Saturday, July 23, 2011

PDF Help Requested

As some of you know, next month I'll be running two Dwimmermount sessions at OSRCon here in Toronto. In between getting the first Dwimmermount Codex, Petty Gods, and Thousand Suns ready for publication over the next couple of months (which is why posts have been fewer than usual this month -- sorry), I've also been preparing for the con by making sure I have a surfeit of pregenerated characters for people to use. Ideally, I'd like to have these characters printed up on the nifty Dwimmermount record sheet Lester B. Portly, Esq. did for me last year.

As I get older, my handwriting turns ever more into an illegible scrawl, so I'd prefer it if I could turn the PDF I have of the record sheet into an editable one. That'd both save my hand the pain of writing out so many sheets and save the players the trouble of deciphering my chicken scratch. Alas, the PDF I have isn't editable and I lack both the knowledge and tools needed to make it so. Now, if anyone out there in the ether does know how to do this, I'd appreciate a hand in fixing this situation. Just drop me a line and I'll get you whatever you need to make this happen.

Thanks in advance!

7 comments:

  1. You can open the PDFs in Inkscape (http://inkscape.org/) which is an excellent free/open source vector drawing program available on all platforms. It is very similar to the old Corel Draw.

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  2. I can do it in a few minutes, James. You should have my e-mail. Shoot the PDF to me.

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  3. Nitro makes a couple of easy to use free programs to edit existing PDFs that I use.

    Nitro Reader would probably work well for the player sheets.

    http://www.nitroreader.com/

    Or, they have a program that will convert a PDF file into a Word Document that you can then edit in Word, although I don't know how well that works with the more artistic player sheets you have.

    http://www.pdftoword.com/

    And, no, I don't work for Nitro or invest...I just listened to too much Kim Komando on Saturday mornings when I was a delivery driver.

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  4. Hey James,

    Long time lurker, thought I'd do you a solid since I enjoy reading your posts so much. Here's the PDF: http://northnowhere.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/dwimmermountpc.pdf

    Let me know if this is what you were looking for. Had some problems getting the text to fit into the spaces that were available on the character sheets.

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  5. Hmmm, I'm wondering if the commenting tools in Adobe Reader would be of any help. I don't have a printer, so I can't test to see where the comments appear.

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  6. On the mac side, you can build a form in Word and then just print to pdf.

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  7. If you use an iPad you can use Goodreader to edit PDFs. I saw that someone else mentioned Nitro and I've also found it helpful on my PCs.

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