RPTools.net

Hi folks.
I've just today made the switch from OpenRPG (traipse) to Maptools with my group (Warning: Link may not be worksafe if .rar files are downloaded.).
We've been playing basically every weekend since 2007, so the switch of something so deeply embedded in our minds wasn't an easy or quick one and we're still ironing out the kinks in our own trains of thought.

But enough history. I have a couple of (seemingly) dead simple questions, that I could not seem to find a solution for - neither by Google nor by the forum search.

• Chat Line Height
  This is massively inconvenient to us, because we run a very chatty type of game.
  Between each of the lines of chat, there is a massive white space that does not appear to serve any purpose whatsoever - but has evaded my attempts to downsize it. Allow me to demonstrate:
  
  I assure you on a big screen, that looks much like a ravine of wasted space.
  Question: Is there a way to reduce the line height in the chat window?
• Chat Background Color
  Our games tend to last between 6 and 10 hours, so you might say we're spending far too much time on them, but that is not the point.
  Staring at a white background for such a prolonged time isn't doing my aging eyes any good, but finding a way to manipulate the background color of the chat has been problematic.
  
  Question: How do I change the default chat window background color? (While we're at it, the background color of the other windows too.)

These questions may have been answered over and over in the past, I apologize for the repetition in that regard.

With love,
Frost

Either your macro is producing extra white space, or you have the avatar which dictates the minimum line height. If you're generating output with macros then you can format the output however you like use normal html formatting rules. If it's the avatar causing the white space then you can uncheck "Show avatar per line" to suppress the avatars. You can also make custom outputs with Wiki: broadcast(). I did that with my lib:players token and created my own Impersonate button for in character chat.

The avatars are turned off, that I've double checked.
I am also not using a macro in these examples, just normal strings of text with a furious strike of the insufferable Return key at the end.

As for the broadcast() function:
Restricting it to trusted macros only is, from what I could gather from the wiki, something only GMs can edit?
Because in our currently active campaign, I've taken the role of a player, so I'm not sure how exactly that should be implemented. (Not to mention the wiki article makes Kate Moss look obese).

If you (or someone else with the knowhow) could provide a quick example, I would be grateful.

Well, the lines between outputs do have a lot of built in white space. Comparing to my white space, yours seems a bit more and I'm not sure why. Nothing you can do about that afaik.

MapTool uses a library called Tiny Look and Feel (TinyLaF) to control much of the text options. It may be able to set the background color from it's control utility. Unfortunately, the sourcefourge page is having connection issues, so I can't test this.

I tend to output as much information as I can in a single broadcast.

It's possible you could develop your own chat-within-chat by storing every chat entry through macros as a variable, and every time someone adds anything, it gets added to your stored variable and reposted:

[macro]
Hi
[output]
Chris: Hi
[macro]
This is Chris
[output]
Chris: Hi
This is Chris
[macro]
Hi Chris, my name is Bob!
[output]
Chris: Hi
This is Chris
Bob: Hi Chris, my name is Bob!

Using this method you'd have to re-post the entire "chat log" every time you add something to it, to eliminate the white-space problem. You could also remove any entries older than say, 20 posts long so it doesn't get overly huge. It won't make much sense scrolling back through, but I can't think of any other solution of which I could theorise.

Through Wiki: broadcast() and html you can control background colours of tables, to eliminate most of the white space.

I suppose you can also have your own chat output frame as well. It could be updated a couple of ways. Either through a macroLink to chat or with an event handler like onChangeToken. One of the main problems with frame updating is the format. New texts would need to be on top and push old down (the reverse of the actual chat frame). That's because there's no way to scroll to bottom of a frame which is where you would want to be if trying to emulate the chat frame.

Interesting.
I had no idea that those features would require such a flexing of code biceps.

It appears I'll have to turn this into a feature suggestion, since I don't really feel up to recoding the whole chat system just to change the bgcolor or line-height attributes.
I will look into TinyLaF to see if there's an easy way (lazy, thy name is Frost) as well.

Thank you for your suggestions, everybody.

I replied in your "Feature Request" posting already.

Yes, the TLAF is a good place to go. You can change the font there, but I don't recall a setting that let's you change the line spacing (although I have certainly not memorized all of the options available!). I believe that for most fonts, the line spacing defaults to 1.2 (or 120%) of the font height. It might be that the font has a baseline that's messing up the line space calculation...? Try other fonts and see how they look.