Hero Designer 6th Edition - Hero Games Company

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52 ■ Export Formats Hero Designer 6th Edition ExPORT FORMATS As briefly described in the “Basic Concepts” chapter on page 2, Export Formats are files which contain special fields that get replaced by information from your character when you export that character. Because the Export Format determines what information is exported and where it is placed in the exported file, this feature lets you create character sheets with a wide variety of looks. Hero Designer provides many Export Formats including a HTML template based on the standard HERO System Fifth Edition character sheet as well as a variety of HERO System Sixth Edition formats and many others. These can be found in the Export Formats section of the Hero Designer area of the Hero Games website (www.herogames.com). Currently, Hero Designer only exports text files. This means that you can only create templates in text-based formats. This could be HTML (for web browsers), plain text, or more complex formats such as RTF (used by many word processors including Microsoft Word). You cannot create templates in binary formats. You can edit or create an Export Format using any standard text editor such as the Notepad application on Windows systems or the VI editor on Linux and UNIX systems. Once you have finished editing or creating an Export Format, be sure to save it with a .hde extension. Only files with a .hde extension are recognized as Export Formats. While the following sections describe the structure of an Export Format and define the tags and containers used, a greater understanding can be obtained by viewing the Export Formats available, so you can see how these items are actually used. You can also often find help with creating Export Formats in the Hero Designer discussion board on the Hero Games website at www.herogames.com. CREATINg AN ExPORT FORMAT The Export Format structure is based on tags and containers. The definition of a tag is simply anything that looks like the following: A container has a similar appearance, but (as the name suggests) it contains other items. It has both a beginning and an ending tag. Like this: …any text here…. The tag for the end of the container is the same as the tag for the beginning with a / inserted before the container name. Note that the “--” at the beginning and end of tag names is two hyphens. Tags are single entities. They don’t contain anything and Hero Designer simply replaces them with the appropriate value when it creates an export file. You can repeat any tag as many times as you want. Each occurrence is replaced with the appropriate value. Containers may contain other tags or even other containers. There are several containers that entail certain logical checks be made by the application before inserting any values. These will be discussed below. A list of the available tags and containers appears in the “Available Tags And Containers” section on page 54. A similar list can be found in the Export Formats section of the Hero Designer area of the Hero Games website (www.herogames.com). As updates to Hero Designer are released, additional tags and containers may be made available. If there is information that you would like to see made available for export, send an e-mail to support@ herodesigner.com requesting it. To create an Export Format, you simply write the template file in whatever mark-up language you choose (plain text, HTML, RTF, TEX, LaTEX, and so forth) and insert the tags and containers at the point where you want text from the character to be inserted. Any text that is inside of a container is preserved. This is useful when dealing with containers that represent “1 to many” values (like Powers). These containers loop through the specified values and insert the text and tags contained within them once for each value they encounter. For example, the … container will loop through each Power the character has bought and each time, insert the text between the beginning and ending
Hero Designer 6th Edition Export Formats ■ 53 tag. If there are any subcontainers or tags, they will be evaluated for each Power. Once you have written and saved your Export Format, you’re ready to test it out. Fire up Hero Designer and try exporting a character with the new format. Describing The Format Hero Designer has several containers for specifying general information about the Export Format. To specify the display name of the Export Format to be used in the list of available formats presented by Hero Designer, use the container: The text in this container is used as the display. Everything from the beginning tag to the ending tag (inclusive) will be removed from the final export file. The name should be kept short for display purposes. To specify the description of the Export Format to be displayed in this list, use the container: The text contained between these two tags will appear as the format’s description in the list of available Export Formats presented by Hero Designer. Everything from the beginning tag to the ending tag (inclusive) will be removed from the final export file. To specify the valid file extensions for files exported using this Export Format, use the container: This container can be repeated multiple times. For example: html htm Replacement Containers Occasionally, when creating a Hero Designer Export Format, you may find it useful to be able to replace one string of text in the output with another each time the first string occurs. You can do this by using the REPLACE container and its associated subcontainers. For example: abc xyz replaces each occurrence of the string “abc” (as specified by the DEFSTRING subcontainer) with the string “xyz” (as specified by the REPSTRING subcontainer). For more sophisticated replacements, Hero Designer provides the REG_REPLACE container and its subcontainers. This container has the form: … … This is similar to the REPLACE container except that the REGSTRING subcontainer contains a regular expression. Regular expressions are complex constructions that specify a pattern of characters to be matched. They are particularly common in many UNIX utilities and in languages like Perl. A discussion of regular expressions is beyond the scope of this manual; however, the a quick web search should turn up plenty of information if you are not already familiar with the concept. The REPSTRING subcontainer specifies the string that will replace the strings matched by the regular expression in the REGSTRING subcontainer. MATH Container Hero Designer also allows you to perform basic mathematical calculation with the MATH container. The contents of this container is a mathematical expression. In the exported file, the MATH container is replaced with the calculated value of the expression. For example: 3 * is replaced with the value of 3 times the character’s STR characteristic. Mathematical expressions in the MATH container can use the four basic mathematical operations (+, -, *, and /) as well as parentheses. Conditional Containers Hero Designer features a variety of conditional containers. These containers (which normally begin with IF or IS) only have their contents included in the exported files if the condition is true. For example, the following container only has its contents included if the character has purchased any Maneuvers: Similarly, the following container only has its contents included if the current item is in a list or Framework: Looping Containers This section describes looping containers and some of the tags and other containers that can be used in conjunction with them.
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Created by dan Simon
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INTRODUCTION ......................
Page 5 and 6: Hero Designer 6th Edition Introduct
Page 7 and 8: Hero Designer 6th Edition Basic Con
Page 9 and 10: Hero Designer 6th Edition Using Her
Page 37 and 38: Hero Designer 6th Edition Configuri
Page 45 and 46: Hero Designer 6th Edition Prefabs A
Page 47 and 48: Hero Designer 6th Edition Character
Page 55: Hero Designer 6th Edition Character
Page 59 and 60: Hero Designer 6th Edition Export Fo
Page 61 and 62: Hero Designer 6th Edition Export Fo
Page 63: Hero Designer 6th Edition Export Fo
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Hero Designer 6th Edition - Hero Games Company

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