At 12:09 AM 11/23/2007, you wrote:
Quote:
You start out with a clean sheet and put objects on it: containers for data, text, grafic elements, whatever. These objects can be position, resized, aligned and so on.
Now you can easily bind different things to the containers; you just drag&drop the thing you want from a list onto the container. After completing the template you load your data, trigger the report generator and the data of this specific data set is handed over to the generator and fed into the containers.
For a character sheet you either have data of a fixed size (attributes, saving throw bonuses,...) or lists of data (equipment, spells, available weapons,...) so you'd probably need two different mechanisms to fill the containers.
This way of working is rather intuitive - for me, at least [img]./modules/mdforum/images/smiles/icon_cool.gif[/img] - and gives you near complete freedom for your design-your-own sheet.
To make it perfect, allow for filtering and sorting of the data within a container. We could have a list of combat-relevant feats under the combat block: make a container for the list of feats and filter it for combat relevant ones. This would of course necessitate an extension of the data, but hey! dreaming should be possible! [img]./modules/mdforum/images/smiles/icon_biggrin.gif[/img]
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What you're asking for represents many months of development time. Since there are only two of us here doing development, and one of us isn't even a full-time developer (I've got lots of business stuff to deal with, too), that's not something we'll be able to create any time soon. It's something we WANT to add and that we've already discussed, but there are too many things screaming for our time and attention that need to be done first. For example, tools to let folks create their own data files from scratch is something that lots of folks are asking for, so that's a critical piece. Plus the Campaign R&D stuff. Plus the data files for numerous game systems that people want. The list goes on and we have to juggle it all in pieces.
What we currently have is a purely script-based way of doing all that you describe above. The problem is that it has a steep learning curve, as opposed to the drag-and-drop UI that you suggest. What we need is something inbetween as a viable initial solution. Then we can work towards the ideal tool like you suggest on an iterative evolutionary basis.
Since we can't create the holy grail solution on the first go-round, the initial tool will be missing things you would ideally want. So the question becomes: What are the things that are MOST important? What things should we focus on FIRST?