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T20 Character Form (and a Problem)

Well, I've taken the T20 character sheet and Adobe Designer, and I've made a form version of the character sheet. You can type in the values, it'll calculate the bonuses and totals, and it's very very nice.

And I created it to donate it to QLI and the site so all the T20 peoples of the world could use it (assuming QLI releases it; it copies their character sheet's appearance pretty much, so it'd be theirs to do with as they will).

But...

Adobe Professional is required to SAVE the changes. :( :( :(

In order to change the form's settings to allow changes to be saved with Adobe Reader, you need something called Adobe Reader Extensions Server (ARES), which is a $30k+ enterprise-level application. (Yet another reason that I equate Adobe with the Sternmetal megacorporation; unethical doesn't even come close...)

I'm perfectly happy to send the form file to Hunter et al., and have them post it the way it is. There's an option to email the form's content within Reader, so if one member of a gaming group has access to Professional, it'd work, but it's clunky. In fact, if your gaming group has access to Adobe Professional, it's not even that clunky - it just means that's who maintains your character sheets. (For example, in my campaign, as I'm the GM, the fact that I'm the one with AP isn't really a problem....)

What I'd vastly prefer is that one of you, my brethren of the Imperium, has access to ARES or some other Adobe tool that will allow that flag to be changed.

Can anyone assist me?
 
Oh, and the last page of the form - the Prior History part - is just copied from the regular character sheet. I ran out of energy before turning that into a form...maybe a v2.0 project for some future day...
 
Fill in the Adobe Acrobat form using Reader. Reader allows you to print the form. Print the form using a PDF print driver to get a saved PDF of your filled in form.

Drawback is that you can't go back and edit the character sheet after it's been "printed".
 
That's an option, certainly. Depending on how much you type onto the form (all of the skills are calculations, for example, so you can fill in ranks, misc. modifiers, and ability modifier and it'll calculate total bonuses), this might be quite tedious, and doesn't save you much effort compared to writing it in with pen or pencil.

My desire is - quite strongly - to fix the file's "Reader can save" flag so that EVERY player, not just those with Adobe Professional, can save changes.

The "email the entries" option also works, and a user with Professional can drop the changes from that email into the form and HE/SHE can save it and then return a saved copy to the player, but like I said in the opening post of this thread: it's clunky that way.
 
Have I got good news for you. PlanetPDF is hosting a free FDF redirector.

Basically, once the PDF form is filled out, just fill in the email address, then click the button.

In your email will be a file with the extension "FDF". Open it and you will have a sheet with all the data in it.

Here is the addy: PlanetPDF FDF Server
 
Very interesting! However, while they permit you to try it out for yourself, their expectation is that visitors not use it regularly:

The FDFGateway is setup on the Planet PDF server for evaluation purposes (don't use it as a workhorse). Feel free to give this a whirl to see how it works for you.
A solution, certainly, SpudmanWP, and it might be all QLI needs to put up my form and make it useable for all you folks out there.

(Hunter and/or MJD, let me know if you want me to email it to you, btw.)
 
I have been using this "Free" interface for years with a d20 D&D 3.5 char sheet that someone else made up. I do not think that we could possibly use it hard enough to be considered "workhorse".
 
That's true enough, Spudman. And for me, it's not an issue, since my players can send their work to me (via the email-the-form-data approach) and I can save it b/c I have Adobe Professional.

So your solution will work well for the average player if they choose to put up my form here.

However, the more elegant solution I'm seeking is to have someone with access to ARES (or Adobe LiveCycle Extensions Server, as they call it these days) set the flag for me. That would make it easily accessible and useable for everyone, since that's a permanent fix.

Cheers!
 
I personally hate PDF for various and sundry reasons. (Mostly because even with Acrobat, you can't turn it into anything generally editable. Which for something like a rule set is a good idea but for a character sheet or the like is not. Why not do it in either xml or html instead? Then it is editable by anyone with the sheet. Anyone can print it. There is no need for a $30,000 piece of software, (Or even a $300 piece of software.) when the tools for either come with every computer system on the market. (Notepad comes immediately to mind, though Word works, etc.) More sophisticated software to handle it is also available and Free! (HTML-kit being one of my personal favorites.) And each Referee can personalize it, if they so desire.
 
Well, I agree with you for the most part, BTL, but if I could find someone to modify the form file, then you'd only need the free Adobe Reader to save changes to the form content.

Admittedly, if you wanted to change the form itself - say modify a calculated field - then you'd have to have Adobe Professional to do so.

I'm working on an Excel version of the form, but the going is much slower (for me) because the layout's not as simple to do.
 
Originally posted by princelian:
What I'd vastly prefer is that one of you, my brethren of the Imperium, has access to ARES or some other Adobe tool that will allow that flag to be changed.

Can anyone assist me?
I have Adobe Acrobat 5.0... PM me
 
The one on the Mad Irishman site is a "form fillable" .pdf T20 sheet. If you have Adobe reader 8.0 you should be able to save it. At least I was.

Mike
 
The problem with the "Mad Irishman's" version is that the font sizes are wrong. The font in the skills section is too large, and there is too much "padding" in the cells, so you can only see the bottom half of the text.

Verrrrry annoying! :(

Personally, I love a good Excel character sheet, because I can modify it to my heart's content (I just hate creating the silly things from scratch...I'm too impatient).
 
I find Adobe Illustrator as a good bridge to edit such PDFs. Sometimes some of the object boundarys transfer wrong, but all in all it handles edits really well. I'm in the process of doing a new batch of sheets myself, once I get the Guidebook and give it a read or six.
 
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