Adding Glyphs

Many board and card games often use small images in text to represent various resources or actions. In Card Editor, these are referred to as Glyphs and are grouped into Glyph Sets. In this tutorial, we will learn how to:

1. Create Glyph Sets
2. Add Glyphs to Glyph Sets so they can be referenced in text

For complete information on Glyph Sets, see the Glyph Sets documentation

Creating a Glyph Set

To create a Glyph Set, first click the Add Document button, found in the top left corner of the window. This will open a menu to choose what type of document to create. Select Glyph Set.

Let's name this glyph set "Resources" and create the file. We now see the Glyph Set table.

Adding a Glyph

We add a glyph with the Add Glyph button found in the top-left corner of the table. Card Editor will ask us for the name of this glyph.

All glyph names must be unique across the entire workspace. Let's call this one "coin", to represent a money resource.

Using Glyphs at Scale

Similar to images used in Image Elements in Layouts, we want to make sure we use an image of appropriate size so that it looks good in print. Card Editor automatically scales glyphs to best fit the surrounding text, so we need to consider the text's font size and the resolution we want to print. We expect to use these glyphs in the Ability text for our Hero and Location cards, both of which use a .125" font. Since we want to output these cards at print resolution (300 PPI), this means our glyph size should be:

.125 inches * 300 PPI = 37.5 pixels

We will round this down to 37 pixels, create a 37x37 pixel image, and save it in the workspace root folder:

We can now use the file picker in the second column to select an appropriate image file. The glyph image will appear in the third column of the table.

This is the only Glyph we need for now. Next we want to create Card Data.