Collectible Card Game Headquarters

Uploaded 9.1.00

Apparently missed a slight text adjustment on M15 story cards

Code: Select all

storyLeft.x = 22

needs to be changed to

Code: Select all

storyLeft.x = 38

in config-m15.txt

Looking at the Amonkhet Masterpieces, I do not have the skill to recreate those... It's unlikely that I will have those frames for some time.

A lot of people find them to be butt ugly so it's no great loss

Every time I come back here to check on the progress, I'm always blown away by how much has been done. You're an animal!! I admit I've done zero research on this so don't burn me at the stake. I just thought I'd ask you directly. Does this app work for Mac OS? I know most of it is PHP which is fine on Mac. I don't know if the batch files are required / referenced in the code directly, or if I could configure some bash scripts with similar results. I mean could I use a similar process as outlined here? https://www.slightlymagic.net/wiki/CardGenerator Input from anyone would be greatly appreciated. Keep up the amazing work ahkren!

@Faraleth, I don't have much experience with Mac OS, if I recall correctly, it is unix/linux based? If so, you should be able to install PHP and uses it if you have the proper modules loaded. I have loaded in the included php.ini; php_gd2, php_mbstring and php_xdebug-2.5.0-5.5-vc11 on PHP 5.5.0. In theory the included .sh scripts should work as they are bash scripts. I believe that the wiki info is still mostly correct.

Downloaded the generator, it works almost perfect! However I've met small problems:


The "Land — Forest Island" line, some characters are 1px higher than other characters.
And next, "enters the battlefield", that "t" seems very strange.
By the way, all characters in rule text seems a bit "fatter" than original card.

Original card:


How to fix these problems?

I compared the text boxes of the render and the scan for Breeding Pool, as far as I can tell, the fonts for the text boxes are the same size, no width or height difference, same kerning between letters.
As for the Title and Type line, it looks to be a problem with MatrixB.ttf as all the letters with a rounded bit go below the baseline. I'll see what I can do to correct it or find a new font to use. If someone has a fixed font already, I'd appreciate it.

Some fonts dip below the baseline intentionally. I'll bet that's just how Matrix was designed. On a side note, I wonder if WOTC switched to Matrix II at some point?

ahkren wrote:I compared the text boxes of the render and the scan for Breeding Pool, as far as I can tell, the fonts for the text boxes are the same size, no width or height difference, same kerning between letters.

I think the kerning is not exactly same:

Look at the "Target creature" and "Agony Warp" in title.

Original card:


I modified Matrix/Mplantin fonts and fixed the baseline problem, but I don't know how to fix the kerning.
The modified Mplantin font includes kerning, but Cardgen doesn't realize it.

I'll see what I can do about that. The biggest issue is that pgp gd library doesn't support kerning by default, so it will take some time to write a function that works within the framework. I'll put it on my todo list.

Imagick has broader capabilities than GD. I haven't looked at it in a long time, but I think it supports kerning and multi-line text boxes (which HQCG creates manually) out of the box. It would be a huge task to integrate it, but it might be worth considering. I don't know if you can run it from a dll or if installation is required.

I can confirm that M14 used Matrix II. The letter "g" is noticeably curved in the newer font and easy to identify. http://www.emigre.com/EFfeature.php?di=105

@skibulk, I've been thinking of trying to convert to imagick, it will just be a long and daunting process. The dll and some related files are necessary because imagick is effectively calling the Image Macgick API and working behind the scenes with the Image Magick executables. I think in the long run it will be better for this project, but doing a complete conversion to imagick will take a lot of time.

I'm a web guy, so my opinion is a bit skewed, but I think it would be cool to convert this to a browser app. JavaScript is taking over the world after all. It could use JSON for configuration, generate SVGs, and optionally use canvas to convert to JPGs. The fonts, frames, and symbols could all be externally linked to monumentally reduce file size. The only issue is that SVG 1.2 doesn't have word wrapping (v2 may solve that). It would have to use a Foreign Object HTML element until then. It would take a lot of work admittedly, I wish I had time to do it.