An Inkscape extension to make lammie-making for LARPs a billion times easier.

Four Printars is powered by templates, defining both the look of the finished lammie, and the data that should go on that lammie. It pulls data from CSV files, exported from whatever database backs the LARP, asks the user what data should go on the loaded template, then neatly arranges filled-in copies of the templates onto pages for printing.

This is an Inkscape extension. It was designed against Inkscape 1.3, but will probably work with more modern versions.

You can download Inkscape for whatever platform you use here.

To install this extension, open up Inkscape and go to Edit > Preferences > System > User Extensions. Click the "open" button next to the directory, download this repo as a zip file using the button in GitHub, and unpack the zip archive directly into that directory.

Restart Inkscape. If you've put it in the right place, you should see Four Printars appear under Extensions > Four Pillars.

The best way to see what's going on with Four Printars is to play around with the sample. You can see it in action here.

Before you start, open up the examples directory and take a quick look at item_template.svg, items.csv and players.csv. item_template.svg defines roughly what your finished lammies will look like. It's a slightly special svg file, and we'll talk about how to make your own later.

items.csv and players.csv are CSV-format tables containing all the items and players that exist in our example game. You can open them in Excel and take a look if you'd like. Most spreadsheet software will let you export things as CSV files very easily - if you ask nicely, I might add support for directly reading .xlsx files, or maybe direct from Google sheets, but that's going to be a fair chunk of work.

Once this extension is installed, open up inkscape. Create an empty drawing of the page size you'd like to print to - probably A4.

Click "Extensions > Four Pillars > Four Printars". Note that while the extension is running, Inkscape itself will become unresponsive and your OS might complain about this. The extension still works fine, and Inkscape will spring back to life when you're done.

First, you'll be prompted for an SVG template file. Find examples/item_template.svg and load it.

Now you'll be prompted for the Item table - that's items.csv. Finally, the Player table - players.csv. You'll then be taken to the main interface, which confirms the tables you've just loaded

You can prepare a batch of lammies using the controls on the right. If you start searching for an item and a player, you can select one of the suggestions to fill in all the other fields automatically. You can also fill in the Obtained, Expires and Ref Name fields as you like. Finally, fill in the Quantity field with how many copies of that lammie you'd like, then hit "Add". You should see it appear in the inventory on the left.

Do this as much as you like for as many lammies as you like. When you're ready, fill in the "Rows", "Columns" and "Bleed" fields. The "Rows" and "Columns" fields specify how many copies of the template you want on each page. I happen to like using 5 rows and 1 column for this template. Note that Four Printars won't try to stop you using crazy options that won't fit properly here.

The "Bleed" field controls how much space will be left between lammies. It's a lot easier to cut your lammies out after printing if you leave a couple of mm between each one.

When everything's set up correctly, hit the "Render" button, then close the extension. You should see a number of new pages in your SVG containing your rendered lammies! You can now print this off and cut them out.

Of course, these are random lammies for a LARP that doesn't exist. You want to do this for your LARP. To do that, you'll need to build your own templates.

Four Printars templates are mildly special SVG files, and SVG files are just a type of image file. You can make them easily enough directly through Inkscape.

First, use the normal Inkscape tools to build something that looks like your lammie. Add some placeholder text to all the fields you want Four Printars to fill in for you:

Sometimes, you'll want to have multi-line text containing, say, a long-form item description. For these, you should create a text object, and a box that the text should stay inside. Select both of them in Inkscape, then use "Text > Flow into Frame" to make sure it stays contained:

Once you've got everything laid out how you want it, be sure to neaten it up. Use "File > Document Properties > Resize to Content" to shrink the document to fit your lammie snugly - this bounding box is used to tile your lammies across a printer sheet, so making it snug is important.

Now it's time to modify your placeholder fields so that Four Printars can find them and fill them in.

For each placeholder, click it, and press Ctrl+Shift+X to open up the XML editor. You need to add two attributes to each placeholder field, like this:

data-fp-value tells Four Printars how it should find the value that ends up in the field. It should be formatted as {Table}/{Column}. For instance, if have an item table, and that table has a column headed "Item Name", which you want to put on your lammies, you should set data-fp-value to Item/Item Name.

data-fp-type determines how you want to select the relevant field. You can set it to one of the following values:

If you want some examples, you can open item_template.svg in Inkscape, click on some of the placeholders and hit Ctrl+Shift+X to see what correct XML should look like.

If you're pulling multiple fields from the same table, you'll need to use the same table name in every data-fp-value attribute. Make sure you don't, for instance, flip between Item/Item Name and Items/Description.

If you'd like, you can omit the table entirely. If you set data-fp-value to, for instance, /Expiry, Four Printars will prompt you for an expiry date for each of your lammies, without attempting to read it from any input files.

You might also want a field to be visible to you while editing the lammie, but not appear in the render. For instance, if you want your Item lammie to have a player ID on it, but don't want any other player fields to appear, it might help you to be able to search on the player's name. In this case, you can create a placeholder, set the data-fp-value and data-fp-type fields as you like, then make the placeholder invisible. Four Printars can still see it, but it won't appear in your output.