World book software?

Rusty Wallace wrote:
> There must be tools out there for doing this sort of thing. It's
> basically technical documentation for a roleplaying game with
> convenient hotlinks to ease the writing/editing process.
>
> Anyone know of a software package that does a sizable subset of the
> above and doesn't cost a fortune?

Yagsbook[1] aims for this, and does some of it. It's a sourceforge
project, and therefore free. However, it's written by me, for me[2],
so it being useful for anyone else is purely coincidental.

Yagsbook is an XML format designed to mark up roleplaying games.
You can describe characters, towns, maps and historical events etc
in XML, then produce PDF or HTML from that. Of course, it means
editing raw XML, which a lot of people probably won't like.

There's a Java application which builds an Encyclopedia out of a
collection of Yagsbook articles. What it produces is a static set
of HTML pages which are cross linked, indexed and categorised
based on their contents. There are plans for producing a PDF version
of the encyclopedia for printing, but they haven't been realised
yet (embedding maps of random size into HTML is easy, especially
when you can embed a thumbnail and link out, doing this on a printed
page is a lot harder). Private/public stuff is also planned, but
unimplemented.

It is currently designed to support my Yags[3] game system, but
does have rudimentary support for other systems (via namespaces,
so you can define a character with d20, GURPS and Yags stats for
example).

[1] http://yagsbook.sourceforge.net/
[2] Principally, my Habisfern campaign. See an example at:
http://www.glendale.org.uk/habisfern/encyclopedia/entries/index.html
[3] http://www.glendale.org.uk/yags


--
Be seeing you, sam DeleteThis @glendale.org.uk
Sam. http://www.glendale.org.uk/

Brandon Blackmoor <bblackmoor.RemoveThis@blackgate.net> wrote:

(snip)
>
>OpenOffice can do most of what you describe. It's free, and relatively
>easy to use.

Can you expand a little? What does OpenOffice do that MS Office
doesn't? I've already gone the route of building various Excel and
Access databases to track campaigns. Spreadsheets are quick and dirty
and pretty effective for capturing data, but
reporting/indexing/crosslinking are pretty big challenges. A
relational database offers much better reporting and will capture the
data just fine, but with the requirement of alot more up front work
and a less flexible design. Crosslinking of data is still a major
pain.

MS Word will do some indexing and crosslinking, but not in a way that
is particularly suited to my needs. And the ability to report on the
data is minimal.

All of these options can probably be beaten into service. I have
beaten Excel and Access into a minimal level of utility at least for
data capture already, but my purpose is to find something that I can
load up and start using with minimal effort. Time spent customizing
the tool is time wasted.

An offline wiki with relatively graceful editing tools and robust
reporting support would do the trick quite nicely. There are several
that come close on the first point, but there seems to be little
attention being paid to the notion of rendering wiki data to paper.

I think this is the best I've found so far:
http://wikidpad.python-hosting.com/wiki

Rusty

Samuel Penn <sam RemoveThis @bifrost.demon.co.uk> wrote:

(snip)
>Yagsbook[1] aims for this, and does some of it. It's a sourceforge
>project, and therefore free. However, it's written by me, for me[2],
>so it being useful for anyone else is purely coincidental.
(snip)
>
>[1] http://yagsbook.sourceforge.net/
>[2] Principally, my Habisfern campaign. See an example at:
> http://www.glendale.org.uk/habisfern/encyclopedia/entries/index.html
>[3] http://www.glendale.org.uk/yags

That's pretty fascinating. I took at look at the application pages
and your campaign pages. I'm definitely going to download this and
play around with it and keep an eye on future developments. Do you
have a mailing list or the like?

Rusty Wallace wrote:

> Samuel Penn <sam.TakeThisOut@bifrost.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>
> (snip)
>>Yagsbook[1] aims for this, and does some of it. It's a sourceforge
>>project, and therefore free. However, it's written by me, for me[2],
>>so it being useful for anyone else is purely coincidental.
> (snip)
>>
>>[1] http://yagsbook.sourceforge.net/
>>[2] Principally, my Habisfern campaign. See an example at:
>> http://www.glendale.org.uk/habisfern/encyclopedia/entries/index.html
>>[3] http://www.glendale.org.uk/yags
>
> That's pretty fascinating. I took at look at the application pages
> and your campaign pages. I'm definitely going to download this and
> play around with it and keep an eye on future developments. Do you
> have a mailing list or the like?

No, I don't. There's occasional discussion over on the lists at
www.freeroleplay.org (where we discuss things to do with open
source roleplaying games, including mechanics and tools such as
this). I know at least one person there who is looking at building
something around OpenOffice to do a similar sort of thing (with
server side stuff for managing the documents).

Development proceeds at a snail's pace, mostly being driven by
features that I need, as I need them. Any suggestions are of
course welcomed, doubly so if you're able to implement them

--
Be seeing you, http://www.glendale.org.uk/
Sam. sam.TakeThisOut@glendale.org.uk

I'm using Drupal for something similar, and though I haven't seen
anything RPG-specific done with this, it might just have most of what
you're looking for. Also it's written in PHP, free, open-source,
themeable, with a whole bunch of add-in modules, one of which is a
Glossary module that sounds like it might be of use for a world almanac
kind of thing...

http://drupal.org

I haven't used it for anything RPG-related (yet). Right now I'm mainly
using the Glossary links for technical articles. I'm definitely planning
a collaborative adventure and world design at some point in the near-
future. Most likely some kind of low-magic fantasy setting based on
Fudge. I'm at...

http://www.gunthersoft.com

Hope this helps,
GH


In article <gjk5u1dtjo4gq4sub9np9gh5cvo58plslo DeleteThis @4ax.com>,
jrustyw DeleteThis @ix.netcom.com says...
> I've tried databases, spreadsheets, text documents and offline wiki's
> with varying degrees of success. The wikis I have tried come the
> closest to what I'm looking for but are kind of a pain to really keep
> up and offer little in the way of reporting and such. It's no good to
> have a complex wiki database and be unable to render it to a readily
> printable and usable form.
>
> I want to build what is essentially an encyclopedia for my campaign
> that I can use to keep track of all the various bits and pieces. I
> want it to automatically recognize terms that have entries and hot
> link back to the main entry. For bonus points the main entry should
> have a list of links that go to other entries that reference the
> current entry. Super bonus points if I can flag entries
> public/private and so produce a fact book that the players can have. I
> should be able to easily print the whole thing out as a book in
> alphabetical order with full indexing that will reference the
> appropriate page number in the document. Ideally I should be able to
> embed my timeline into this encyclopedia so that once I've entered
> notes for a session it will fit in just like any other entry. I
> should be able to grab a term that doesn't currently have an entry and
> with a couple of clicks create a new entry. I don't insist on all the
> indexing and cross referencing being maintained in real time. I'm
> happy to periodically issue a command to rebuild those items.
>
> There must be tools out there for doing this sort of thing. It's
> basically technical documentation for a roleplaying game with
> convenient hotlinks to ease the writing/editing process.
>
> Anyone know of a software package that does a sizable subset of the
> above and doesn't cost a fortune?
>

Rusty Wallace wrote:
> Can you expand a little? What does OpenOffice do that MS Office
> doesn't?

Nothing really, but it's a heck of a lot cheaper (ie. Free). If you
already have one of the commercial office suite (like MS Office) than
OpenOffice doesn't really have much to offer you.


JD

Gunther Herzog <gruumsh.RemoveThis@yahoo.com> wrote:
(snip)
>http://drupal.org
>
(snip)
>Hope this helps,
>GH

It certainly sounds interesting, but I'm afraid it would be overkill
for my purposes. It looks like alot of trouble to get up and running
if you aren't already doing alot of web development. Is that a fair
statement? A Wiki with something like the Glossary module and some
reporting would be very close to what I think I'm looking for.

At Wed, 08 Feb 2006 05:08:46 GMT Rusty Wallace <jrustyw RemoveThis @ix.netcom.com> wrote:

> It certainly sounds interesting, but I'm afraid it would be overkill
> for my purposes. It looks like alot of trouble to get up and running
> if you aren't already doing alot of web development. Is that a fair
> statement? A Wiki with something like the Glossary module and some
> reporting would be very close to what I think I'm looking for.

Are you familiar with scripting languages (we are touching and talking
the Realm of Programming here)? If you are, you could go for something
as simple as your favorite plain text editor of your opering system and,
once you have worked out a version you would like to have a hardcopy of,
run a script over it to generate the necessary output. You don't even
need a meta-data envolope, such as XML, to extract the data from, though
this allows for much more flexible processing. I did that for quite some
time, using Perl and LaTeX as intermediate means to create high quality
output in form of PostScript and PDF, but you could as well employ roff
and friends, *HTML or anything else that prints nicely.

When Wikis started to boom a couple of years ago this didn't leave me
untouched and I am now walking the Wiki way. The major advantage is, of
course, the ability to handle cross references as well as an impressive
ratio of net content versus meta and formatting data. Another is that,
as soon as I put the contents on a public server, other project members
can work their way through it and make use of it as well.

As it has been stated before, most Wikis aim for HTML output. However,
the output quality of the current web browser generation should not be
underestimated, and with proper CSSs applied, clipping away fancy GUIs
and widgets, leaving just the actual content to be printed with fonts
and settings optimized for printing, such prints look quite aceeptable.
Modern operating systems even allow you save such output directly as
PostScript or PDF, which, in the end, might be what you are looking for
to redistribute your work.

Regards,

- PM

--
Use pitt<at>ekkaia<dot>org for personal replies.

Pitt Murmann <tarpit.RemoveThis@ekkaia.org> wrote:

>At Wed, 08 Feb 2006 05:08:46 GMT Rusty Wallace <jrustyw.RemoveThis@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>
>> It certainly sounds interesting, but I'm afraid it would be overkill
>> for my purposes. It looks like alot of trouble to get up and running
>> if you aren't already doing alot of web development. Is that a fair
>> statement? A Wiki with something like the Glossary module and some
>> reporting would be very close to what I think I'm looking for.
>
>Are you familiar with scripting languages (we are touching and talking
>the Realm of Programming here)? (snip)

Yes, I'm capable of doing the coding for a project like this, though
my skills are a little dated. I'm tempted to give it a go and try to
make exactly what I want. However, the point of this exercise was to
see if there was something out there that was relatively close without
me having to do alot of work to get it to the point of managing my
game. Time spent building the tool (ie whatever morphodite bastard
wiki-like thing it ended up being), to build the tool (ie a body of
organized game data), to help me perpare for the game qualifies as an
exercise in cat vacuuming that I don't really have the leisure time
for.

That said, it seems that if I'm going to get what I want I'm going to
have to get my hands dirty, so thanks for illustrating another path
forward that I hadn't really thought about.

Rusty

On Mon, 6 Feb 2006, John Desmarais wrote:

>
> Rusty Wallace wrote:
>> Can you expand a little? What does OpenOffice do that MS Office
>> doesn't?
>
> Nothing really, but it's a heck of a lot cheaper (ie. Free). If you
> already have one of the commercial office suite (like MS Office) than
> OpenOffice doesn't really have much to offer you.

It has a functional programming staff, that actually listens to user
problems and fixes them. Which is a hell of a lot better than I can say
for Microsoft.

Lena

plus, I love it's equation editor!

I would compose the pages in html or rtf and then use one of the various
free packages available for the purpose to convert them to windows help
files. That automatically gets you a topic list (each page is a seperate
subject) and a fully-searchable index.

I've been looking at doing the same thing for my campaign and that's the
best answer I've been able to come up with. As for which software to use to
do this - that being the main point of the question - I can't help out. I
have downloaded two packages (but I'm not sure from where) - HelpExpert
(copyright www.calcom.de which may or may not be a valid link) and RTF2HLP
(copyright http://www.ariacom.com - same caveat). Of the two, RTF2Help
sounds the more useful, HelpExpert sounds the more user-friendly. There are
other packages out there that do the same, but these two are freeware.

Mike Bourke


"Rusty Wallace" <jrustyw RemoveThis @ix.netcom.com> wrote in message
news:gjk5u1dtjo4gq4sub9np9gh5cvo58plslo@4ax.com...
> I've tried databases, spreadsheets, text documents and offline wiki's
> with varying degrees of success. The wikis I have tried come the
> closest to what I'm looking for but are kind of a pain to really keep
> up and offer little in the way of reporting and such. It's no good to
> have a complex wiki database and be unable to render it to a readily
> printable and usable form.
>
> I want to build what is essentially an encyclopedia for my campaign
> that I can use to keep track of all the various bits and pieces. I
> want it to automatically recognize terms that have entries and hot
> link back to the main entry. For bonus points the main entry should
> have a list of links that go to other entries that reference the
> current entry. Super bonus points if I can flag entries
> public/private and so produce a fact book that the players can have. I
> should be able to easily print the whole thing out as a book in
> alphabetical order with full indexing that will reference the
> appropriate page number in the document. Ideally I should be able to
> embed my timeline into this encyclopedia so that once I've entered
> notes for a session it will fit in just like any other entry. I
> should be able to grab a term that doesn't currently have an entry and
> with a couple of clicks create a new entry. I don't insist on all the
> indexing and cross referencing being maintained in real time. I'm
> happy to periodically issue a command to rebuild those items.
>
> There must be tools out there for doing this sort of thing. It's
> basically technical documentation for a roleplaying game with
> convenient hotlinks to ease the writing/editing process.
>
> Anyone know of a software package that does a sizable subset of the
> above and doesn't cost a fortune?

"Mike Bourke" <mbou3355 RemoveThis @bigpond.net.au> wrote:

(snip)
> I
>have downloaded two packages (but I'm not sure from where) - HelpExpert
>(copyright www.calcom.de which may or may not be a valid link) and RTF2HLP
>(copyright http://www.ariacom.com - same caveat). Of the two, RTF2Help
>sounds the more useful, HelpExpert sounds the more user-friendly. There are
>other packages out there that do the same, but these two are freeware.

I should have thought about Windows Help files. I had to build those
suckers for Access applications way back when. You might well be onto
something here.

HelpExpert appears to be dead, but if you follow the links you get to
this: http://www.lightdev.com/page/3.htm which might be interesting.

Rusty

I downloaded it quite a while back, must have been June of 04. I would also
suggest taking a look at http://www.pricelessware.org ,
http://www.pricelesswarehome.org/ and http://www.sover.net/~whoi/ - either
of those might still have it archived or might have another freeware utility
to do the job. The first is an out-of-date version of the pricelessware site
(but it contains links to programs that have since fallen by the wayside),
the second is the current site, and the third is run by the guy who used to
be the heart and soul of the newsgroup alt.comp.freeware, who generate the
pricelessware lists. Lastly, take a look at Halibut
(http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/halibut/) for the same purpose.

As for Lightdev - you're right, it looks interesting, but what it can
actually do depends on the plugins. In particular, Lightdev might make
creating the source pages for Halibut (and possibly the others) much easier.

Mike

"Rusty Wallace" <jrustyw.DeleteThis@ix.netcom.com> wrote in message
news:2qtvu1dobuut636n4tfoinni9ir7ut9ptg@4ax.com...
> "Mike Bourke" <mbou3355.DeleteThis@bigpond.net.au> wrote:
>
> (snip)
> > I
> >have downloaded two packages (but I'm not sure from where) - HelpExpert
> >(copyright www.calcom.de which may or may not be a valid link) and
RTF2HLP
> >(copyright http://www.ariacom.com - same caveat). Of the two, RTF2Help
> >sounds the more useful, HelpExpert sounds the more user-friendly. There
are
> >other packages out there that do the same, but these two are freeware.
>
> I should have thought about Windows Help files. I had to build those
> suckers for Access applications way back when. You might well be onto
> something here.
>
> HelpExpert appears to be dead, but if you follow the links you get to
> this: http://www.lightdev.com/page/3.htm which might be interesting.
>
> Rusty