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What is the easiest way to scale tokens for printing?

Posted: Fri Apr 29, 2011 1:22 pm
by scibat
Pretty much what the topic asks. When I load a token up, it tends to be huge and I have to fight to get it the right size usually wasting a lot of paper on multiple printing attempts before I get it right. Is there an easier method? I have a 1" square battlemap and that's what I tend to size them for.

Re: What is the easiest way to scale tokens for printing?

Posted: Fri Apr 29, 2011 4:35 pm
by CoveredInFish
TokenTool is pretty much a tool supporting Maptool (or other VTTs) and printing tokens hasnt got much thought - I think.

I could imaging that TT doesnt set the resolution of the created image file (actually it cant without guesswork, because you cannot specify a scale or print size)

I would open the image editor of my choice and set the resolution I need there -- but I agree "use other software" is a lousy answer :(

Re: What is the easiest way to scale tokens for printing?

Posted: Fri Apr 29, 2011 6:54 pm
by Phergus
Scaling the token is the wrong way to handle it. You want to set the DPI of the image to match the intended grid size.

As CiF asserts, TokenTool doesn't set the DPI attributes of the generated image. So what usually happens when you try to print an image is that the OS assumes it should print at the DPI of your display device and you get not what you wanted.

For TokenTool images you want to set the DPI to be the same as the token size assuming that a token occupies a 1" x 1" space.

Gimp allows you to do this easily and I'm sure there are other tools that will do this as well.

ImageMagik would be a good choice to batch convert a number of images.

Re: What is the easiest way to scale tokens for printing?

Posted: Sat Apr 30, 2011 10:34 am
by Azhrei
And printing from within TokenTool wouldn't be such a good idea anyway. One token at a time? Ugh.

So TT would need to have the ability for the user to select a bunch of images and arrange them on a page, then print that page. This means it needs to know about various printer vagaries -- such as printer margins, avoiding moire patterns, and so forth. And those are all things that other image editing programs already do -- why reinvent the wheel? In addition, we're sort of straying away from the intended use of the application as well; it's designed to make quick and easy tokens for a digital tabletop program, not general purpose graphics manipulation. :|

I don't have any plans to develop TT any further at this point. If someone else wanted to take on this job and donate their changes then I'd be willing to look at them and perhaps apply them to our base code...

Re: What is the easiest way to scale tokens for printing?

Posted: Sat Jun 11, 2011 4:21 pm
by triad4evr
There is a terrific tool at the following web address- you don't have to buy the token art, just download the PDFs- they will automatically be set for 1 inch by 1 inch, 2 inch, 3 inch tokens, etc. and the PDF files are free. Only real issue is that you can't save your token layouts, but otherwise, these are _terrific_! for use with Token Tool.

Ooops! Need the link, right?

http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product_i ... rers_id=14

Re: What is the easiest way to scale tokens for printing?

Posted: Sun Jun 12, 2011 6:40 pm
by Azhrei
Yeah, those are pretty cool. :)

For those wanting to try them out, scroll down the page a little ways and grab the "Interactive 1 inch countersheet" PDFs that the link points to. Read the paragraph immediately above the link to learn how to use it.

Warning to Mac users: Preview will not run the JavaScript code that is embedded in these PDFs so it won't work. You will need either the full Adobe Acrobat Pro or the free Adobe Acrobat Reader (I checked v8 and it works). The JavaScript code pops up a dialog box that asks for the image which is then scaled and inserted into the PDF. Now the PDF can be printed. I'm not sure if it can be saved in a way that it reloads properly though; I didn't try.