Journal Tools and Pins
SDX wires campaign text to the canvas through character journals, notes on placeable objects, styled journal pins, folders, map-note conversion, and read-aloud narration.
With Enable Journal Notes on, a Player's Notes tab becomes a small multi-page journal.
Use the page sidebar to create and navigate entries. The editor gives you normal ProseMirror formatting plus quick blocks for information, warning, quest, loot, and NPC.
The content stays actor data throughout. Disabling the enhanced UI won't deliberately delete saved notes, but back up important actor data before you switch note systems.
With Enable Notes on placeables and Notes tab in tray on, the configuration windows for Tokens, Tiles, Walls, Ambient Lights, and Ambient Sounds all gain a Notes control.
Write rich text and save. The tray's Notes tab lists every annotated object on the current scene, where you can expand or collapse the note, pan to the object, rename the note label, toggle player visibility, and delete it.
These notes are metadata attached to the placeable. Delete the placeable and its note goes with it.
The pin tool creates an SDX canvas marker. Link it to a Journal, to a specific Journal page, or leave it unlinked as a tooltip or label.
From the Pins tab you can search, pan or ping, bring players to the location, open and edit the pin, copy and paste style, duplicate it, flip it between GM-only and player-visible, require line of sight, and remove or delete it.
Edit one pin, or the world defaults. The marker itself can be a Font Awesome icon, an image, or custom text, and it takes its own color and tint, a background and border, and a shape drawn from circle, square, pointy hex, or flat hex. Size and scale are adjustable, while Fit to hex grid snaps the whole thing to the grid. The rest covers content and behavior: label and tooltip text, title and body font sizes, player visibility, line-of-sight behavior, and where the display name comes from.
| Choice | Display name |
|---|---|
| Auto | Journal/page → tooltip title → canvas label |
| Journal/Page | Linked document name |
| Tooltip | Tooltip title |
| Canvas Label | Marker label |
Auto skips placeholder names like "New Pin" when it can find a better source.
Irregular transparent images do better with Pixel perfect on Pins enabled. The alpha threshold decides which pixels count as clickable: lower values accept more translucent pixels, higher values demand more opaque ones.
Experimental, and it costs real CPU. Plain shape hit testing stays the cheap default.
The GM can build nested folders in the Pins tab. Drag pins in and out, drag folders to reorder or nest them, collapse and expand, and give each one a color and a Font Awesome or image icon.
Folder scope can be:
| Scope | Definition appears |
|---|---|
| Scene | Only on the current scene |
| World | On every scene, marked with a globe |
Pins stay scene-owned even inside a world folder. A world folder is a shared organizational definition that shows up everywhere, while each pin keeps living on its own scene.
Search reaches matches inside collapsed folders.
Use Notes→Pins for every Map Note on the current scene, or the convert control on a single note.
The new pin carries over position, the Journal or page link, the text label, and the icon path, tint, and size.
Choose a target folder and decide whether the original Note gets deleted. Deletion is optional so you can compare the converted result first.
The playable hex-dungeon builder creates one pin per generated room, linked to the matching room Journal page. Use that path whenever the room number on the map and the room key have to stay synchronized.
With Enable Journal Narration on, rendered Journal blockquotes get a narration toolbar. Put read-aloud text in a blockquote, render the page, and present it from the added control.
The ProseMirror Easy Reference menu inserts live NPC, Item, RollTable, check, and dice syntax. See Easy Reference.
Placeable Notes button is absent. Enable the setting and reload. Foundry v14 uses the DocumentSheetV2 header-controls hook.
A note saved blank. Reopen after updating SDX. Current builds read the real ProseMirror field path.
Pin has an unhelpful name. Set Pin Name to Auto or Tooltip, and give it a real title.
World folder is empty on another scene. Expected. The folder definition is world-wide, and the pins stay on their source scene.
Map Note conversion duplicated markers. You kept the originals. Delete them once you've verified the converted pins, or use the conversion dialog's delete-originals option next time.
Image pin is hard to select. Try pixel-perfect mode, or a lower alpha threshold. For map-sized hex art, use Fit to hex grid.
Related: Hexcrawls & Dungeons · Easy Reference · Character Sheets