Last year I managed to find a group to play Dominion semi-regularly. It prompted me to buy yet another expansion. I picked Nocturne for its lack of extra components. It was probably a mistake, since Adventures, Empires and Renaissance all provide more variation to the game, while Nocturne adds more complexity.
Anyway, back to the topic. It began to feel clumsy to move the four boxes around. It is time to find a storage solution.
There were many awesome storage solutions available. Some of which involve specially crafted containers, which might be hard or impossible to buy from China. Others involve repurposing the vanilla game box.
Sumpfork’s Divider Generator
One the greatest models is Sumpfork’s Divider Generator. A live version can be found here, and the source code can be found here.
I do have found a few problems however.
First, while the generator comes with myriads of options, hacking any new idea into it is surprisingly hard. The problem is that the generator does not really do all the layout controls. Instead, it relies on reportlab to do so, which works on its own set of assumptions, completely irrelevant for our purposes.
Second, the default background images, while looking good on a low resolution screen, actually looks very pixelated on a high resolution screen and, more importantly, with a decent printer.
The second point resulted in me trying to hack in an alternative design that does not involve raster images. The first point ensured that my attempt was futile.
My Dividers
Instead of continuing trying to modify Sumpfork’s generator, I figured out that it might be easier if I simply typeset the divider cards myself.
Really, once you realize that what you need is just to typeset the divider cards, it becomes a much easier problem. As long as I can find a way to typeset a few cards on a page, and another way to control the card contents, I get a generator. What looks like an annoying problem might be in truth two separate easy problems.
For typesetting I use XeLaTeX, which I am not an expert of, but there is nothing you can’t get by randomly hacking a few macro packages and options.
For some reason I decided to do everything in a De Finibus theme…
For the content control, I might have wanted to write a Python program to manage things, but since my goal is only to satisfy myself, LaTeX macro functionality is more than enough for this purpose.
Results
