Draw Steel Ability Card PDF Generator

[lament cedar]

Hello! I whipped up a quick and dirty implementation of a customizable ability card PDF creator from Draw Steel!
It allows you to pick from the different types of ability cards you need, like Signature or Triggered or even the blank ones, based on the character sheet, and create your own 3x3 page that's a form fillable PDF
It's REALLY bare bones right now, completely functional and doesn't utilize the actual UI for the cards from the character sheet
https://drawsteel-ability-cards.vercel.app/

[elder geyser]

This is such a useful tool! Do you have plans to develop this further? If you’re taking suggestions, the ability to type text in would be awesome and consumable/item card templates would be cool too.

Great job!

Also the look of the ui is really pleasant

[lament cedar]

yes! I've got some ideas for sure
what do you mean by type in text? You can do so in the pdf itself but do you mean in individual cards?

[elder geyser]

Oh I guess that’s exactly what I mean! I was saying typing in the generator ui so when you click crate pdf the text is already there.

[lament cedar]

ah, I wanted to keep it tightly scoped for something I'd use lol, which is a PDF that's both form-fillable but also writeable by hand
that being said, I don't think it'd be super challenging to like click on a card you've added in the 3x3 grid and fill out a form to prefill those values, I'll see if I can get to that in the next few days

Consumable/item card templates and titles are a a great idea! I'll see what I can do about that too

the PDF isn't the prettiest, it turns out generating a PDF with code is quite... challenging if you're not both an adept designer and an engineer lol

[elder geyser]

I know nothing about coding so I could only imagine😅 but great work so far

[lament cedar]

@elder geyser I've added "prefill card" functionality! you should now see a new button once you've added a card to the grid to edit the stuff in that card, which will pre-fill the PDF with that text if you want it to be

[lament cedar]

I'll start working on generating other types of cards soon!

[elder geyser]

Amazing!

[lament cedar]

@wide tiger do you have any feature requests you'd like on this app? I'm looking for ideas besides the other cars types

[wide tiger]

I think a lot of my requests would be idiosyncratic design things for the cards themselves (colour, position of fields, etc). Obviously pretty significant scope increase, but the ability to automatically populate ability cards (such as from the Steel Compendium's json) would dramatically increase its utility.

[lament cedar]

Ah yes! That's good feature request honestly, and I'm not a designer so I'll take any input on design I can! Creating PDFs programmatically is a significant challenge however so I don't know how easily I'd be able to implement those designs 😓

But the loading of data from the json I think is somewhat doable

[wide tiger]

Yeah, I've been looking into generating card designs and I think the easiest option is to design them in html and use a headless browser to make them into a PDF which uhhh... isn't that easy.

If it's of interest, this is what I'm currently working with for ability cards — but I totally think people could reasonably prioritize different things in their design

[lament cedar]

Wait... I can do that! That's not too hard to do if I can do the html implementation easily enough

That's a great idea

Hell, it could just be a html form that prints using user dialog that a user could save as a PDF, instead of a PDF on its own

Why didn't I think of that 🤔

[wide tiger]

Hell yeah. Glad I could help :D

[lament cedar]

If you have an exported html card for each you'd wanna use, I can leverage those designs into my next version?

Seems like a fun afternoon tomorrow

[wide tiger]

Unfortunately they're just affinity publisher templates right now. I've been meaning to try and make html templates for them for a while now, just haven't gotten the chance yet

[lament cedar]

No worries! That's enough to get me started maybe!

[lament cedar]

If you can make the affinity publisher file available I might be able to parse them as HTML, tailwind can help a lot with that

[wide tiger]

Let me know if this works!

[lament cedar]

it does! perfect!!

[lament cedar]

what's the draw steel font you use?

[wide tiger]

The name/header fields are Tilt Warp and the rest of the text is Charter.

[lament cedar]

there's this missing one called Draw Steel?

oh I'm stupid, those are your custom fonts

[lament cedar]

import worked fine. gonna spend the rest of the afternoon working on this to make it pretty! 😄

[lament cedar]

hm
can't quite get everythin the same way with html, let me see what I can do

[lament cedar]

I realize that https://discord.com/channels/332362513368875008/1335848698298765333 exists, so I'll probably not add a ton more to my app, since this is doing a much more full-featured situation than what I was intending, but also is the natural progression of what my app would be doing

[wide tiger]

Ah yeah, that's fair enough!

[astral otter]

Regardless of if you continue to develop it further (lit. don't let me stop you), this is a great thing to add to Heroic Resources

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