Using Hero Lab with programs like Adobe Illustrator

[Shepherd]

Hi Rob and others,

I bought Hero Lab with the intention of using it as a build tool to help make a MnM supplement, but I need to design the supplement itself using other software (Adobe Illustrator and InDesign in combination).

I've tried exporting the hero files as PDFs, but they're impossible to work with in AI -- every letter is its own entity, so manipulating the PDFs in AI or cutting and pasting them from Acrobat Pro into other software is impossible.

This obviously is a problem, especially when faced with the daunting task of re-typing all the powers, feats, and stats for dozens of characters.

Are there other workarounds for this? Has anyone else combined Hero Lab with other software to redesign their HL characters without having to rework everything from scratch?

 

[Shepherd]

I'm the only person who's run into this problem? The only person who would like to export Hero Lab data into a format I can use in layout software?

Really?

 

[Lawful_g]

Yep. You're all alone in an uncaring universe... *wind blows over the dusty wasteland*

 

[KaitlynStuart]

Shepherd,

No, you're not the only one. Right now, what I've been doing is either using a jackleg XSL stylesheet (that I laboriously whipped up over several days -- XSL is not my best skill) to "translate" the XML data from the portfolio files into an XML file that InDesign can read, or exporting to text and just importing the text into InDesign (mostly a combination of both). I'm hoping that the Authoring Kit, now that it's out, will offer options to make the import a lot easier -- I'd love to skip the XSL step, since I still have some problems with translating the powers.

 

[Colen]

As KaitlynStuart suggested in another thread, you can also choose File -> Output Active Hero Summary to get a plain text summary of the hero.