group is entirely ready to leave the whole pen-and-paper scene quite yet. We're still pretty "old school".

I'd like to use FG to store characters and create player handouts ... as a stepping stone to perhaps running a campaign within FG itself. Is it possible to create PDF exports from FG? Character? Story elements? Homebrew spells and races? That kind of thing ....

[Zacchaeus]

Hi Torvin and welcome to FG.

You can't do this kind of thing natively. The campaign is stored as an XML file in the campaign folder of your FGData folder. If you can find a program which translates this into a pdf then you could create a pdf. I suspect this would require you to sit down and do some programming.
For NPCs have a look at NPC engineer (https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/showthread.php?40736-NPC-Engineer-now-with-full-parsing!) and for characters there's a couple of XML to pdf thingies (https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/showthread.php?22440-5E-Character-sheet-from-XML) around.

[LordEntrails]

You can export characters as XML and then their are a few ways to print those to PDF (as Mr. Z mentions).

DLC content (such as anything you purchase) can not be exported (to protect it). If you have created your own story entries then you can access the xml for those entries, but their is no way currently get that into a useable PDF format. Myself with the help of another user on the forums have experimented a little bit with converting the FG XML into a viewable (Word or PDF) format, but it is not trivial. And results in something that still requires a lot of editing.

[FG_Dave]

Thanks Zacc and Lord.

[Tovrin]

Thanks guys.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I can't seem to find the FGData folder in my specific campaign folder. Is there something I need to do to export it as XML?

EDIT: nm. It appears what I'm after is in the db.xml file in the specific folder.

[damned]

Hi Tovrin last night our group which is spread across the US, AUS and the UK managed to get all the AUS players and the US payer into the same room and the GM used FG to manage things in the background and we used pen and paper and dice to play on the physical table. That was the first time we had played that way and it went as smoothly as any other game. There are many ways of mixing and matching one or more FG clients into your physical tabletop game.

[Tovrin]

Hi damned. Did he produce any handouts from FG at all? I'm trying to find a handy XML to PDF tool that'll help.

[damned]

Hi damned. Did he produce any handouts from FG at all? I'm trying to find a handy XML to PDF tool that'll help.

Nope.
We had char sheets and we maintained them ourselves.
There are several D&D character sheet exporters.
None are perfect but they give you the bulk of what you need.