Any interest in another instruction publisher?

[Jason Allemann]

For the last 8ish years I've been occasionally tinkering with my own instruction generation program. Not that I ever found anything wrong with LPub, as a developer I just like rolling my own solutions to problems that interest me. It was a cool little hobby project that I would improve a bit every time I created new instructions. It has evolved over the years, and it's finally reached a point where I feel other people might be able to make use of it.

Note that I just wanted a program where I could hit a button and get a PDF file. If you want to be able to fine tune every step/page this won't be for you. Right now the output is configured specifically for how I wanted my instructions to look, but I have designed it to be extensible, and eventually I hope to add more overall layout options. I have also only tested it with my own files, so who knows what you might get out of it. Please consider it as alpha software.

If you are interested in trying it out you can download it here:
http://truedimensions.com/lego/instructo...14_394.zip
Edit: Forgot to mention, the readme.txt file in the archive has instructions on how to configure it.

It has the following dependencies:
Windows
LDraw
LDGLite or LDView (for rendering)
FOP - http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/ (only required for PDF generation, you don't need to install this if you just want to test the program and look at the images it spits out)

You can also just check out some of my instruction files to see what it outputs:
http://truedimensions.com/lego/instructions

So, I'm just curious if anybody else might be interested in this, or what it might become with some improvement. If so, I'd love to hear feedback. I have some time over the next few months where I could do some work on it. If not, no big deal, I'll keep using it for myself.

Jason

[Willy Tschager]

Please use the "Insert URL" feature (next to the "Select font size" button) to ease downloading.

w.
LDraw Content Manager

[Nicola]

i'm surely interested in an LPUB alternative, i'll try it asap.

The pdf it generates are a little to sparse for my liking, i like to cram stuff on the instructions in order to have as few pages as possible, but it looks nice nonetheless!

[Jason Allemann]

i'm surely interested in an LPUB alternative, i'll try it asap.

The pdf it generates are a little to sparse for my liking, i like to cram stuff on the instructions in order to have as few pages as possible, but it looks nice nonetheless!

Cool, let me know how it goes. More layout options is definitely on the todo list. Mine are only sparse because that is what I like, and they aren't really targeted for print, so barring ridiculous file sizes I wasn't too concerned about the page count.

J

[Michael Heidemann]

Hi,
just downloaded and tried. Ok, i can see that you made it for yourself

I hate to write in text documents if not necessary "config\settings.xml". Please add an option window for that. i know, that is time consuming without any benefit for the coder, as he has this once set and never changed. But i am new to this and like to do all work by my little mouse.

[Jason Allemann]

Hi,
just downloaded and tried. Ok, i can see that you made it for yourself

I hate to write in text documents if not necessary "config\settings.xml". Please add an option window for that. i know, that is time consuming without any benefit for the coder, as he has this once set and never changed. But i am new to this and like to do all work by my little mouse.

Haha, yeah, having UI to change the settings is on the list. Thanks for trying it out!

J