My Problem.

[kingtycoon]

As you know- I've gotten pretty deep into game-design lately.



I'm working on the follow up book on how to run the game - and it's going well! Remind me to tell you about the setting & adventures Agatha has been coming up with. It's pretty neat. Plus there's a bit more going on, I guess, fermenting. Anyhow- I'm pretty happy about my record-sheet designs and here's the source of my current problem.

So I have a rudimentary database - really an excel sheet of MONSTERS - and I'm going to need to make one for a few other kinds of independently generated stuff. There's a lot of new material & so on - and what I'm trying to do is output the fields into the form, making the record sheet reproduce over & over. I need a few variants of this stuff too.

My solution right now - which you see the prototype of above- is to do a mail merge into word -and then make the graphic the watermark on the document. Word's output is troubled on this - and it's not really optimal.

There's no dynamic resizing of text, for example, or proper centering - plus, I'm having to rely in these text boxes that are kind of janky. It's not ideal, is what I'm getting at.

My problem though is that I'm not sure of a better solution - I'd certainly use one if I knew about it, and I'm not incapable of learning something new- so long as it's not ruinously expensive or really excessively sophisticated. So I call out to the ether - what do you think?

Comments

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

There's a million and one ways of doing this I suspect and - with the exception of text boxes - I'd probably end up doing what you're currently doing on first blush, and might even using webpage with php calls from the text file with comma separated values. starting with this snippet.

$string";
?>

(This simply reads in a line and outputs it... one instead could use array file (monsters.csv) and then output individual fields as appropriate)