Cutting and Pasting

[Silas1066]

I'm building a campaign based off of a dungeon module. Instead of re-typing everything into the story section, is there a way to paste text into that section from word or notepad?

[Griogre]

The short answer is yes. The Cntrl c and Cntrl v copy and past shortcuts work for putting things into the storybook. I personnaly find it faster to make a "skeleton" of the module in the storybook by just typing in the encounter names. Next close FG and open the dm.xml file for the correct campaign. Then cut and past the text directly into the xml.

If you are not familiar with the tags then it is worth your time to find a short encounter and problerly format it in FG's storybook so you can see the tags. They are very straight forward. You don't really need to do an encounter, just type is something like: This is a title in the Title, This is a paragraph in the body. This is bold text and this is a link. Use the edit commands in FG to actually make a link and bold the text. Then you have an example in the text.

One hint, FG autosorts by ecounter name and it uses an alpha sort - so if you want your encounters to be in order start them with the encounter number ie 01, 02 ect. The leading zero is important for correct sorting. As an expample, my intros are always 00 Intro

[Silas1066]

I've discovered some problematic things with cutting and pasting

1. You can't paste text into the DM notes -this kind of defeats the purpose.

2. When you paste text into the story section, it is ALWAYS double-spaced, which becomes a problem when you make the text a "text box" to show your players.

am I doing something wrong?

[Cantstanzya]

I haven't used it, but there is a utility that will take a word doc and bring it into Fantasy Grounds. Do a search on the forums and you should find it.

[Griogre]

I've discovered some problematic things with cutting and pasting

1. You can't paste text into the DM notes -this kind of defeats the purpose.

2. When you paste text into the story section, it is ALWAYS double-spaced, which becomes a problem when you make the text a "text box" to show your players.

am I doing something wrong?
First, cut and paste is poorly supported in the current release. It is touchy and you have to do things a certain way.

DM's don't have notes, players do. Do you mean the storybook? Carriage returns cause paragraph breaks which make it look like it is double spaced. Even typed in normally, you can't have two paragraphs in the same chat text frame. You need to make two chat text frames - this has nothing to do with cut and paste but isn't that apparent.

Just so you know, I now personally write my modules in word and then cut and paste them over into FG's xml. Now that I got the hang of it - it is fast and allows me to spell check - but there is a learning curve. There is also a word converter as someone mentioned but I originally didn't have word I had another word processor so I couldn't use it and got use to not using it.

One thing I did that helped me when I first started was to find a tiny free 1st level adventure with only a few encounters and then actually typed it directly into the storybook (I used Into the Darkness the 3.0 intro module which I translated to 3.5). I then downloaded another adventure off the WoTC site and after looking at xml of the first one cut and pasted that one into the xml of a new campaign after first reading the XML of the first one I typed in.

[gurney9999]

There is also a external macro program that lunatis created a script for that allows for pasting into certain fields that the normal FG interface does not allow for (in addition to a myriad of other functions it provides).

See more info on the FG Hotkey file here:

https://www.fouruglymonsters.com/downloads_freebies.htm#hotkeys

[Silas1066]

What I have been doing is cutting and pasting from the module PDF and then converting the text to single-space line by line. It's pretty time consuming, but I did manage to convert an entire module last night.

I also select the images from the PDF to import the maps. This works well.

The worst problem I have is with the game crashing when I try to type the first few lines in the story area as DM. I don't want to reinstall the program, because I've put a lot of work into it (loaded up 2 more rulesets, 3 modules, dozens of portraits, etc.)

I'm hoping this doesn't get worse.

[kalmarjan]

If you want to reinstall the program, all you need to do is copy your campaign folder to another directory other than the one FG resides in. You can then reinstall, and copy the directory back. If that does not solve your problem, then look through your db.xml file for any corruption or strange garbled characters.

Hope that helps,

Sandeman

[Huscarl104]

Did you ever get an answer? I'm still looking. :)

[bmos]

I've discovered some problematic things with cutting and pasting
...
2. When you paste text into the story section, it is ALWAYS double-spaced, which becomes a problem when you make the text a "text box" to show your players.


What I have been doing is cutting and pasting from the module PDF and then converting the text to single-space line by line. It's pretty time consuming, but I did manage to convert an entire module last night.


Paste one paragraph into FG
Select the text you have pasted in FG (which will have extra line breaks)
Ctrl + J
Repeat with next paragraph

[Whaley]

Paste one paragraph into FG
Select the text you have pasted in FG (which will have extra line breaks)
Ctrl + J
Repeat with next paragraph


How have I gone this long without knowing Ctrl + J?!??!!
I Personally use Foxit Advanced PDF Editor which allows me to copy and paste multiple paragraphs at a time if needed and it formats accurately about 99% of the time. But Ctrl+J would have saved me hours of time spent earlier!

[A Social Yeti]

I've discovered some problematic things with cutting and pasting

1. You can't paste text into the DM notes -this kind of defeats the purpose.

2. When you paste text into the story section, it is ALWAYS double-spaced, which becomes a problem when you make the text a "text box" to show your players.

am I doing something wrong?


this is one of the most confusing aspects of FG right here.
the "notes" section is NOT part of any packaged module.
the Notes are a live on the fly in session active campaign only tool. If you export the campaign as a module to run again later, none of the notes will be in it. That section is treated like it is the player's post-it notes, that are not part of the module the GM runs.
So when building a module the GM should never put anything in the notes sections that is considered part of the "module." The Gm only puts stuff in the notes for players when it matter to them in their campaign, but not as material of the module itself.

It took me a good while to figure that out. Once I started huffing the chlorine gas though it totally made prefect sense to see it that way of course. ;)

[damned]

this is one of the most confusing aspects of FG right here.
the "notes" section is NOT part of any packaged module.
the Notes are a live on the fly in session active campaign only tool. If you export the campaign as a module to run again later, none of the notes will be in it. That section is treated like it is the player's post-it notes, that are not part of the module the GM runs.
So when building a module the GM should never put anything in the notes sections that is considered part of the "module." The Gm only puts stuff in the notes for players when it matter to them in their campaign, but not as material of the module itself.

It took me a good while to figure that out. Once I started huffing the chlorine gas though it totally made prefect sense to see it that way of course. ;)

You are replying to a post that is 15years old....