Purchase questions re: Authoring Kit

[StarManta]

I'm looking at getting Hero Lab for the purposes of my own RPG, and I have a few questions before purchasing:

1) It appears that the Authoring Kit is treated like a game license, and that when I buy HeroLab for $30 it may include the Kit as the one 'freebie'. Is that correct?

2) According to the wiki, it looks like it uses XML to store the data (for lists of gear, etc). This should be fairly simple to import/export to other sources. Has anyone used this, and are there any caveats I should be aware of?

 

[Mathias]

You can choose the authoring kit as your game system. It will give you non-demo access to any system created with the authoring kit, including our sample systems, Savage Worlds and 4th edition.

Yes, the raw data is in XML, but in my experience, the problem isn't importing - the problem is parsing the data into the pieces HL needs to know about. So the majority of your time will not be spent on data entry when adding a new system to the authoring kit.

Take weapons in Pathfinder for example - each of them has critical hit information. Here are some examples:

x2
19-20/x2
x3
x2/x3
-
18-20/x2

You need to set up a system in the authoring kit that allows HL to know what each of those mean, in a way that allows that stored data to interact properly with all the abilities and effects that want to modify it, so that you can display the correctly adjusted value to the user. Once that's done, if you're good with XML, you can probably build something that will take the raw data and convert it into what you need.