I'm working on my first ruleset - Call of Cthulhu - and I am in the (lengthy :)) process of writing up the reference material. It occured to me that if I could copy and paste this text from the rulebook directly into my editor it would be a lot easier. The problem is I've been to both drivethru and rpgnow but they don't stock pdfs of the rules - does anyone know where I can buy them?
If they aren't at those 2 sites the only other suggestion is from the game publisher itself. If not you are going to be out of luck.
One note though, even if you could get a hold of the PDF be very careful about distributing the ruleset out to people unless it has some type of Open Gaming License or something similiar.
Another idea would be to OCR the book, if you have access to a scanner. It's what I do if there is no PDF available. It's pretty accurate, bout 95% I'd say, you still need to go in and fix some typos. For instance, my OCR prog likes to read HD as RD, and 0 as O.
Thanks for the advice guys. I tried the OCR and it worked out pretty well - it will save me a lot of work!
One thing to watch out for if you cut-n-paste from a pdf (or word doc) is that certain characters like the forward/backward " symbols aren't handled by FG. When displaying the text it will usually just 'stop' when it reaches one of these symbols and pick up again at the next line break. Leaving you with chunks of text that aren't displayed to the user. These can be quite hard to spot.
Yeah the long dash and other things also don't work. If you do have a problem because of a bad character I found that when I load the actual xml file into my Visual Studio Editer (and I expect this pretty much is similar with any xml editor) the "bad" characters show up as a solid block. This helps me spot the problem character.
I would be very interested in a CoC ruleset for BRP... even if it's just a very simple (watered-down) ruleset. After all, the BRP game system is nowhere near as complicated or detailed as modern D20.
Keep us up to date with any progress!
Also one question on creating rulesets for other games: Is it possible that these custome rulesets can "skin" the interface so that the layout for Fantasy Grounds looks more like a Lovecraftian HORROR game rather than a Medieval Elf-Fantasy game?