D20

[chiefweasel]

Hey all,

I have been posting about issues with the SRD files, so having problems creating prestige classes, but I have been working my way through the Magic Item Compendium. I do have a question for someone, I have the entire listing of magic items in HTML format and each item in a seperate file. Does anyone know if there is a program to convert something like that into text format? and second, can a text type format, produced from the format above, be imported into Hero Labs directly, thus creating a .dat file?

just curious. Some programmer, with skill above my meager ones, might look into something like this. Just let me know. thanks.

[heratyk]

There are several ways to convert from html to text. You could open the file in Microsoft Word or a similar word processor and select save as...text. You could highlight the text in your web browser, copy, and paste into notepad. Or you could open the html file in your favorite text editor and do a search & replace for anything between < and >.

The .dat files for Hero Lab are in XML format (HTML is a subset of XML), so converting to text might be a step backwards. If you have different parts of the description formatted differently (for instance, name is a heading, price is in italics, description is in 12-point arial), you can do a search & replace in a text editor to save some work. So, in this example, if your html document has the item name as formatted as heading2, it might look like:
<h2>Boots of Stinking</h2>
You can replace all instances of <h2> with name=" and all instances of </h2> with "
That would make it look like:
name="Boots of Stinking"

Then you can do the same thing with other elements of the listing, fill in the missing XML tags, and just save the text-only file with a .dat extension.

Here is an example of a magic weapon from srd_magicweapons.dat in Hero Lab:

<thing
id="iAdmDagger"
name="Adamantine Dagger"
compset="MagicWep"
description="This nonmagical dagger is made out of adamantine. As a masterwork weapon, it has a +1 enhancement bonus on attack rolls.{br}{br}No aura (nonmagical); Price 3,002 gp.">
<fieldval field="gCost" value="3000"/>
<fieldval field="gSizeCost" value="2"/>
<fieldval field="wAttBonus" value="1"/>

<child entity="wSpecMagic">
<bootstrap thing="wDagger"/>
</child>
</thing>

[chiefweasel]

With each item/feat/whatever being its own seperate file, it might take longer to convent them then to add them myself. I was hoping for a program to do them all in one fell swoop. That way I could offer the contents of entire D7D books in HL useable .dat files.

Doing them one at a time is possible but will take much longer.

Maybe at Gen Con this year, Lonewolf can can set up some sort of grass roots effort to hook people together to tackle different classes/magic items/feats/whatever. Once we have a bunch of files in a central location we can combine them and bacially have the books in HL format. just a thought.

[heratyk]

I am working on the spell compendium right now. I'll post my work when I'm done. If anyone else is working on other suppliments, we can divvy up the task to avoid duplication of effort, and all post our results here.

[rob]

Originally Posted by chiefweasel

Maybe at Gen Con this year, Lonewolf can can set up some sort of grass roots effort to hook people together to tackle different classes/magic items/feats/whatever. Once we have a bunch of files in a central location we can combine them and bacially have the books in HL format. just a thought.

We'll be presenting a number of seminars on data file authoring at GenCon this year. I'm not sure we can actively organize such an effort from a legal standpoint. However, I don't think it would be a problem for interested authors to meet at one of our seminars and then go off to setup their own collective effort.

That being said, GenCon is still 7 months away, so you'll probably want to get things rolling sooner than GenCon....

[chiefweasel]

I am currently working on all the feats from the PH-2. I have already done a few of the prestige classes from it as well:

halfling Outrider
order of the bow initiate

If anyone would like any of those I will post them for people. Things like the magic item compnedium is a large project, and has some issues onto itself. such as the location of items. There were changed a bit from the original game system and HL doesnt use the new system. So some things need to be fudged a bit.

I will also be at Gen Con, I run the Cheese Weasel ConGames there. I dont mind getting together with a group of people and discusing how to divide up some of the work.