Your First Countersheet

This tutorial shows how to run the extension (that is assumed to be already Installed) using one of the small included examples.

Begin by opening the counters.svg file in the templates folder. It’s whereever the downloaded zip was unzipped.

Now run the extension in the Extensions menu in the Boardgames submenu. The extension is called Create Countersheet in the menu. A dialog window with some options should appear.

The most important thing to do is to enter the name of the Data File (CSV). The data in that file is used by the extension to know what counters (or cards etc) to generate. The SVG file contains the templates describing what the counters look like, but text and attributes (colors etc) can also be modified from data in the CSV file.

A CSV file is a plain text file of Comma Separated Values that can be exported from most or all spreadsheet applications or plain text editors. For the purpose of this tutorial though the file nato_counters.csv to use already exists right there in the same folder with counters.svg. See?

Version 2.x: To run the extension the full (absolute) filename of the data file is needed in the dialog text entry field. For instance on my computer for my file I need to type in /home/pelle/Documents/countersheetsextension-2.0pre4/templates\nato_counters.csv. On a Windows machine the name will probably begin with C: like C:\Users\pelle\src\countersheetsextension-3.0.1\templates\nato_counters.csv (you can find out by looking up the file in the Windows Explorer and right-clicking to get to its Properties where the Location of the file can be copied, and then just add the filename to the location).

Version 3.0: Click the icon next to the data file filename to get a standard file dialog to pick a file (i.e. counters.csv). There is no longer a need to figure out what the absolute filename is like in old versions of the extension.

The other values are less important. They can be left set to their default values for now. The Image Path setting must be set when using a template with images, but is not needed for this example.

Then click OK to generate the counters!

If the file can not be found the extension will fail, but also show an error message describing where it searched. It will look in some default paths. This can help in figuring out how to get the full path correct. (In version 3.0 this should no longer be a problem.)

Once the extension runs without errors it should produce a row of very plain counters on the page. Not very exciting, but it confirms that everything is installed and works as it should, and that the absolute filename was entered correctly.

After having all of this figured out it is probably a good idea to also have a look at Editing Counters and Editing Templates to be able to do anything useful with the extension.