TL;DR * Grab my gm-notepad-swn-free dataset for some tables to add to your gm-notepad .

I have continued refining my gm-notepad tool. See my announcement about gm-notepad I have developed gm-notepad into a satisfactory funtional state.

I wanted tables to feed into gm-notepad . And I immediately thought of Stars without Number: Revised Edition. Or frankly anything by Kevin Crawford, as he apparently dreams in random tables

First, I looked at munging data from swnt , a command line tool for “Stars without Number”. It was doable but I did a bit more digging.

Looking at my folder full of Sine Nomine products, I saw StarsWithoutNumberRevised-DeluxeEdition-011418.epub . On a lark I typed vim StarsWithoutNumberRevised-DeluxeEdition-011418.epub , and got the following:

1 " zip.vim version v28 2 " Browsing zipfile StarsWithoutNumberRevised-DeluxeEdition-011418.epub 3 " Select a file with cursor and press <enter> 4 5 mimetype 6 OEBPS/cover.xhtml 7 OEBPS/SWNRevised-DeluxePDF-011418-EPUB.xhtml … more lines of no importance to me

And a part my brain remembered: “Of course and EPUB is built from an HTML * document.” I had forgotten (or didn’t know) that an EPUB is a fancy ZIP file.

Jackpot! I could use nokogiri to parse the OEBPS/SWNRevised-DeluxePDF-011418-EPUB.xhtml document and extract the tables.

With some Ruby coding, I got the basic process down, and generated the tables for gm-notepad-swn-free . I have a separate code repository that I’m working on for data extraction first from Stars without Number, then for other Sine Nomine products that have an EPUB. I will only release the datasets for tables that are freely available. At present I have:

One Roll NPC *

One Roll Patron

One Roll Urban Encounter

One Roll Wilderness Encounter

Planetary Tag

Thank you Kevin Crawford for taking the time to release your content as an EPUB. I look forward to writing a library that others can use to extract tables from Sine Nomine’s publications.