Print Character Sheets

Noon said:

....

Also, did you know that after running your script, it kinda messes up the tabs in both the character sheet and the tabs in the main window chat box?

but if you refresh the browser it all comes good.

The Bring Your Own Beat update launched at the beginning of the month, along with consistent updates to Get A New Look as well as new Compendiums and more functionality within Character Sheets.

There are a more, similar updates on the horizon for the team before printing character sheets can be supported from directly within the character sheet interface.

I play in Adventure League and some of the venues have really poor internet access so I am currently using OrcPub2 to print my Character sheet. This is less than optimal. Please give us that ability to print out our Character Sheets!

If you think about printing out the sheet, this is done by CSS with the @media print{} .
(this is how e.g. background images du not appear when you print a page. You can also use @media to change the look of the page based on the size of the screen)

Note that browsers often have built in settings for this, that have priority over the css file.

If you save the sheet you might be able to edit the css using this

+1 from me as well! I am dying to be able to print in order to easily reference all my abilities at a time. I'd love to be able to print without having to screen shot everything one snip at a time.

Considering most people would like to see a portrait also printed on their character sheet, shouldn't this suggested be also voted on and implemented BEFORE they do this one?

https://app.roll20.net/forum/post/1448895/grant-character-sheet-access-to-character-avatar

+1

Will this ever get done? It's been 4 years now on the suggested thread. This seems like it should be a priority.

Nope, not yet... And it's not a priority, no matter how old it is or how many votes it gets. They have their own timeline and to date this has not even had a mention.

Mark said:

Nope, not yet... And it's not a priority, no matter how old it is or how many votes it gets. They have their own timeline and to date this has not even had a mention.

That isn't true at all.  If you go back to the previous page, Kenton posted 3 times in this thread starting at 6 months ago.  I would be surprised if it starts as soon as his last comment on that page makes it sound with all the other things going on.  But it might actually get a serious look later in the year.  It will be interesting to see if it ends up requiring changes in character sheet code (something I am slightly nervous about).

New to Roll20. Surprised by this feature gap and very surprised it is 4 years old. I was going to use Roll20 to help me DM a group for my kid. Is there a better site for creating printable character sheets? 

There are some sites that specifically do that. I've used some to replicate the characters I couldn't print here.

Just Google "D&D 5e Character Generator" and explore a bit, see which you like best.

Paul R. said:

New to Roll20. Surprised by this feature gap and very surprised it is 4 years old. I was going to use Roll20 to help me DM a group for my kid. Is there a better site for creating printable character sheets? 

D&D Beyond prints character sheets really well.

Mark said:

..to date this has not even had a mention.

It has,
https://app.roll20.net/forum/permalink/7462021/

adding my support

Gold said:

Mark said:

..to date this has not even had a mention.

It has,
https://app.roll20.net/forum/permalink/7462021/

If you call that actual progress...

Seriously, I have not seen any updates on the dozen suggestions, most of them in the top 10 of popularity, have any movement for a month. It's like they are asleep or given up!

Well, since anything labeled obstructed is supposed to require rewriting/restructuring some of the existing code of the site (hopefully without causing a lot of other problems), I don't expect any of this to be quick.  Especially since they are still dealing with fallout from the AFoW update, working on the rollout of Pathfinder 2, and still have the "layer up" update in the works.  It isn't like they are doing nothing at the moment.  You are perfectly free to believe that if you wish though.

I don't want to come across as if I don't have desires for quick resolution of some of the suggestions myself.   I actually have all of my votes spent, and have been thinking about removing some of the ones from suggestions that have had dev comment to free them up for other suggestions.

Can we get an update on this yet @Kenton?    

I would use R20 so much more if I could print my sheets directly from it.

I'm really sorry for the delay in responses. Printing Character Sheets is still something we're very interested in doing. At this time, we haven't found a good solution without a significant burden on Character Sheet contributors.

I expect we should have more time to research and to plan for this addition in the future.

 plan for this addition in the future

That's not exactly narrowing it down since it's ALREADY been 4 years this thread has been going.

Depending on which browser you use, there are some "print friendly" mods that help you print difficult pages better or isolate certain frames, etc. that you can try in the meantime.  Scaling in your print preview can also help.  Depending on which sheet your game is using these work with varying degrees of success or failure.

Kenton said:

I'm really sorry for the delay in responses. Printing Character Sheets is still something we're very interested in doing. At this time, we haven't found a good solution without a significant burden on Character Sheet contributors.

I expect we should have more time to research and to plan for this addition in the future.

Why can't you just render all the data from the sheet into a separate page where it could be printer friendly? I mean I know you have a vast amount of sheets for all the games etc but surely this makes more sense? Obviously nobody here knows what the back end structure is like but ultimately if you can display the sheet on a separate page (like in the character vault) at the very least people could print that page?     

If you go to Settings in your game and check the box for Use Pop-out Windows for Character Sheets you will get your character sheet in its own separate page.  Still not the most printer friendly though.  But, with some manual size scaling you can usually get a print that's useable depending on which system and sheet you're using.

Install Tampermonkey, use this. If it doesn't work for your sheet I can create some fixes but it should just let you open up a character sheet and press ctrl + p and it'll print. I don't know why I didn't make a userstyle before but I'm losing my mind with how many notifications I'm getting from this thread. This one should work for most sheets and the 5E one. I have a specific one for the Neceros pathfinder sheet but I haven't decided if I'm going to create new userstyles for each edge case or make a way to "detect" it. I added PFC support. Most sheets should just work by playing with the zoom percentage in the print window.
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/389733-roll20-character-sheet-print-support

It's not a hard fix but the roll20 team has to deal with things that I don't. Like enabling print support would let people print out compendiums and licensed content. I understand the desire to have the least amount of impact on sheet designers since a bunch of sheets are probably nearly abandoned, but there's only one way to improve printer support among them: enable the feature and let them fix their sheet.

They can literally just export all the character data to a seperate "rendered" sheet no? Like they do with the pop out window but just make it printer friendly.

Noon said:

Install Stylus, use this. If it doesn't work for your sheet I can create some fixes but it should just let you open up a character sheet and press ctrl + p and it'll print. I don't know why I didn't make a userstyle before but I'm losing my mind with how many notifications I'm getting from this thread. This one should work for most sheets and the 5E one. I have a specific one for the Neceros pathfinder sheet but I haven't decided if I'm going to create new userstyles for each edge case or make a way to "detect" it.
https://userstyles.org/styles/174872/roll20-character-sheet-print-support 

It's not a hard fix but the roll20 team has to deal with things that I don't. Like enabling print support would let people print out compendiums and licensed content. I understand the desire to have the least amount of impact on sheet designers since a bunch of sheets are probably nearly abandoned, but there's only one way to improve printer support among them: enable the feature and let them fix their sheet.

There's a default media query from bootstrap that needs to be disabled and then they have to render the window differently so it takes into account offscreen parts of the sheet. Alternatively, they can render it all to an image. That route is a bit hamfisted though, I feel.

Depends on what they want to get out of it and how much manpower they devote. It also is in a section of the code that hasn't been changed in a while so changing it probably has a large amount of windup, changing, verifying, and pushing. The best we can do is unofficial solutions and making sure someone posts in this thread every 2 months so it doesn't get locked. It's on their radar and if it was internally easy they would have done it. Technical ease isn't the same thing.

I'm going to probably swap that script for a userscript version tomorrow so I can do some detection of character sheets and also disable some of their css for more accurate rendering. Let this be a warning to everyone who sees this post before I update it: Come back tomorrow, don't install that stylish script unless you super need it now.

Thanks for coming up with an alternative Noon.  Much appreciated.

It's tomorrow!
Steps to print:

1. Install Tampermonkey or Violentmonkey (browser extensions)
2. Go here and click Install
3. Done. Press Ctrl + P to print. Change zoom to fit your page. It'll print whatever the top sheet is (technically the bottom sheets as well so maybe close them)

I see that Mark mentioned my old scripts broke things slightly. My bookmarklets were hardcoded to save space and when they updated something a couple months ago it must have broke. I fixed it and made it a little more resilient to change.

Sorry for not getting around to it but it should work until this isn't obstructed.

Noon said:

It's tomorrow!
Steps to print:

1. Install Tampermonkey or Violentmonkey (browser extensions)
2. Go here and click Install
3. Done. Press Ctrl + P to print. Change zoom to fit your page. It'll print whatever the top sheet is (technically the bottom sheets as well so maybe close them)

I see that Mark mentioned my old scripts broke things slightly. My bookmarklets were hardcoded to save space and when they updated something a couple months ago it must have broke. I fixed it and made it a little more resilient to change.

Sorry for not getting around to it but it should work until this isn't obstructed.

I get this mess when I try to print after installing that. Am I missing something? Tried in Chrome and FF.

Whoops. You're right. I took for granted my setup. It should not crash anymore. Reinstall up to version 0.1.2 and try again.

Yes!

Let me put up my support for this here as well. I'm starting a campaign using roll20 as a support software, only one of the players is not physically present at the table and roll20 is being used only as character sheet deposit and map/miniature substitute, and being able to print the character sheets would have been amazing.

Bump

+1

+1

Unfortunately, I don't have any real news to share on this feature request.

We have been doing research internally about how best to support Official Sheets as well as Community Sheets with printable styles. Finding a solution to those two requirements has not been successful yet.

You should be able to take the data and push it into a pdf with formatting and capture all the tabs/pages in a standard sheet. if you make the api available then users can create their own transformations for the sheet/game they are running.

We appreciate that you're looking for solutions, just please don't give up on it!  My group uses Roll20 every week, but we all meet in person, and about half of them need a new handwritten sheet every week!  I would dearly love to be able to just print it out.

Likely our entire group would up there subscription level from free to plus to be able to print character sheets.

Bump

+1

+1

would be nice (actually migrating from default character sheet to a custom ones and exports would have been nice)

Ugh. I dislike notifications but hate missing updates because I disabled notifications.

I'd like to say a few words (typical me):

Kenton has implied twice that the reason this isn't going to happen anytime soon is Roll20 doesn't want to break things in a way that is going to put work on sheet developers, including them. The problem with that is there's nothing to break. Printing literally doesn't work. It's at 0%. It can't be more broken, there's only one direction to move. There is no silver bullet solution here. It won't be nailed on the first try. If there's some kind of hope that MDN is going to release a new spec called document.roll20.printCharacterSheet we'll all die here constantly getting notifications of people bumping this thread in the desperate hope that the key to necromantically raising this dead hope was persistence.

If we all accept that there is no perfect solution, the only remaining one is a consistent framework that allows people to adapt their sheet to be printed by themselves. Roll20 doesn't have the time to go through it and why should they? Most of the sheets are community created. Why would the community not want to handle their own printing anyways? What if my sheet doesn't need dropdown menus when it is being printed? What if my sheet shouldn't have graphics in some spots but should on other? The community is what makes this site worth using. The work and effort put in to patch over the flaws present in any system. There are 632 sheets available to select out of the box. Who volunteers to go through every sheet and make sure it is printable?

So with that script I wrote earlier, I went through and tested every official character sheet, and every popular sheet from the Orr Report with my script. It took about an hour (almost exclusively loading the VTT) and typing this post up. This is just an example though. My margins and paper size will be different than some others and is just further reason why the tools should be given to the community. So they'll work within the confines of what people want to do with it.

Sheets by Roll20
13th Age by Roll20 : 75% zoom
Chronicles of Darkness by Roll20 : 72% zoom, No margins
Cypher Systems by Roll20 : 100% zoom, no margins, landscape
D&D 5E by Roll20 : 85% zoom
Dungeon World by Roll20 : 85% zoom
Gumshoe by Roll20 : 82% zoom
Pathfinder by Roll20 : 82% zoom
Pathfinder 2E by Roll20 : 82% zoom
Starfinder by Roll20 : 82% zoom
Star Trek Adventures by Roll20 : 75% zoom

Popular Sheets
Basic Fantasy/ Basic Roleplaying/ Call of Cthulhu 5e/6e/7e : 82% zoom
Pathfinder Community : 82% zoom
Warhammer Fantasy 2e/ 3e/ 4e :  82% zoom
Warhammer 40k : 82%
Warhammer Wrath & Glory : 72% zoom, no margins (little weird but working)
Shadowrun 5e : 82% zoom
Storytelling System : 100% zoom (most resize strangely)

Alright and with that we've gotten to 88.69% of sheets used on roll20 checked, and working just fine out of the box. Probably most would already work but I didn't check so mileage may vary. Could some of them work better? Probably. Could that be handled by someone who wants their particular sheet absolutely perfect? Yeah.

If you want some extra print magic on your own sheets, submit a request on greasyfork or just put Roll20 probably strips media tags. Don't do this until confirmed working.

@media print {
	//Your print version css here
}

in your css and it will work.

Great work Noon.  For some reason I thought roll20 stripped @media from the css... 

Seems that when I checked the PF community sheet before with your script it wasn't working for me.  I'll need to revisit and see what I can do for the PF community sheet. Thanks for the post.

Oh. I forgot they strip tags. Yeah, they might.
If that's the case let me know and I'll add it. I actually have some tweaks added specifically for PFC already. I'm more than happy to change them if you've got something better. I just did it as a proof of concept.

.sheet-h2-section,.sheet-section:not(.sheet-section1) {
    page-break-inside: avoid;
}
.sheet-top-buttons,sheet-main:not(.sheet-section),.sheet-mode,.sheet-selectedlabel-check,.sheet-selectedlabel-check+b,.sheet-showsect {
	display: none!important;
}

Thanks for that.  I'll play around with your script and the PF Community sheet over the weekend.

Noon said:

If you want some extra print magic on your own sheets, submit a request on greasyfork or just put Roll20 probably strips media tags. Don't do this until confirmed working.

@media print {
	//Your print version css here
}

in your css and it will work.

Just checking if anyone has checked if the app posted earlier works with the AD&D 1e sheet, as well as keeping this current, and letting them know allowing import/export and printing of character sheets would be great for my little startup company :)

-the Dwarf
now at ARGH

I would like to use this opportunity to cut off the requests early. It takes like a minute to install the userscript and check if it works with your sheet. Please do that and report if it doesn't work instead of asking if it does. Otherwise I'll have to make a separate thread and monitor that (to prevent auto locking). Just try it. It doesn't modify anything permanently and nothing should look different while active. AD&D 1E does work though.