Online character builder / printing

V

Vicar In A Tutu

Explorer

• Dec 28, 2010

• #1

I was considering posting this question over on the WoTC-forums, but when I saw what it had become (a seething pot of hat and nerdrage, not to mention a considerable amount of justifiable anger), I decided to post it here instead. I have tried printing character sheets from the online character builder many, many times. On three different computers. The one at work, my private laptop and a computer belonging to a friend (this is btw a beautiful piece of hardware, unlike my own and the one at work). But I always print blank pages. This happens everytime. On all three computers. I just can't print the damn character sheets, and as long as this is the case, the builder is completely and utterly useless to me.

Does anyone know what to do? Is it like this for everyone?

 

log in or register to remove this ad

Piratecat

Sesquipedalian

• Dec 28, 2010

• #2

What's happening here is that Silverlight, bless its little heart, converts documents to giant honkin' hundreds-of-MBs-large bitmaps before printing. These are swamping your printer's memory.

The solution? Google then install the free PDF program Cute PDF, which transparently acts as a printer driver. Print from the CB to a PDF, which creates a (still larger than it should be) PDF of 4-5 MB. Your printer can handle these with no problem.

 

R

Riastlin

First Post

• Dec 28, 2010

• #3

Weird. I have not had this problem (nor did any of my friends in my group). My suggestion would be to try contacting WotC directly because there hopefully is probably a fairly simple solution. I will say that despite some notable missteps this year, I have received fairly quick and helpful responses when I have had occasion to contact them.

 

OnlineDM

Adventurer

• Dec 28, 2010

• #4

I'd give you more XP for the CutePDF suggestion, PirateCat, but I need to spread some around first (can someone else cover me?).

My printer has been able to handle printing the huge bitmaps, but the problem has been pagination. I like to print the first three pages on my cheap black-and-white printer, but print the power cards on the more expensive to use color printer. My printers have struggled at getting the pages right. If it's a total of five pages, for instance, the color printer might print pages 2 and 3 even though I tell it to print pages 4 and 5. With the PDF, there will be no problems!

Thanks for the great pointer on CutePDF.

 

L

Larrin

Entropic Good

• Dec 28, 2010

• #5

Interesting, my printing problems have been that when i tried to skip pages (say i tell it to print pages 3-5 only) I got a very strange things happening. It printed random pages out of order, and my attempts to figure it out then cued up 12 more jobs than i had asked for. I only did this once in the first week of the CB, so maybe its been fixed.

 

Riley

Legend

• Dec 28, 2010

• #6

Over the weekend, I used Acrobat 7's virtual printer to create character sheet PDF's. They're still images, but they clock in at a mere 700kb.

 

P

Prestidigitalis

First Post

• Dec 28, 2010

• #7

Riley said:

They're still images, but they clock in at a mere 700kb.

Click to expand...

You expected video?

 

Riley

Legend

• Dec 28, 2010

• #8

Prestidigitalis said:

You expected video?

Click to expand...

No, but I would hope for text.

 

tuxgeo

Adventurer

• Dec 28, 2010

• #9

Prestidigitalis said:

You expected video?

Click to expand...

Riley said:

No, but I would hope for text.

Click to expand...

My own personal guess about the direction WotC is taking this: they are trying to find an alternative to piratable PDFs which include text in them. These Character Builder PDF-images do not allow easy abstraction of the text content; so that is the kind of PDF they require their application to create.

 

P

Prestidigitalis

First Post

• Dec 28, 2010

• #10

Riley said:

No, but I would hope for text.

Click to expand...

It was a sad, sorry joke. Video vs. "still images".