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Aug. 20th, 2016 08:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackI am trying to make cards for a putative board game. Just printed on normal paper is fine for this level of testing.
I have a spreadsheet with a list of card titles and card text. Ideally I would print A4 pages each of which has four cards. Each card would have the title in a larger font and the text in a smaller font. There would be a little spacing, so if the cutting isn't perfect I don't lose any text. I may be getting over-perfectionist here, but ideally the spacing would not need to be in addition to the page margins, I just want a white border, it doesn't need to be printed.
I have libre office. That's supposed to be reasonably good, right? But the mail-merge features seem byzantine. Am I just too tired? Microsoft office was always overly-hlepy, but functional, for this sort of thing. Or is there any command-line based solution which is better?
I feel like it's at the "shouldn't be that hard" stage. I know I CAN figure out how to do it in libre office, but I want to know if something else is likely to be easier[1].
[1] One of my pet hates is that when you're pretty sure you can't do something a different way, people jump all over you saying "no, don't do it like that", and you have to rehash all the trade-offs you've already made before they're willing to believe you actually had a reason for doing it that way. But if you're NOT sure what the best way is, and ask, people rush to tell you "the way you've already chosen, the next step isn't that hard, it's X" and yes, thank you, now that takes 2 minutes not 20 minutes, but it hasn't really solved my problem if I want to do that for all twenty steps or not...
I have a spreadsheet with a list of card titles and card text. Ideally I would print A4 pages each of which has four cards. Each card would have the title in a larger font and the text in a smaller font. There would be a little spacing, so if the cutting isn't perfect I don't lose any text. I may be getting over-perfectionist here, but ideally the spacing would not need to be in addition to the page margins, I just want a white border, it doesn't need to be printed.
I have libre office. That's supposed to be reasonably good, right? But the mail-merge features seem byzantine. Am I just too tired? Microsoft office was always overly-hlepy, but functional, for this sort of thing. Or is there any command-line based solution which is better?
I feel like it's at the "shouldn't be that hard" stage. I know I CAN figure out how to do it in libre office, but I want to know if something else is likely to be easier[1].
[1] One of my pet hates is that when you're pretty sure you can't do something a different way, people jump all over you saying "no, don't do it like that", and you have to rehash all the trade-offs you've already made before they're willing to believe you actually had a reason for doing it that way. But if you're NOT sure what the best way is, and ask, people rush to tell you "the way you've already chosen, the next step isn't that hard, it's X" and yes, thank you, now that takes 2 minutes not 20 minutes, but it hasn't really solved my problem if I want to do that for all twenty steps or not...
no subject
Date: 2016-08-20 07:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-08-20 08:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-08-20 09:58 pm (UTC)With luck some LibreOffice person can tell you how to do it though, it sounds like a reasonable thing to want! Maybe they can also tell me how to stop the damn Calc thing from trying to put initial capitals on text I write into cells, I've as usual turned off all the autocorrect helper options I can find! (-:
no subject
Date: 2016-08-21 09:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-08-22 10:48 am (UTC)If I'm sufficiently forward looking, I often say something offputting but vague like "for complicated reasons, I need to X" which hopefully conveys the idea that I didn't just conceive a passion for X out of thin air.
And of course, one time in about 20, someone DOES have a great suggestion Z which is simple and completely obviates my need for X. But it's really hard for other people to judge how simple something is: often it's "simple, assuming you completely discount the cost of a learning curve" or "simple, unless you're in my situation" etc
no subject
Date: 2016-08-23 03:07 pm (UTC)I did this kind of thing by preparing a generic SVG and writing a Perl script that substitutes in the desired image & card texts for each card. This worked pretty well - "convert" can then turn these SVGs into PNGs, put borders around them, and smoosh them together for printing - except that if the card text needs wrapping that has to be done by a hand edit of the SVG.
Should I ask you to come and play 1825
Date: 2016-08-24 04:37 pm (UTC)Re: Should I ask you to come and play 1825
Date: 2016-08-26 02:45 pm (UTC)It is a game about the early development of the railways in Britain. Players don't represent railways, but investors - you win by having the largest personal wealth at the end of the game, and while you can spend some of the game as the Director of one or more of the railways (which means you make moves for that railway), it's not necessary that you do in order to win.
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~damerell/hidden/1825.text is a summary of the rules.