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CardArtist

CardArtist is a tool aimed at automatically generating large numbers of playing card images based on a card database and graphic templates. CardArtist is designed to help hobbyists in the creation of new board games and card games from playtest, either physical or virtual, to professional printing by services like The Game Crafter.

CardArtist is currently in early beta stage and, while functional, it is still unstable.

The techinical design of CardArtist is discussed in the following blog posts. These provide insight about software architecture and programming techniques, they are not documentation about how to use CardArtist, for that see below.

License

The license information for this repository are available in LICENSE.md.

System requirements

CardArtist runs exclusively on Windows and requires .NET 5.

Project goals, non-goals and suggested third-party software

CardArtist is exclusively aimed at the batch generation of images.

CardArtist is NOT meant to provide:

  • A text editor or an IDE
  • A preview tool for XAML or WPF
  • A C# debugger

There is very good free software that can be used in conjunction with CardArtist, these are a few suggestions:

Getting started

The rest of this document explains how to create a template and describes all the features of CardArtist, a general understanding of C#, Razor and WPF is expected.

For users who are not yet familiar with C#, Razor or WPF, it may be easier to read this step by step tutorial first. The tutorial shows in detail how the Middara sample template was written and can be used to learn different approaches to create complex card layouts.

Creating a project

A CardArtist project consists of a folder having two subfolders: Cards and Templates. CardArtist will automatically create this folder structure when using Load Project and selecting a folder.

Cards

The Cards subfolder contains the card database which is composed of "decks": XML files like the following:

<Deck Template="t1" Dpi="300">
    <Card Id="1">
    </Card>
    <Card Id="2">
    </Card>
</Deck>

Each deck file will result, when rendering the cards, in the generation of a separate folder. In the example above, the deck references the template file named t1.csxaml. The two cards from this deck will be rendered at 300 DPIs resulting in two files named 1.png and 2.png.

The user can add attributes and children to the Card elements, such data can be referenced from the template.

It is possible, but not required, to specify the exact pixel size of the images to be generated: <Deck Template="t1" Dpi="300" Width="825" Height="1125">.

Each Card element can optionally override some of the properties of the Deck: <Card Id="1" Template="t2">.

Templates

The Templates subfolder contains Razor files used to generate XAML/WPF layouts for each card.

Razor is a templating language normally used to generate HTML files. CardArtist uses Razor to generate XAML files.

XAML is a language used to describe user interfaces. CardArtist uses XAML to describe the WPF layout of each card. See here for a more detailed explanation of how this works and why WPF a great choice for drawing playing cards.

An empty template file looks like the following:

@using System
<Grid xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
      xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
      Background="White"
      Width="2.75in"
      Height="3.75in">
    <Border x:Name="Card"
            Width="2.5in"
            Height="3.5in"
            Margin="0.125in"
            Padding="0.125in"
            CornerRadius="10"
            BorderBrush="Black"
            BorderThickness="1">
        <Grid x:Name="SafeArea">
        </Grid>
    </Border>
</Grid>"

The template above defines an area called Card, in this case 2.5 by 3.5 inches.

When having the cards printed professionally there may be a misalignment between printing and cut. In this case, the worst case misalignment is expected to be 0.125 inches. For this reason, the Card area has an external Margin of 0.125 inches and a corresponding internal Padding. The user should let the card background bleed into the whole 2.75 by 3.75 inches area while all graphic elements should be inside the 2.25 by 3.25 inches SafeArea.

CardArtist allows to choose whether the rendered card images should contain the bleed area (good for professional card printing) or be cropped so that only the Card area is visible (good for at-home printing or for virtual playtesting).

Rendering output

When rendering cards, CardArtist will save the generated images into the Renders project folder. It will also save the intermediate files (XAML and C#) used for the image generation into the Debug folder.

Template functionalities

Referencing the card data in the template

Given the following deck file

<Deck Template="t1" Dpi="300">
    <Card Id="1" Title="Ride the Jackrabbit" Image="./Jackrabbit.jpg">
        <Content>
            <Paragraph FontSize="9"><Bold>HERE IT IS!</Bold></Paragraph>
            <Paragraph FontSize="9">Along Arizona's stretch of Route 66, halfway between Holbrook and Winslow, you can find the <Bold>Jack Rabbit Trading Post</Bold>.</Paragraph>
            <Paragraph FontSize="9">Travelers of Route 66 can see billboards advertising this convenience store and gift shop as early as Missouri.</Paragraph>
        </Content>
    </Card>
</Deck>

the card data can be referenced from the template:

<Grid xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
      xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
      Background="Black">
    <Border x:Name="Card"
            Width="2.5in" Height="3.5in"
            Margin="0.125in" Padding="0.125in"
            CornerRadius="10" BorderBrush="White" BorderThickness="1">
        <Grid x:Name="SafeArea">
            <Border CornerRadius="8" Background="White"
                    HorizontalAlignment="Stretch" VerticalAlignment="Stretch">
                <Grid>
                    <Grid.RowDefinitions>
                        <RowDefinition Height="Auto"/>
                        <RowDefinition Height="*"/>
                        <RowDefinition Height="Auto"/>
                        <RowDefinition Height="*"/>
                    </Grid.RowDefinitions>
                    <Grid.ColumnDefinitions>
                        <ColumnDefinition Width="0.2in"/>
                        <ColumnDefinition Width="*"/>
                        <ColumnDefinition Width="0.2in"/>
                    </Grid.ColumnDefinitions>
                    <TextBlock Grid.Column="1" Grid.Row="0"
                               HorizontalAlignment="Center"
                               FontWeight="Bold" FontStyle="Italic">
                        @Data.Title
                    </TextBlock>
                    <Image Grid.Column="1" Grid.Row="1"
                        HorizontalAlignment="Stretch" VerticalAlignment="Stretch"
                        Stretch="UniformToFill" Source="@Path(Data.Image)" />
                    <RichTextBox Grid.Column="1" Grid.Row="3"
                                 BorderBrush="Transparent" Background="Transparent">
                        <FlowDocument>
                            @{ WriteLiteral(Data["Content", 0]); }
                        </FlowDocument>
                    </RichTextBox>
                </Grid>
            </Border>
        </Grid>
    </Border>
</Grid>
  • @Data.Title copies the value of the Title attribute into the XAML layout.
  • @Path(Data.Image) is a two-step operation: Data.Image accesses the Image attribute and Path converts it to an absolute file path so that it can be used by WPF.
  • @{ WriteLiteral(Data["Content", 0]); } is a block of code doing multiple operations:
    • @{ starts a section of C# code
    • Data["Content", 0] accesses the first (number 0) XML element named Content from the card data
    • WriteLiteral copies the inner XML from the Content element into the XAML layout without performing any XML escaping.

Data access syntax

@Data provides access to the XML element representing the card.

An XML element can be interacted with in the following ways:

  • Converting (casting) an XML element to string or calling the .ToString() method returns the inner text and descendant elements.
  • Converting (casting) an XML element to a numerical type attempts a conversion of the inner text to number.
  • An XML element can be converted (cast) to System.Xml.Linq.XElement.
  • Calling the .Xml() method returns a string representing the element and all of its content.
  • Calling the .Elements() method returns an array of the children elements.
  • Calling the .Attributes() method returns an array of element's attributes.
  • Calling the .Name() or .LocalName() methods return the qualified and unqualified name of the element.
  • Accessing a property of an XML element returns the attribute of the same name or null.
  • An XML element's children can be accessed with the array syntax:
    • ["Foo", 0] returns the first (number 0) child element named Foo or null.
    • ["Foo"] returns an array containing all elements named Foo.
    • [0] returns the first (number 0) child element or null.

An XML attribute can be interacted with in the following ways:

  • Converting (casting) an XML attribute to string or calling the .ToString() method returns its value.
  • Converting (casting) an XML attribute to a numerical type attempts a conversion of its value to number.
  • An XML attribute can be converted (cast) to System.Xml.Linq.XAttribute.
  • Calling the .Name() or .LocalName() methods return the qualified and unqualified name of the attribute.

These syntaxes can be chained as needed. For example:

  • @Data["Dice", 0]?.Die1 returns the Die1 attribute of the first Dice child element (<Card Id="1"><Dice Die1="Blue"></Card>). The ? operator avoids an error in case a Dice element is not present.
  • @foreach(var paragraph in Data["Text", 0]["Paragraph"]) iterates over all the elements named Paragraph inside the first Text element.

Using files

The Path function can be used when referencing a file from the project folder in order to convert a local path to an absolute path which is understandable by WPF.

For example <Card Id="1" Picture="./Foo.png" /> can be referenced like this in the template:

<Image Source="@Path(Data.Picture)" />

Functions

Raror allows to specify C# code by adding a @functions{ } area in the template (see here). This allows to create variables, functions and even define new types.

Mapping XML to XAML

The Explore function allows to map complex XML data to XAML. The full definition of the Explore function is:

void Explore(XElement element,
             Func<dynamic, (bool Print, bool Explore)> elementAction,
             Action<string> textAction = null)

The function will explore the descendants of an element, in order, and invoke the provided callback functions for each element and text block encountered.

  • The element parameter is the element to explore.
  • The elementAction parameter is the callback function that will be invoked for each descendant element. If the callback returns Print=true, Explore will print the current element (opening and closing tags only, including attributes, not including content) as XAML. If the callback returns Explore=true, the Explore function will iterate over this element children.
  • The textAction parameter is the callback function that will be invoked for each descendant block of text. If the textAction parameter is not provided, the Explore function will simply write each text block as XAML.

For example, the following XML data

<Card Id="1">
    <Text>
        <Paragraph><Use /></Paragraph>
        <Paragraph>Add <Bold>1</Bold> resource.</Paragraph>
    </Text>
</Card>

can be converted to XAML using Explore:

    @{
        Explore((XElement)Data["Text", 0], MapElementToXaml);
    }

    @functions{
        (bool Print, bool Explore) MapElementToXaml(dynamic e)
        {
            if (e.Name() == "Use")
            {
                //Convert the shorthand "<Use />" element to a XAML image
                <Image Source="@Path(@"Resources\Use.png")" />

                //Don't print the "<Use />" element, don't explore its descendants
                return (false, false);
            }

            //Any other element and their descendants should be printed without modifications
            return (true, true);
        }
    }

In some case the text portions of the XML data must be converted as well:

    @{
        Explore((XElement)Data["Text", 0], MapElementToXaml, MapTextToXaml);
    }

    @functions{
        void MapTextToXaml(string text)
        {
            <TextBlock xml:space="preserve">@text</TextBlock>
        }
    }

Referencing external libraries

It is possible to reference .dll libraries from the template using a reference XML comment. reference comments use paths relative to the project folder.

Once referenced, the library can be used:

  • from C# code, optionally adding a @using statement;
  • from XAML, by adding a xmlns attribute.
<!--reference MyControls.dll-->
@using System
<Grid xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
      xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
      xmlns:mycontrols="clr-namespace:MyControls;assembly=MyControls"
...
    <mycontrols:OutlineTextControl Text="@Data.Title" StrokeThickness="1" Stroke="Black" Fill="White" />

It is also possible to use a reference comment with an assembly name, this is useful to reference standard .NET libraries:

<!--reference PresentationCore-->
@using System.Windows