Editing the character sheet -help or advice wanted

[Robin Smallburrow]

Well, I have spent fruitless hours today trying to convert the PDF of the character sheet to either an excel or word doc so I can insert a Grimoire on the back of the character sheet for Dwimmer-crafters, but without any success.

I did download a free software program to help me (which didn't!, then tried in Word with no success there either.

But because I am not knowledgeable about these things I feel I am bashing my head against a wall here. Surely it is not that hard??

HELP!!

What I am trying to do is insert a nine column table in the bottom half of the back of the character sheet with all the important information that a Dwimmer-crafter requires

(meaning that the Tale of Years etc. has to be truncated in order to fit the table)

The table has the following headings: Name, PR, Casting time, Range, Duration, Skill TN, Cost, XP, Method, Notes (then at least ten blank lines for the PC to fill in).

Any ideas how this can be put in, or do I just have to create a new sheet (which I don't like as when you start giving players more than one sheet they don't tend to read them!)

Robin S.

[Rich H]

I edited the official character sheet to accommodate my house rules pretty easily using Foxit PDF editor - you can see the results here: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/795 ... ion%29.pdf

I'm guessing you're looking at doing something similar, Robin, but for your magic rules?

[zedturtle]

Okay, here you go.

I took my best guess at the spacing for your stuff... it's a lot of detail (especially for TOR) and I haven't had a chance to dig deep into your system.

[Rich H]

... Out of interest Zed, what editor do you use?

[zedturtle]

A little bit of Acrobat Pro and quite a bit of Adobe InDesign.

[Fridokind Wargaug]

I would recommend Foxit, too. I redesigned the Loremaster's screen with it (removing all the unimportant stuff and adding the journey related tables for example).

On the other hand, you can use Photoshop or Gimp. I imported the character sheet into gimp, edited it, and then saved it as pdf again. Works great.

[Robin Smallburrow]

Thanks Zed, this is exactly what I was after thank you! This is such a great Forum!!

Can now update my Magic rules accordingly! (to Version 5!!)

May I ask how you did it as I plan to do other things, such as a proper seperate Grimoire Sheet (Full Page).
At present I do it the long and laborious way by doing it in Word first, then copying over to the TOR template sheet.

Robin S.

[zedturtle]

Thanks Zed, this is exactly what I was after thank you! This is such a great Forum!!

Can now update my Magic rules accordingly! (to Version 5!!)

May I ask how you did it as I plan to do other things, such as a proper seperate Grimoire Sheet (Full Page).
At present I do it the long and laborious way by doing it in Word first, then copying over to the TOR template sheet.

Robin S.

Well, be careful... there's a fairly big typo on the sheet, so as soon as I can I will fix that and re-upload it.

I do all of my work (and most of a tweak job like this) in Adobe InDesign. There's a pretty steep learning curve*, but the results (I think) are worth it.

- - - - - -

* I paid for most of the learning curve in the '90s with Adobe Pagemaker and Quark Xpress; once you learn one of these sorts of programs, you've 90% of the way there for another one. Except Publisher... for reasons I won't get into here.

[zedturtle]

Ok, the typo is fixed. (Fellowship Phase). Sorry about that.