Introduction to Styles, Series, and Rotors
About Styles, Series, and Rotors
Version 1.4 of Multideck introduced several new features designed to help solve certain problems in creating your card decks. To use these features successfully, you should read all of the Help pages in this Styles section, in order. This introductory page will give you a quick overview of each feature.Styles: A Consistent Look
The first problem is achieving a consistent "look" for your cards. You may want several different features of your cards to use the same font or text color, for example, while still differing in font size, background color, and other aspects.You can do this easily enough by using the Item Info controls to set the same font and text color for each item. But if you later decide to change the font and/or text color, you must go to each affected item and change that item's settings individually. This can be time-consuming and error-prone.
The Styles feature lets you create a style as a named collection of attributes that can include font, font size, text color, background color, bold, italic, and more. Then in your Item Info settings, you just apply your style to each item. Afterwards, you can change all of the items at once just by changing the style.
Styles can also be used for much more than that, because they can interact with rich text markup, image filenames, and the Series and Rotor features.
Series: Create Many Cards from One, with Differences
Suppose you wish to create a deck that contains many cards whose content is almost identical, but that differ in just one or two fields. For example, in a game with a map, you might want a card for each city on the map, and all those cards might be the same except for the city name.You can do that by making a row in your source for the first such card, then copying that row as many times as you need, then editing each copied row to give it a different city name. But if you do that, and later you need to change something about all those cards, you will need to edit every row again. This is time-consuming and error-prone.
The Series feature lets you make a single row in your source that will "expand" into multiple rows, each with a different value for one of its columns. You do this by making a column whose value is a series, a string that lists multiple values. From that one row, Multideck will create a separate card for each value that the series lists, and each such card will be identical except that the card's content from the series column will be just one of the values listed in the series.
In the example of the city cards, you would add a column called (say) "City", and its value (in a given row) would be something like this:
|New York|San Francisco|Chicago|Denver|Seattle|Miami|
That would be the equivalent of using six rows, each identical except for having a different one of those city names in the City column. If you later need to change something else about those cards, you only need to edit that one field to apply the change to all six cards. (And of course, your series can contain as few or as many elements as you need; six is not a limit!)
Series can be used in combination with Styles and Rotors to achieve even fancier effects.
Rotors: Vary the Cards in a Series
Suppose you've created a series listing city names, as described above. But suppose also that you want each City card to have a "Bonus" value in another item that is one of "coal", "iron", or "water". You still want six cards, one for each city in the series, but you want each card to list just one of the bonus values, and you want an even distribution of those values across the six cards (so in this case, each bonus value should appear on two of the six cards).You can do this, still in one row, by adding a rotor field. A rotor is like a series in that it lists multiple values; but unlike a series, it does not "expand" into multiple cards.
So you would add a rotor field that looks like this:
^|coal|iron|water|
That will make the first card of the series have coal for its bonus, the second to have iron, the third to have water, and then the fourth through sixth would repeat the rotor with coal, iron, and water again. The expanded results would look like this:
Bonus City
----- ----
coal New York
iron San Francisco
water Chicago
coal Denver
iron Seattle
water Miami
This simple example does not show all of the advantages and power of these features. Please continue reading through the rest of this section to learn more.