Production Czar

So you're the Production Czar. This is what you're in for:

Starting

You should be comfortable working on Athena and doing basic LaTeX. You don't need to know advanced LaTeX, any TeX, or any Perl, though if you do you can go hacking on things to your heart's content.

Before you or your team can do anything with the Template, you need to do the basic setup. Why don't you go take care of that now and then come back here.

Some Template Foundations

Now that you're back, here's the stuff that you, as Czar, should know about the Template on general principles, and certainly to do any customization.

The LaTeX files are set up to centralize information as much as possible. Rather than having every bluesheet define exactly how it should look, there's a bluesheet.sty in LaTeX/Styles they all use (via the \usepackage{bluesheet} header). Rather than having bluesheet.sty and greensheet.sty and character.sty each define everything about their style, there's a sheets.sty they all use to define the common elements (via \RequirePackage{sheets}).

This is the general structure; as much of the common elements as possible are put into a .sty file. This is either \RequirePackage'd by other style files, or \usepackage'd by .tex files.

The second way information is centralized is that the .tex files in LaTeX/Lists define some of the properties of bluesheets, greensheets, other list-type extractables, and usually more properties of abilities, items, and other tex-type extractables: namely, a macro associated with the sheet/card, the official name, and all the information about how the sheet/card is printed. For list-type extractables (usually sheets), the latter is just the filename containing the sheet. For tex-type extractables (usually cards), it's whatever information will go on the card. The Lists/*.tex files are \input by character.sty, which defines needed associated macros so that when the character sheet lists \Banarchists, \Aforensics, etc. the official names of the sheet/ability/etc. are printed. (Some Lists/*.tex files provide some of those macros, and game.cls itself provides the fundamental \listsheet.) The packets perl script will tickle the magic in charextracts.sty (which is used by character.sty), causing it to spit out .tex files for the tex-type extractables (which packets will latex and process) and a single file listing the list-type extractables (which packets will use to decide which bluesheets etc to print for the character).

The third way information is centralized is that EVERY document in game uses LaTeX/Styles/game.cls as its base, via \documentclass{game}. While that doesn't contain any game-specific info itself (it's the Template black magic), LaTeX/Styles/custom.sty gets sucked in by it. There you define some global things that everything in the Template wants to have available, like \gamename and \gamedate, and do any other global customizations you feel like.

The fourth way information is centralized is that is that game.cls draws on LaTeX/Lists/characters.tex and LaTeX/Lists/players.tex to define character info for every character. (Since everything uses game.cls, everything uses those files as well.)

Because information (both form and content) is so centralized, when your team specifies something they should only have to do so in one place. Further, when you want to do customization and change the way things look, you should only have to change one or two files, and your changes should automatically propagate to exactly where you want them. Do make sure you check the docs when you make a change so you know what needs to be changed where, though --- and test it right away!

Finally, one Template macro you should be aware of early is \newdef; please read its entry in the glossary. Otherwise even basic parts of style files won't be clear to you, and you won't be able to explain it to the GMs (did we mention that's part of your job?).

Typical Customizations

There are all sorts of potential customizations available. Your team is unlikely to use everything available, but you'll probably want some of it, so you should browse through now enough to know what's there.

• You are not limited to Template-provided tools---you can still define latex macros yourself, which is often the perfect way to get the effect you want. Want to do room numbers by putting \ROOMcommon, \ROOMgm, \ROOMthrone in the files and setting them centrally? Just \newcommand\ROOMcommon{37-232} (custom.sty's tail is a great place) will do; you can get more complex, but you don't have to.
• Creating cards: how to make new types of cards, in case ability cards, item cards, stat cards, etc. aren't enough for you.
• You may wish to add new fields of character information (or combo fields, or pronouns...); this is done in of LaTeX/Styles/custom.sty, whose comments explain how.
• Adding tex-type and/or list-type extractables for the packets script to automagically extract and print.
• Automatic generation (and optionally assignment) of random numbers for item numbers, badge numbers, etc.
• If you add or change any macros, remember to document it in the glossary!
• You can define what your game's money should be like (and use \cash{ } to make change automatically). If you don't want extractable money, just comment out the Money sections from bin/packets.config, LaTeX/Styles/character.sty, Charsheets/template.tex, all of which should make it obvious what to change.
• There's a \rot macro available for alphabet-rotating text, something that comes up all the time in game mechanics. Full description is in the glossary as usual.
• The Bare Bones Guide to HTML: Kevin Werbach's guide to HTML, so you can update the documentation in this directory as you customize stuff. Try to keep the use of fancy tags minimal so that GMs can mostly read the docs with "more," though they can also use the doc script, which processes via lynx so some formatting occurs.

Other

Remember to read the rest of the introduction, which will tell you (among other things) about places where Template discussion happens, where you can report problems and ask questions, and (important!) where to look for updates on recent issues and their solutions.

If you're feeling like doing more hardcore Template tweaking, here's some more stuff you should look at:

• Template design philosophy: what this package is and isn't trying to do --- the high-level goals as well as some design specifics; guidelines for us making permanent changes to the Template.
• The to-do list, mostly based on feedback from GM teams and especially Czars.