drailin

D&D Item Card Template- A LaTeX Template for making simple, effective item cards by me! (www.overleaf.com)

Hey there programmers, I know this is a more markup/typesetting deal, but I thought there might be people who are interested. After being dissapointed with many of the options out there for making ttrpg item cards, I made a LaTeX template for that exact purpose. I wanted it to be relatively easy to use, generate clean images,...

drailin, 6 months ago

Yeah, I feel kinda silly for not thinking about it in v1. I play in person, but distribute items via discord, so it never even crossed my mind.

drailin, 6 months ago

Thanks! I couldn't sleep one night last week so I threw the basics together. Then I went on a mission to understand how to implement logic gates into LaTeX, get everything turned into commands, automating the sizing, etc. By Friday it was easy enough to use and made a good enough looking card that I figured I would share it with the world!

drailin, 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

Hey, the printable card setting has been implemented (just waiting for Overleaf to publish it), but I thought I'd show off the result here first:

Printable Card Example

It fixes the card size to a 5:7 ratio, the same as any playing card (usually 2.5×3.5in), so it will fit any sleeve for game cards when printed.

drailin, 6 months ago

LaTeX is a typeset that is written in plain text with Markup language. Word, docs, acrobat are all WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editors, so you type the words and use toolbars to edit formatting. In markup, what you write is what you get: you type everything, including the commands for alignment, spacing, etc. It makes control and customization of your document easier. If you ever have tried to use MS Word to make a good looking equation and wanted to die when it messed up your images and spacing 10 pages back, markup typesetting is the solution.

My tip would be to find a few templates on overleaf that you might find useful and just mess around and try to come up with what you want to see. Could be for work documents, could be for a hobby, whatever. Overleaf, the website I shared this project on, is great because it handles the backend stuff like compiling, software installs, etc. and allows you to easily copy templates over from premade projects in the gallery.

I learned to use it for writing scientific publications, but eventually I used it for all my homework, making 'official' looking DnD content, keeping a log of my work; basically most documents that are longer than 1 page. It is particularly good for science and math writing, but is almost as versatile as HTML for whatever you want to make.

drailin, 6 months ago

They are, and will always be, iconic. I only used one other source when making this, mainly for the font pack and the potential to add a texture map to the text block in lieu of solid gray.

drailin, 6 months ago

It was funky and felt distinctly un-LaTeX with the pdf cropping and graphic declarations, but was super fun. Way different from academic writing or even hobby typesetting with normal, pre-made classes (the DnD 5e LaTeX Template by rpgtex is a gamechanger for homebrewed dnd content and was the catalyst for this). The standalone document class is really weird to work with, and using tcolorboxes as the main document content feels like I am fitting a square peg into a non-euclidean hole, but it is still working!

I am just glad I decided to use LaTeX and not python for this.

D&D Item Card Template- A LaTeX Template for making simple, effective item cards by me! (kbin.social)

After starting some earnest homebrewing efforts for magic items in my campaign, I was getting frustrated with the limited options for item cards I could give to my players. I am not great with illustrator/photoshop, have terrible handwriting, didn't particularly like the form-fillable cards I found online, and the...

Watching the game with my son. (imgur.com)

Throwback photo of me and my boy watching some basketball last year. We both like watching the lil dudes scurrying up and down the phone screen.

D&D Item Card Template- A LaTeX Template for making simple, effective item cards by me! (kbin.social)

drailin, 6 months ago

Regarding not being familiar with LaTeX, I have already successfully used this template alongside chatGPT to convert items from a block of poorly formatted text to a finished card in just a few minutes. All you have to do is feed chatGPT the item's description and the contents of the TeX files contained in the package (itemcard.tex, itemCommands.tex, tcolorboxSettings.tex) and it will do a pretty bang up job of formatting your item to match the template.

drailin, 6 months ago

Regarding not being familiar with LaTeX, I have already successfully used this template alongside chatGPT to convert items from a block of poorly formatted text to a finished card in just a few minutes. All you have to do is feed chatGPT the item's description and the contents of the TeX files contained in the package (itemcard.tex, itemCommands.tex, tcolorboxSettings.tex) and it will do a pretty bang up job of formatting your item to match the template.

drailin, 6 months ago

If you get a chance, let me know how it goes! So far I am the only person to use it (and I might not be an impartial judge) so I would really like honest feedback! It should require only a little aptitude for markup languages to get a grip on it, but re: my other comment in this thread, using an ai to read the template files and format your item description to match has already proven quite successful.

drailin, 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

Joke answer: I am a young burnt out academic who is putting off writing his PhD thesis, so I fit right in the sweet spot for this sorta thing.

Real answer: I learned to do this as I was doing this. I had a solid idea of what I wanted and just started going through the LaTeX documentation to find the things I would need. Really it is just three new tricks I had to learn:

• The standalone document class, which crops the pdf to the content inside
• tcolorbox, which usually adds a blurb in a colored box for text inserts
• Logic gates for LaTeX

Everything else was just formatting. I was inspired by this template that showed that LaTeX would be good for dnd stuff.

drailin, 6 months ago

Not only can I not draw, I apparently can't even figure out how to properly attach an image using kbin. Example item card: https://imgur.com/a/QIgFZ6n

drailin, 6 months ago

I messed up the xpost, but it is already up on dnd@lemmy.world. i will throw it up on dndnext though!

drailin, 6 months ago

Regarding not being familiar with LaTeX, I have already successfully used this template alongside chatGPT to convert items from a block of poorly formatted text to a finished card in just a few minutes. All you have to do is feed chatGPT the item's description and the contents of the TeX files contained in the package (itemcard.tex, itemCommands.tex, tcolorboxSettings.tex) and it will do a pretty bang up job of formatting your item to match the template.

drailin, 6 months ago

Not only can I not draw, I apparently can't even figure out how to properly attach an image using kbin. Example item card: https://imgur.com/a/QIgFZ6n

drailin, 6 months ago

Regarding not being familiar with LaTeX, I have already successfully used this template alongside chatGPT to convert items from a block of poorly formatted text to a finished card in just a few minutes. All you have to do is feed chatGPT the item's description and the contents of the TeX files contained in the package (itemcard.tex, itemCommands.tex, tcolorboxSettings.tex) and it will do a pretty bang up job of formatting your item to match the template.