Basic Fantasy RPG Forums

Thanks! There's still a lot of work that needs to be done, but life struck on me and on Dustinian as well. Here's hoping I can dedicate some time to this again pretty soon.

One thing I came across recently that may be worth looking into is GitBook. It's a tool that let's a book be written in Markdown and then compiled out into a website or other formats (such as epub). It would be a large undertaking to convert the text into Markdown, but the payoff could be really nice if we end up with an easy to use website and ebook versions in one go.

Hey, everybody. Been a while since I posted.

asacolips wrote:It would be a large undertaking to convert the text into Markdown

Nah, it'd be easy. I can write a TTL script to do that. I've also recently been learning about markdown and Git since I migrated the TTL project to GitHub several months ago. But I need to work on TTL; there are several improvements I'm working on.

Once I have TTL updated, I want to re-create the SRD from the newest revision of the core rulebook. Then I can work on Markdown.

Dustinian wrote:Once I have TTL updated...

So, I don't know that I've posted much about this in detail, but I've been creating this SRD using a scripting language I've been working on for years: Text Transformation Language (TTL).

I'm an ex-technical writer, and even in my current IT manager role, I find myself rolling up my sleeves and helping out when folks are looking for a way to update a couple hundred (or thousand) documents at once.

I wrote TTL because I didn't know Regular Expressions, and every time I tried to learn Regular Expressions, it turned my brains to mush.

Anyway, I tell you all that to say: I have done a HECKUVA lotta work to TTL in the months since my last post. It's pretty darned robust. You should check out the GitHub site for it if you're interested.

TTL is free and open-source (GNU GPL3).

Dustinian wrote:I want to re-create the SRD from the newest revision of the core rulebook.

Those TTL updates enabled me to re-write my BFRPG SRD scripts without having to use lots of hacks and workarounds. I've spent the last two weeks or so saving the new version of the core rulebook, and re-writing my TTL scripts. I've got the SRD in better shape than ever! I fixed a bunch of broken links, BOM artifacts, and orphan tags.

The SRD is at the same URL, but now it's up-to-date as of revision 99 (previously revision 79).

Dustinian wrote:Then I can work on Markdown.

I'm writing a new script literally right now to migrate the cleaned-up HTML into Markdown. Your comment was well-timed, asacolips, because I had been learning Markdown for a few months due to moving TTL to GitHub (GitHub uses a "Readme" Markdown file as the primary documentation for a project).

I HOPE to release the Markdown later on tonight, but more likely it will be next weekend.

Anyway, SRD is updated, TTL is good shape, and I'm working on Markdown.

BTW: Let me know if anyone wants me to ZIP up my BFRPG TTL script along with the TTL executable and the source file I worked with. I could set it up to where you could see TTL in action by downloading the zip, decompressing it, and double-clicking on a .BAT file.

Woo, cool stuff! I've always been more of a regex and BeautifulSoup person myself, but I'm glad to hear that's working out well. I probably won't be able to make any improvements on my side of the css for a long while; I'm involved in a large project on the side that's going to eat most of my free time between now and October. Still, great work!

My brain is turning to mush just reading all of that! Just letting you know that I use the SRD a lot and I thank you sincerely for doing it, all who were/are involved

Delver wrote:Just letting you know that I use the SRD a lot and I thank you sincerely for doing it, all who were/are involved

No problem, Delver! It's been a fun project, both as a project in it's own right and as a testbed for TTL. But I'm really glad you find it useful. I'd love negative feedback, if you have a moment. Tell me what irks you about the SRD site. I'd love to be able to ponder that and see if I could solve it with an upcoming change. Thanks for taking the time to respond, though! It means a LOT to me to know that someone actually USES the SRD.

asacolips wrote:I probably won't be able to make any improvements on my side of the css for a long while;

Hey, no problem at all. The MD challenge has gotten me something to sink my teeth into. FYI, I have a script that produces MD that's great, with one exception: OpenOffice splits some of the two-line headers into separate rows. I'm still working on this; I just thought of a solution yesterday, but have not had time to implement.

And even after I get the MD done, I have two other goals:

• More internal hyperlinks. Whenever a sentence references the "attack bonus" or some particular monster, or spell... I'd love to hyperlink there.
• EPUB and MOBI output. I want to try the MD to EPUB that you referenced a while back. But I also may try to go right from HTML to EPUB through Calibre. I just think an EPUB copy that I can flip through, navigate, etc. on a tablet would be HUGE for running games from a tablet.

So I have plenty to do! And I greatly appreciate all you've done to date! Good luck on your project!

We should be able to make a pass at creating links to referenced sections. I imagine the overall function would look something like I'm not sure if that's something you can do in TTL, but it may be a good extension to make if not. It's definitely doable with BeautifulSoup's parser, so this may work well as a post-process after the document has been converted with TTL that we then run again in BeautifulSoup.

Errrm... Seems as if the SRD page has been moved? Has the link changed? Need updating? Help! I'm lost!

Delver wrote:Errrm... Seems as if the SRD page has been moved? Has the link changed? Need updating? Help! I'm lost!

Not sure how it happened, but the entire _prototypes folder was wiped. I recovered it. Should be all good now. Sorry, Delver!