Symbols for deck plans

[Rigel Stardin]

http://www.travellerrpg.com/CotI/Gallery/index.php?n=1575

Patron Zero: These have been sitting on my computer (s) since the early 90's. Hope they are useful.

 

[Patron Zero]

Thanks Rigel Stardin, I will be spending much less time reworking images, your kindness is much appreciated !

 

[Midgardsormr]

Many thanks to Rigel, GRNDL and madmike for sharing their symbols. One of these days I'll get around to mapping again, and I'll definitely make use of them!

edit: madmike, did you actually upload your dwg file somewhere? I went back through the thread, and I didn't see a link, but I might be suffering selective blindness.

Unfortunately, that set doesn't work for me. I want to be able to print the result on an 8 1/2 by 11 sheet, and Paint has a lower limit on how small things can get.

Sounds like you may wish to migrate to a more versatile image editor. Paint.NET, perhaps, or Gimp. Inkscape is also a pretty good choice for deckplans, but it's a vector editor, and so requires a somewhat different way of thinking. Not as different as CAD, but different nonetheless.

If you'd like some help and/or criticism, I recommend The Cartographers' Guild, which has lots of tutorials for the Gimp and Photoshop, and quite a few for other programs. Most of the traffic there is fantasy-oriented, but there are some modern and fantasy mappers, too.

Oh, and someone mentioned artifacts from saving as gif and jpeg. If you're interested, here's some technical information on those formats to explain it: Gif is an 8-bit paletted format that permits only 256 colors total in an image. If you try to convert an image with more colors than that, then the software will do its best to simulate the missing colors by dithering. Sometimes it works, but usually it doesn't. Png is 98% functionally superior to gif and has thus superseded it. The only thing gif can do that png cannot is animation.

Jpeg does not handle line-drawing style imagery well. If you increase the compression ratio to about 95%, you'll eliminate most of the artifacts, but it will still probably distort fine lines slightly. Also, jpeg is a "lossy" compression format, meaning that it throws away information when saving. Each subsequent save operation discards more data, causing the artifacts to propagate. It is okay as a final display format, but definitely not useful as an intermediate or working format.

 

[Carlobrand]

...Sounds like you may wish to migrate to a more versatile image editor. Paint.NET, perhaps, or Gimp. Inkscape is also a pretty good choice for deckplans, but it's a vector editor, and so requires a somewhat different way of thinking. Not as different as CAD, but different nonetheless.

If you'd like some help and/or criticism, I recommend The Cartographers' Guild, which has lots of tutorials for the Gimp and Photoshop, and quite a few for other programs. Most of the traffic there is fantasy-oriented, but there are some modern and fantasy mappers, too. ...

Thanks for the suggestion. Two considerations: price and accessibility. Are they pricey? I'm on a pretty tight budget. Do they generate files that anyone can look at, or do they save to a proprietary format that you need to own the program to view?

 

[Rigel Stardin]

(Not an advertisement) Before this last upgrade, Neopaint by Neosoft was just an overblown version of Paint. Now they have added layering and a few other things which I'm still learn. It a good buy for people who know how to use paint and dabble with photshop like programs.

 

[SpaceBadger]

Thanks for the suggestion. Two considerations: price and accessibility. Are they pricey? I'm on a pretty tight budget. Do they generate files that anyone can look at, or do they save to a proprietary format that you need to own the program to view?

Last I checked, the Gimp is still free.

I haven't used it much, the one time I needed to (because I needed to make an image, had my new laptop w no other image programs, and wanted to just grab something free from the internet), it was reasonably easy to pick up based on my experience w PaintShop Pro.

One thing that puzzled me for quite awhile was trying to get it to Save As in standard image formats; turns out that capability is hidden under Export instead. o:

 

[Midgardsormr]

All three of the programs I recommended are free, and they can all save standard image formats.

Inkscape's native format is svg (scalable vector graphics), which can be viewed in most modern web browsers and also embedded in many kinds of office documents.

Gimp does use its own format for its working documents, but I think you can change it to use tiff as its native format. It can also open some Photoshop files, although not reliably enough to depend on it.

I'm not sure about Paint.NET; I've never used it.

But again, all three can easily make png, jpeg, gif, tga, tiff, what-have-you.

 

[Rigel Stardin]

BMP Window or OS/2 Bitmap
Cur Windows Cursor
Gif Compuserve
JPG JPEG/JFIF
PCT Macintosh Pict
PCX Zsoft/PC Paintbrush
PNG Portable Network Graphic
PSD Adobe Photoshop 3.0
RAS Sun Raster
TIF Tag Image File
TIFF Tag Image File
TGA Taga
WPG Word Perfect
WMF Window Metafile

These are the file formats that my program can read and save as. Nice when you want to make your own Icons and word art...

 

[MikeinBallard]

Inkscape and Libre/Open Office Draw

I've been using MS Paint for the longest time and it's still good for knocking out test designs, but I switched over to Libre/Open Office Draw. It's not that hard to take the premade shapes and create some good looking deck plans. You can also export them to SVG and pull them into Inkscape.

 

[ShihanScott]

vector PDF

i have created a vector version of a modified Gazelle CE saved as a PDF from Illustrator if anyone is interested.