As part of my work to organize my Pathfinder ACG box, I found that I needed a way to create alternating tabs in a general way. In particular, a few times, I found myself in the position where I had designed the tabs in photoshop only to realize when I was done that I had forgotten something. Or, in the case of Wrath of the Righteous, that there were new cards that needed to go in the middle of the sequence. Since this would require re-ordering all of the tabs following it, this became a bit of a task.

To solve this problem, I decided that I wanted to write a program to lay out tabs for me, and automatically take care of that alternation. To prototype, I create a short function in perl that had the basic imagemagick commands that I would use, and took a big list of tabs as input. The script automatically “-flop”ed the template to perform the horizontal mirror, and placed the appropriate text in position from the correct edge (i.e. positioned from the left edge on the left tabs, and from the right edge on the right tabs). I used this prototype to figure out the basic features I would need, and created the tabs for Rise of the Runelords and Wrath of the Righteous. Continue reading Automatic Creation of Tab Separators →