RE: Data Merge, Pinned Items, and Visibility

[Halfling Caravan Games]

I've got a little bit of a tricky problem to sort out.

Mostly as a game design and card game layout exercise I'm bashing away with a game with a long history which has a TON of information to pack into a US-Poker sized card (2.5" by 3.5" dimensions with a roughly 1/8" margin on each side).

The problem I have is this:

1. Below on the cards below you see "Prince (2) Nairobi" (on Alice Chen) and "Bishop (1)" on Alfred Benezri inside a sort of cartouche. I want that Cartouche to float up and down depending on game text (as you can see with Alfred).
   To make this happen that cartouche is a floating element of the text box which creates brings in the text you see on Alfred. Technically the text box fills from the bottom, and this element is pinned to a spot before the very top-left-most character.
2. When a card would not have text (like Alice) but also need the Cartouche (like Alice), I would like to be able to hide that white background which is needed for Alfred. That background is a combination of a) a text decoration so that it automatically expands upwards with the text length, b) a pinned top edge effect (a cropped paint-smear image).

Problem: I can't hide the text box without hiding the Cartouche. Since this could be a project with a LOT of situations like this appearing, I want to have a way to make the Cartouche automatically rise up the card with text length in that white text area... AND... if I hide that white text area, the cartouche remains visible while the background vanishes.

[NathanC]

Hi @Halfling Caravan Games,

As far as i'm aware I don't think this will be achievable automatically via data merge, however if you could upload a sample copy of your files we can take a more detailed look into this.

I've provided a private dropbox link below if you wish to upload your files there.

https://www.dropbox.com/request/T1JD62hEHWVUGGfBvUKG

Many Thanks 🙂

[Halfling Caravan Games]

2 hours ago, NathanC said:

Hi @Halfling Caravan Games,

As far as i'm aware I don't think this will be achievable automatically via data merge, however if you could upload a sample copy of your files we can take a more detailed look into this.

I've provided a private dropbox link below if you wish to upload your files there.

https://www.dropbox.com/request/T1JD62hEHWVUGGfBvUKG

Many Thanks 🙂

I've sent you a version that I have partly populated from the Data Merge. Don't worry if you get broken font things, they will be game relevant icons.

[NathanC]

Thanks for sending over the file,

It looks like Cartouche would need to be unpinned manually so it is no longer a child layer of the bottom white text box, data merge would not be able to perform this action automatically I’m afraid, I’ll keep looking and let you know if we find anything else.

[Halfling Caravan Games]

11 hours ago, NathanC said:

Thanks for sending over the file,

It looks like Cartouche would need to be unpinned manually so it is no longer a child layer of the bottom white text box, data merge would not be able to perform this action automatically I’m afraid, I’ll keep looking and let you know if we find anything else.

Yeah, I had the feeling that I would need to do that through some kind of 'manual' process.

Would the internal scripting of AffPub be able to search through and do that or is that just asking for a world of headaches and manually cleaning up later?