Process Inkscape files and create sets of cards for board games

You'll need inkscape, convert, montage, and gs in your PATH.

Initialize a starter project

Install the gem globally with gem install svggvs and then run svggvs install <project> where project is the name of the directory to place the skeleton project files. You'll get a few files in there:

• template.svg, an Inkscape template that shoows how to do the basic SVGGVS template setup
• Cardfile, the file SVGGVS uses to define each card for printing
• Gemfile, in case you need additional gems. It has SVGGVS added already, but you may also want remote data gems like google_drive, for instance.

How it works

Create an Inkscape SVG file in your project directory. Make sure it has a Source and a Target layer. Your card template is made up of sublayers in the Source layer. These layers are copied to the Target layer upon processing. The names of the layers are what you refer to in the #active_layers method in your Cardfile. By default, layers are hidden, and hidden layers are deleted after copying to the Target layer, unless they have the following names:

• (visible): The layer is always visible, regardless if it's specified in #active_layers
• (protect): The layer will not be deleted if it is hidden. Good for clone sources.

Hiding/showing layers is the way that you make certain card elements appear/disappear on different types of cards with with different properties. You can also replace the text in text boxes (both standard and flowroot boxes) by giving those boxes a distinct label (under Object Properties) and feeding in a hash of label/text pairs into the #replacements method in the Cardfile.

Create a Cardfile in your working directory. It should look something like this:

@session.configure do |c|
  c.svg_source = "template/template.svg"
  c.svg_merged_target = "template/output.svg"

  c.png_export_width = 825
  c.pdf_card_size = "750x1050"
  c.pdf_dpi = 300

  c.individual_files_path = "template/output/card_%02d.svg"
  c.png_files_path = "template/png/card_%02d.png"

  c.pdf_target = "merged.pdf"
end

@session.process do
  require './card_definitions.rb'

  CardDefinitions.processed.each do |card|
    @session.with_new_target do |target|
      datum = card.to_svggvs

      # #active_layers indicates what sublayers within the "Source" layer of
      # the Inkscape document should be toggled as visible. All others are hidden.
      target.active_layers = datum[:active]

      # Any text with {% liquid_like_tags %} will have those tags replaced with the
      # values within the hash passed in.
      # Additionally, you can label the following and have things replaced:
      # * svg:flowRoot will replace the text in the svg:flowPara within
      # * svg:text will replace the text in the first svg:tspan within
      # * svg:image will replace the xlink:href of the tag, changing the image to load
      target.replacements = datum[:replacements]
    end
  end
end

You can also have a .cardrc file which is run before loading the Cardfile.

Process your cards with svggvs:

• svggvs merged_file: Create a big SVG file with all cards as layers. Fine for simple setups, but will create monster files!
• svggvs svgs: Write out individual SVG files.
• svggvs pngs: Write out PNG files after writing out the SVG files.
• svggvs pdf: Write out the merged PnP PDF file.

You can also pass in --cardfile <new file> to load a different cardfile, say for card backs.