Advanced PDA Node Editing

So you've read PDA Basics and figured out how to use your PDA. And you've checked out Writing PDA Nodes to get started on the process of actually adding content. But now you're feeling ambitious and you'd like to make some fancy-looking nodes. Let's dive into the weird and wacky world of advanced node editing!

Miscellaneous Visual Tips and Tricks

- Think about word wrap/line length. By default, the system uses word wrapping - you can make any individual line as long as you want. 90% of the time this is just fine. But... if you're using any kind of strict formatting setup, word wrapping is going to muck with how it looks, because clients can differ on where they insert the line breaks. If I'm doing manual line breaks, I usually try to write to a maximum of 77 characters a line, because that shouldn't wrap on basically anything short of mobile. To make doing it easier, include a horizontal line of 77 dashes and use it for section breaks as a marker to eyeball to.

- Include space. Paragraph breaks, bullet points, and empty lines make things SO much easier to read. I also like section breaks, as mentioned above.

- Use color consistently and sparingly. We can't do bold or italics or anything like that, so color's your major tool for formatting. Using the same kind of color schemes for the same levels of headings makes long and complicated nodes easier to follow. Too much color, though, and things get super distracting.

- Consider saving templates. If you always write things the same way, it'll save you time and mental effort. I have a template I can use for making Group 10 Research Reports, for example, which is a Notepad file that just contains the standard headings:

|{150,255,255}[PROJECT NAME]|n

|{150,255,255}[PERSONNEL]|n

|{150,255,255}[SUBJECT OF STUDY]|n

|{150,255,255}[OBJECTIVES]|n

|{150,255,255}[METHODS]|n

|{150,255,255}[RESULTS]|n

|{150,255,255}[CONCLUSIONS]|n

Indentation and Spacing

By default, the PDA system can only recognize one empty space in a row, and it won't recognize tabs at all. This is really annoying when you want to make an indentation, for something like an outline.

There's one basic way around this: an empty color code counts for an extra space. For example, if you need five spaces in a row, you can type: |{0,0,0} |n|{0,0,0} |n|{0,0,0} |n|{0,0,0} |n|{0,0,0} |n.

The empty space inside each color code will be recognized, so you'll get five spaces in a row. See a visual example here: https://cdn.imgchest.com/files/yq9c32q9p84.png

There are a few ways to make this less tedious:

• Caors' PDA tool can do this automatically for you, if you want to avoid doing it by hand.
• If using Notepad to write your node, and you have standard indentations, you can do a Find and Replace. Replace five spaces with that string of five color codes and it'll be done automatically for you. (This DOES get tricky if you have things indented at, say, 5, 10, and 15 spaces each - make sure you find and replace them from the longest to the shortest, so you don't trip yourself up.)
• Alternatively, if you're comfortable with aliasing and you think you're going to be doing this kind of thing a lot? Consider writing an alias like 'indent <text>' that will enter 'datapad pda append text |{0,0,0} |n|{0,0,0} |n|{0,0,0} |n|{0,0,0} |n|{0,0,0} |n <text> for you!

Extracting Color from Nodes

What happens if you entered strings and color into a node and then forgot to save the input text when you needed it again? Well, don't despair. Most clients support copying text to HTML. Just select the text from the node and right-click on it to use your client's Copy to HTML option, and it'll extract the text with the color preserved. Now, HTML stores color in hex format (six digits, starting with a hash mark), and Untold Dawn wants colors in RGB format. So you'll need to convert one to the other.

Caors' tools can help us here again. Let's say I want to get the color of the first sentence back. Copying it as HTML, I paste it into Caors' HTML extraction tool. And I get back the color codes in a format I can use! An example: https://cdn.imgchest.com/files/4jdcv3p8j54.png

Sometimes this doesn't work just right, especially if you're trying to convert a huge block of HTML over. But take heart: As long as you have the HTML font colors, it's entirely possible to get back the RGB codes.

• If you have only a few color codes, you can use services like https://htmlcolorcodes.com/hex-to-rgb/ to convert the colors shown in the HTML into color codes Untold Dawn can recognize. Just copy the six-digit color code starting with # to get its RGB equivalent.
• If you have a LOT of color codes, or you might need to do this multiple times? An AI service like chatGPT can easily convert them for you. Take a look at this link (https://cdn.imgchest.com/files/yq9c32qn8w4.png) if you want to see an example prompt of how this can be done.

Making 'Art'

For the most part, it's probably better to stick to descriptions of art. But there are cases where it might be useful to try and make actual visuals in your nodes - for example, see this map at node #3439: https://cdn.imgchest.com/files/739cxgrjkp7.png

Michael Cox's player originally made this map, but some changes to the game required it be updated from scratch, and that was really, really tricky. Some things you should keep in mind if you're trying to do stuff like this:

1) I stuck to a set width instead of center-justifying the map prettily, because a map would fall apart if word-wrapped.

2) I counted up the spaces and used find-and-replace to do sets of them - for example, every 'big' room was the size number of spaces every time.

3) The line numbers matter- for lines 0 through 9, the line numbers are one character shorter than 10-99, so I had to add one extra space manually to map lines 6-9 to offset. Yikes.

4) Something like this is 100% illegible for screenreaders, probably, so consider how you might add alt-text or a similar functionality to make sure everybody can benefit! I added a set of word-only directions to node #3602 in this case to try and serve as an alternative.