Realm Works is designed with hosting copyrighted content in mind. Content that is purchased from the their marketplace and protected. For example cannot be exported and modified outside RW. Fantasy Grounds and Roll20 also have this capability and currently WotC are the biggest seller on both platforms. When ■■■■■■■■ like Hasbro and WotC are selling and opening to such platforms, I don’t’ think others should stay behind and be resistant to change.
Also on the piracy - thanks to piracy I started paying for and collecting certain games.
The nature of the PDF format does not allow proper automation to get the content. I tried few things but it takes more time to “clean up” the outcome. The copy-paste is fast enough. I can get a book in 2-3 days in RW.
I am using Adobe Acrobat Pro and the good part with this is that in Edit mode, I can copy entire columns and it retains the paragraph information. This makes whole sections a breeze.
Once I outline the necessary articles in RW based on the bookmark information and initial evaluation of the content, I just copy-paste. Conan is one of the reals I spent least time on due to the excellent arrangement of the PDF. Some sections are annoying to translate to RW, such as the Book of Skelos and the Nameless Cults, but it is OK in the end.
The workflow also allows me the super fast make reference manual (I.e entering the whole book with the same structure) in Fantasy Grounds.
There is no such option as “paste as table”. Even in Word/Excel, in order to paste something as a table, the input must be formatted the appropriate way. As RW is rich text editor, the source must have its formatting preserved. The magic again happens in Adobe Acrobat and I am not sure if the free version has this equivalent:
Select the table in Acrobat.
Right-click somewhere on the selection and from the menu pick “Copy with Formatting”. Depending on the computer you have, the operation will take few seconds to analyze and copy the content, preserving the format. The success of this operation is entirely dependent on the way the PDF is prepared.
Paste in RW (simply) Ctrl+V. The format of the table, the shading and borders are preserved. Still it does not look pretty and what I do is to select the table and clear the formatting (this clears only the fonts, not the table properties) using Ctrl+Space
I select the table using Layout tools and adjust the settings. I found that for me, the best looking is when the parameters are as follow: Alignment: Depends on the original design, I try to keep it true to the source Indent form Left: 0.01" No preferred table, row, column or cell width - I leave it auto-sizing so it flows properly with word-wrap when I resize RW Cell margins: Top and Bottom 0.01", Left and Right 0.08", wrap-text enabled
Sometimes the header of the table, which is merged cells in RW confuses Adobe and the result is… ■■■■. So if I have such situations I simply add the header manually. Sometimes it is easier to convert the desired pages to Excel or Word and copy from there, depends how heavy on tables the file is (Such as Gamemaster’s Toolkit). Conan PDFs are the best when it comes to layout and ability to be used with digital tools.
Modiphius are the best.
The copy with formatting works with protected files, while the other options demand the file to be editable, which is not the case with many Drivethroughrpg files.
This is how the source looks like and you can see that it is a breeze for the software to convert it to table (even if you export to Excel or Word the formatting is preserved.). Many PDFs are arranged so ■■■■■■ that it is painful (I am looking at you, Dark Heresy 2 books, ■■■■ you).
Thanks for that.
I an using Acrobat Reader but it has no such feature. I’ll see if I can get my hands on the full Acrobat software or perhaps a similar (open source) alternative?
This is indeed feature of Adobe Acrobat DC, not the Reader version. Before I jump to the full one, I explored some free and open-sourced, but nothing beats the original
