To be honest a lot of the "heavy lifting" is exactly that stuff of copying and pasting out everything from the books. Even if you don't code a single thing just getting all of the text out (and UniqueIDs using the Two-Letter designator in them for everything) is probably going to be a huge help. Next would be the relatively minor coding of simple pre-reqs and pick-reqs for setting requirements for things, and most anyone should be able to do those kinds of things as there are a TON of examples in other Edges and Hindrances and so on.

After that it's just working out what other coding needs to or could be done to help automate things more, is all. And while that stuff can be a bit of a pain to figure out it's a lot less overall work than all of that copying and pasting tends to be, IMHO.

That is what I was going to say. The scripting is easy. The data entry is the time consuming part. Even if you just went and added edges and whatever without putting in the requirements and eval scripts that is helpful.

Well then I'm happy to help with the data entry. It's pretty brainless work, but I've been blessed with the ability to type about 100 wpm and can certainly cut and paste. I went to the original sources and put in additional information for all the gear/armor/weaponry (though a couple I still haven't given to Dartnet). If this will help anyone who can finish up the files, let me know and I'll send it your way.

Btw, I would want to make sure the Unique IDs I use match what you're doing. My thoughts would be SR, but I haven't put that on the other files yet but they're all still unique.

I would think SR would be appropriate, but I'd send anything you may have done to Dartnet in any case. It seems to me he's taking point on this one and it's in darned good hands as far as I'm concerned.

I wonder if you can copy-paste from the pdfs. Pinnicale is kind of hit and miss with that, some you can, others you cannot.

I've been able to copy and paste with every Pinnacle title. I've never found one I couldn't and if you have one that doesn't have a text layer I would check where you got the PDF from. The only problem is formatting. The main one being that paragraphs in their PDFs are not broken out into paragraphs, instead the end-of-line line breaks are normally paragraph breaks in the PDFs so you generally have to fix those. EM dashes also tend to come over wrong, and they use a good number of EM dashes, and occasionally single or double quotes or the minus sign end up weird as well, but normally I find pasting to a plain text editor, like Notepad, and then doing the copy and paste from notepad into the Editor tends to fix those issues. Personally I think that's an issue with Hero Lab rather than Pinnacle's PDFs, though, since most everything else handles those special characters just fine.

My Deadlands Reloaded Player's Guide Explorer and Deadlands Reloaded Marshal Explorer pdfs are from RPG Now / Drivethru. They let you select, but not copy. Those are the only two that I can think of but there may be more. Those were the only two that I recall trying and being disappointed.

You are right, there are occasional things that do not work in Hero Lab. I think it might be the difference between the type of characters that are used, where Hero Lab uses a more limited amount of characters (only what is on the keyboard) while books and webpages have a larger amount to choose from. I can understand why, as they would not have thought that someone might want to use more than what is on the keyboard. But some pdfs have some extras.

It's probably just the character set in use, is all. Not sure if it's possible to have that changed in Hero Lab or not, though. Switching from, say, ASCII to UTF-16 or the like could, I suppose, cause some issues somewhere.

I normally get PDFs direct from Pinnacle, but I can say I just checked the DLR files I have (GWG10200) and they all copy and paste just fine for me. You could try and see if there is just a different version available at Drivethru since you originally downloaded them, maybe those updated files will work for you. Otherwise I guess I would just recommend getting straight from Pinnacle otherwise.

When I run into this problem I often use a notepad transfer buffer. Just copy and paste to notepad then copy from notepad to paste in the editor. I hope you find this helpful.

This could be an artifact of the reformatting from a standard version to an explore edition. Depending on the software used to reformat the text it could lose some of its editorial standards. My standard edition pdfs from Drivethrough RPG work with no issue.