Improved Functionality for using and Importing Handouts

I am a GM that uses a ton of handouts for my superhero and horror campaings. I create very elaborate news articles, source materials and visual references to enhance the game play experience for my player. To do this though. I need to use all sorts of software types such as Powerpoint and Word to create these files. These programs only give me the option to save my files out to proprietary, or PDF format, which means I need to convert the files from PDF to png or jpg files before importing them into Roll20. This may seem trivial, but when I create a five or ten page "Pamphlet" style handout for the creepy motel the players are investigating or a several page Newspaper handout or anything with more than a page or two of content, the conversion programs treat each page as a separate jpg/png file. So what I end up with is 15 jpg. files which Roll20 imports one at a time as separate handouts. This annoyance is compounded by the fact that I then need to tag, select, assign and reveal each handout one at a time. This makes for an incredibly clunky, time consuming process for me and my players who then have to open 15 handouts one at a time instead of just flipping through them as I intended. Most annoying is that if for any reason someone drops connectivity and we have to refresh our windows, all of the handouts that were opened then close and my players need to reopen them all. Is there any way that you can improve the handout functionality client side, and also allow importing PDF and Word files as Handouts? This would make my life so much easier and my players would thank you. My players love the time I take to create these elaborate handouts but the process to import and display them is less than ideal. Thank you.

I'm certainly in favor of improving the handouts to allow much more dynamic content. I do have a few interim ideas you could try: You can drag a PDF to the image area of a handout and it will prompt you for a page to extract. At least you wouldn't need to deal with a bunch of files that way... Another option, once you have all the images in your library, you can copy and paste them all into the body of a handout: <a href="https://app.roll20.net/forum/post/1373363/multiple" rel="nofollow">https://app.roll20.net/forum/post/1373363/multiple</a>... Finally, you could assemble them all into a single image and just upload that.

Thanks Aaron, I was unaware of the PDF import which at least saves some time. But the second option just doesn't work for me because the images I use are usually pretty large and sometimes text heavy. When I copy them from my library into the body of a handout, the compression on the image makes everything but the images unreadable. I've tried increasing the resolution on the images and its still not helping. I think the images become compressed when added to the body of the handout, which is fine for images but not for handouts with newspaper like text or any smaller fonts. I appreciate the suggestion. I would love to see this aspect improved and streamlined because it's the meat and potatoes of a lot of my games. I could do without the dynamic lighting, fog of war and all that jazz, if the handouts and the formatting/aligning of maps were more ironed out. Overall, I love the experience on Roll20 and hope they keep innovating for other games besides Pathfinder and D&D.

Yeah, agree! =D One more interim thought: Creating a primary handout with links to each of the pages might at least make navigation more manageable. I like to name my handouts with unicode characters at the beginning as a way to enforce ordering, so you could push all the single pages to the end out of the way, but keep the primary entry near the top. The Daily Cog [The Daily Cog: Page 1] [The Daily Cog: Page 2] [The Daily Cog: Page 3] ...

I'll offer another interim idea, or workaround, for now. This would be outside Roll20 in a way, using a 3rd party site, but you could paste the Link in the Roll20 chat (or in a Handout) as your way of sharing it. The idea is, you can use <a href="http://www.Dropbox.com" rel="nofollow">www.Dropbox.com</a> or Google Drive. (Use Google Drive if your group already uses Google Hangouts for the game, meaning everyone is already a google account member. Otherwise use Dropbox instead). These sites are easy to use, plenty of storage space for thousands of your handouts, and lots of other features-advantages. The drawback is, obviously you'd be bouncing outside of Roll20, perhaps in another tab. The upsides include, you could just load the PDF (no convert to JPG) and it would be the full multi-page PDF shared to everyone.

Here we are 4 years on and it looks like the solution is still to use some 3rd-party sharing tool like Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive for sharing anything that isn't just a trivial image. Is there at least a ticket for "sharing a handout with multiple images" ?

I guess people don't want it as bad as we do.&nbsp; Back in the day, I would create elaborate handouts. Like Tour guide pamphlets about the city in a supers game. For a fantasy game, I once created a play bill that correlated to attacks/events happening around the city. You name it. But with one page per, handout it's not worth the effort on both ends. At least we have animated tokens...&nbsp;

Is there perhaps a suggestion to allow import of PDF files as handouts?

I don't believe so. The option is to not use them or strong out the images in photoshop and save them as a single photo. But that becomes memory prohibitive.&nbsp;

And sure Google drive is a great resource that I already pay for.... I already use Discord to host Chat and Video, and also as an In Character Live RP Chat between sessions and as a General Chat forum. I hardly ever post in the Roll20 Game Forums for my games once the game is staffed up and started. At this point, the only thing I use roll20 for are the maps and the supposed ease of running D&amp;D 5e because of the "drag and drop functionality" from the SRD and the premade adventures/supplements. Even in those cases, I'm usually rebuying something I paid 5 bucks for 30 years ago (Against the Giants, Temple of Elemental Evil, Tomb of Horror, etc) for 5 times as much.&nbsp; For M&amp;M, or Champions, or Icons, or Hollow Earth, or LT5Rs, or Deadlands, or V&amp;V, or basically any other system except D&amp;D 5e, I still need to do everything manually, including manually recreating the 500 villains/extras I have, into a character sheet that most likely is nothing more than an CSS or HTML copy of a PDF character sheet.&nbsp; Even then, we only recently got some of the games listed and in most cases the support is minimal. It doesn't seem like much to ask... to support PDF handouts. I'll stop "grumbling" before the almighty PinkD20 hears me, and bans me AGAIN for talking crap about the mediocre service we paying PRO players get...

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