HeroLab and Linux - a REALITY!

[Colen]

Unfortunately, saving to PDF has known issues on Linux that would be very hard for us to fix. For some reason, drawing text works differently enough on that OS that our PDF rendering is messed up.

Until Wine duplicates how Windows renders text exactly, I recommend seeing if you can find a PDF printer driver, if such a thing exists on Linux. That way you can print as if to a printer, but it should generate a PDF for you instead of printing onto paper.

Hope this helps!

[LovesTha]

Installing a pdf printer in ubuntu is realy easy:
sudo apt-get install cups-pdf
I haven't tested it with PoL->Wine->HeroLab, but otherwise it works well and put's the pdf in a folder called PDF in your home directory.

[DarkOne]

I am planning to purchase HeroLab provided I get HeroLab (in demo mode) running on Linux using PlayOnLinux. This is now the only thing that is holding me back from purchasing HeroLab.

Using PlayOnLinux, I manage to create virtual drive with HeroLab installed.

When I start HeroLab I immediately obtain an window titled "Security Warning" with error message "There is a problem with the certificate for this site." This occurs before selecting Demo option. Selecting Yes to continue, I choose Demo, and get to page asking for Game System to retrieve.

Those who managed to get HeroLab working under PlayOnLinux, could you tell us how you handled this error.

[DarkOne]

Forgot to mention I using openSUSE 12.3

[raventower]

i have hero lab installed in linux mint with win and have play on linux installed. it runs but wont download updates. help?

[wulfblat]

Originally Posted by raventower

i have hero lab installed in linux mint with win and have play on linux installed. it runs but wont download updates. help?

I hit this too. I even installed the most recent available IE8 from PlayOnLinux, which had no trouble accessing the internet, but still Hero Lab errored out.

As a work around you can manually download the game data file from the Hero Lab download page (these are .hl files) and then click on the import file button in Hero Lab to import the downloaded file.

[zarlor]

I've got this running on Ubuntu 15 just fine, but HeroLab didn't work for it right out of the box. I had to install the winbind packger (sudo apt-get install winbind) and made sure on the install of HeroLab with PlayOnLinux that I selected the option to set the version of Wine to use and tell it to get the latest Wine (1.7.50 at that time) and that seemed to work fine for me.

[BlueJayofEvil]

I've currently got Hero Lab working on my Linux partition on my laptop (openSUSE Tumbleweed.) I'm using the standard Wine method (current version 1.7.5x) as opposed to PlayOnLinux (POL uses Wine to achieve what it does but comes with easy pre-made configuration scripts and easier installation options.) There's nothing wrong with POL, I just tend to use plain old Wine so I can troubleshoot my own issues and learn possible workarounds that may help others.

The Hero Lab app itself tends to be a bit slower than on Windows (to be expected in many cases with Wine) and exporting to PDF, while functional, is quite slow. Hero Lab tries to open a Windows PDF viewer after an export to PDF and produce a message saying one could not be found, but the PDF file will be saved correctly in the directory where you choose to save it to. (If there's an option to not open an exported PDF automatically, please inform me of where said option can be located. It would be greatly appreciated.) I've tried installing a Windows PDF viewer with Wine, but Hero Lab still couldn't find one so I decided to stick to exporting PDFs.
There isn't much that I've found to not work so far.

If you want better app font/smoothing support, you can optionally install the Windows gdiplus library (it may or may not help, YMMV, but it I noticed an improvement on my system.) This can be done using the winetricks script (the openSUSE Wine package comes with this, but other distributions may package it separately or require a manual download of it.) To use it, log in to your user account (not root) and open up a terminal and enter the command winetricks gdiplus (sudo is not needed to execute the winetricks script command) and the library will be installed and configured automatically. Again, YMMV (your mileage may vary.)
There may be other optional Windows libraries that may help, but I've not tested any other than gdiplus. (Winetricks has a list of common ones that can be selected.)

If you have a printer set up, saving/exporting to PDF then opening the PDF in a native Linux PDF viewer is a viable option to get your file printed. (I haven't tested/looked into printing through Wine to a native Linux printer setup, so it may or may not be possible. Exporting to a PDF then printing that from a native viewer is likely the more convenient method to avoid issues.)

I'll soon be submitting my Wine results to the app database on the WineHQ website (the most recent entry was Hero Lab 4.3a with Wine 1.6.1, tested over a year ago.)