Aha! Aside from drawing any custom symbols, it’s much easier to programmatically create countersheets - input the field values and colorschemes, and let the PC handle aligning and compositing them. I’ve built those generators before for fun, particularly when I was making Cyberboard gameboxes. I’ll PM you, might be a fun weekend project to make a new one.
Examples of some I did that way:
Back To Iraq cyberboard gamebox from the 90’s (the gamma is off so things look dark, and I did no antialiasing because of 256 color palette limit, but you get the idea - full strength on the left, counter flipped on the right (some counters had a blank back)):
The Russian Campaign from several years later:
You’ll need to look away when the page first loads (because it uses a pinwheel animation), but other than that, I don’t see marching ants or animations. The text cursor blinks, but that blink rate is controlled by the operating system. Since you’re using a Mac, I’m assuming that you’ve already altered the text cursor blink rate to something like 60000 ms.
Output is in .xml. Saving downloads the file to your desktop. Loading shows a pinwheel, but only lasts a few seconds.
Not sure if it’s at all the sort of thing you’d be looking for, but I stumbled on Scribus last night. It looks like it has much of the functionality I was missing from Pagemaker, and I haven’t seen any flashing or marching ants so far (aside from blinking text cursor when actively editing a text field). It can do simple filled shapes, text, import images, etc and has placeable guidelines, object grouping, and so forth. Not precisely the tool I’d use for this particular job, but I wouldn’t turn to something like LibreOffice either so YMMV. It’s definitely not a tool for creating new graphics like the guns on your examples, but if you had those separately it might work fine for putting them together with the rest of the elements.
However, the site is full of pain/animation. I have it in another tab and am hoping the animation runs out, and I can download the demo afterwards. But that much pain/animation, continuing for this long, is not a good sign of accessibility.
There’s a link at the bottom of the page to request a free trial, if you want to avoid the images in the sales pitch. I’d link to the request form directly, but it’s just an overlay on that page.
First I’m just trying to get the right colors on the front sides. I’ll deal with text positioning and the back sides later and icons later still. I tracked down the html color system, and entered appropriate html codes for each counter in a spreadsheet. I created a script for NanDeck to use the specified colors. I verified the script. I ran the script, but the script ignored the script. All counters are white, all text is black, the 1st counter is the 8th, and so on. I found instructions, but I can’t make heads or tails of them:
Finally got a limited set of front and back counters in nanDECK, with reverse arrangement on the back sheet. I’m hoping to find a way to get clearer text-- wineskin may be a problem here,-- then do a full set of counters, then figure out a good way to do the iconography in nanDECK.
I now have a complete counter sheet, though using photos for icons isn’t working out. I’ll need to re-draw several silhouettes and figure out how to use them in nanDECK.
