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Pedro Medeiros

Every now and then I want to make a procedural image or PDF, like cards for game prototyping, grid papers, etc. Is there a good and modern library for drawing that? (Ideally c# but I'm up for anything with an easy setup)

@saint11 python can do these things pretty decently, and spit out images of various formats or pdfs

@saint11 mm. when we've wanted this we mostly just write it in postscript heh. that's not very helpful

@irenes @saint11 same 🤷‍♂️ But not ideal, mostly because the tooling is so rough!

@saint11 Sounds like you want SVG maybe? Maybe InkScape or such will let you name certain elements so you can mix and match editing things for templates, and then inserting other shapes or text within them from code.

@saint11 Nandeck has the ability to script cards and parameterize graphics. I don't have much experience with it.

nandeck.com/

I prefer building card game prototypes by combining images I create and data from spreadsheets but it sounds like you're wanting something to procedurally generate the data too?

www.nandeck.comnanDECK | Code your graphics

@ericraue Ideally yes, I wanted a solution that I could use to quickly procedurally draw and generate images. Right now I'm using SkiaSharp, but it's kinda clunky.

@saint11 I used PDFkit and svg2pdfkit in JS for my maze generator. Worked quite well.

@saint11 I used this some years back for D&D monster cards. It worked fine 🤷‍♂️

@saint11 off the wall one here, but there are good libraries for generating data for receipt printers. They let you create a design, then you can basically search and replace on that design and create images from there. It’s called ZPL.