After much of my precious spare time I’ve finally got a PDF draft of the new Open Wargaming System generated by LaTeX. There’s an enormous amount of massaging that’s required to make it clear and pretty, but the proof of concept works.

Here’s the primary reason I wanted to use this instead of simple HTML printing:

• Automatic Table of Contents Generation
• Automatic Indexing (when I get more than 1 index item listed)
• The ability to export to HTML and PDF
• The ability to automatically grab the Glossary and Special Abilities sections from the Open Wargaming Website (I did this by making a Makefile and created two ./tex/ sub pages to both the Glossary and Special Abilities sections)
• Allegedly (according to some sites) sending this TEX to a Professional Printer & Designer should be easy and fairly seamless, but I’m not sure how well this works in the real-world.

Here are the generated test files:

• Exported HTML
• Exported PDF

Here’s my Makefile (for the non-programming types: this is very loosely like a Batch file in DOS) and TEX file.

I know this seems as if it’s a step behind to some of you, but this is one step to having everything online and guaranteed open-source as is the heart of the Open Wargaming System.

Addendum: I’m not really impressed with the HTML conversion, but I don’t mind what’s going on with the PDF creation (most notably the Column Layout, which I’ve had a booger of a time trying to code in FPDF/PHP–plus this solution has good TOC’s and Indexes). It might be easier for me to create a simple  HTML converter that integrates with the OWG’s search engine. There’s still lots to do–mainly cleaning up the errors and warnings when creating the PDF (which PDF is my primary concern). I MIGHT be able to convert BB Code to TEX, it should be a whole lot easier than writing a BBCode to PDF converter.