Bringing in content from Dead Tree technology with no digital equivalent.
Greetings.
I thought I would show one way to bring in content from physical books to Fantasy Grounds where there is no digital equivalent.
The old school (really old school) RPGers may remember when Iron Crown Enterprises (makers of the Rolemaster system that the Rolemaster Classic Ruleset is based on) used to publish Middle-earth Roleplaying (MERP).
The MERP books were published in the 1980’s and 1990’s before ICE lost the license to The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit after being forced into bankruptcy in 2000.
MERP/RM was actually the first RPG I ever played. However, since ICE lost the license, there was never a digital version of the books created (at least officially). With almost 200 books, that is a lot of content.
This makes it a time-consuming process to enter the information into Fantasy Grounds.
I discovered a way to speed things up considerably, and I thought I would share in case anyone else finds themselves in a similar situation.
If you use a Windows PC and have access to OneNote, you can use OneNote to OCR an image. So, you can take a picture of the page in the book and drop it into OneNote and have it do the OCR work for you. This may work with the macOS version of OneNote, but I don't have a mac to test with to be sure.
- First, take a picture of the page in question. I am not going to use a whole page, but the process is the same. I am just going to do a couple of paragraphs. I just used my Cell phone (iPhone XR at the time of this picture).
NOTE: The higher quality (i.e. resolution) of the picture, the better this process will work.
What you do is take a picture, save it somewhere, then you can copy the picture into OneNote (either using an image editor like Paint, or simply dropping the file into OneNote).
Here is a picture of a section of the Angmar MERP Campaign Module (size greatly reduced from original to not be huge in the post):
https://i.imgur.com/5rdRAOR.png
- This is what it looks like in OneNote:
https://i.imgur.com/jthMSUv.png
- From here, you need to right-click on the picture in OneNote and select “Copy Text from Picture”:
https://i.imgur.com/PMcyqYi.png
- Then you can paste the text somewhere. I would recommend that you paste the result into OneNote (or perhaps Word) to clean up any formatting. The OCR will only get text, it will not capture formatting.
Here is what it looks like after pasting it back into OneNote:
https://i.imgur.com/X6cym9v.png
- After cleaning up the formatting, copy and paste into Fantasy Grounds.
https://i.imgur.com/ha6tKnS.png
This will save a bunch of time typing everything in. Once you have everything entered, you can then export the module (using the module creation best practices), which is how I typically do things now.
I used it to quickly convert Hillmen of the Trollshaws and Dark Mage of Rhudaur, and I am working on other modules even now.
Here is what they look like in FGU.
NOTE: Creatures was mostly done by hand editing the XML, but the final portion of it was using the above method (pasting into XML instead of FG), same with Treasures.
https://i.imgur.com/Nj46Caz.png