Mosaic Help

Introduction

Mosaic helps you manage the content / text of the cards, not do the graphics design. Basically, after the game is developed, if you want to professionally publish the game, you still have to give the cards to a professional graphics designer.

Mosaic has a grid of cells, on the right side, each containing an image file. Drag-and-drop image files on the cells. If you drag one file, you can drop it on the cell that you like. If you drag several files, they will fill the empty cells (in order: left to right, top to bottom).

Double-click on a cell with an image to edit the cell's properties - the text which will appear on the card.

Each cell has several zones with text, zones which can be moved around; each zone has its own text formatting. See the application's settings.

Right click on a cell to display the context menu.

On the left side there is a tree whose nodes can be linked to cells which then act as a group.

Press "Ins" to add nodes in the tree.

Drag-and-drop cells with an image on the tree nodes (or tree nodes on cells with images) to link them. This helps with searching for images linked to tree nodes.

Press "S" to save the project.

Press "F1" for a small help.

Advanced tips

Press digits "1" through "4" to change the profile. A profile lets you have a different size for the viewport: rows and columns.

Settings

Press "G" to open the settings of the project.

In the "Mosaic" section, there are the "MosaicColumns" and "MosaicRows" fields which let you change the size of the viewport for the current profile.

Searching for text in cells

Say you have 200 cells and you want to find the few cells that you know contain the text "shield".

Press "T". This opens / creates the "Temporary" tree node and focus its "Filter" where you can type "shield". Press "Enter" and all the cells which contain the text will be rendered clearly, while the others are faded.

In the "Search filter" section from the settings you can modify where Mosaic looks for text matches. For example, you can tell Mosaic to not look in the file name for text matches.

Note: if the selected tree node has no "Filter" then all the cells which are not linked to tree nodes are rendered clearly.

Export / printing

Mosaic doesn't directly print the images, but exports the mosaic to images.

In the "Export" section from the settings, the "ExportColumns" and "ExportRows" specify how many cells are included in a single exported image file (this is useful when you print, for example, 3 * 3 cards on A4 paper). Only the viewport is exported, not all the cells from the project.

Set "ExportQuality" to 100 to export as PNGs rather than JPGs.

For quick play-testing (that is, for cheap and fast printing), export the mosaic with "Export print text" which will export images only with the text, and only black and white, not with the background image.

Installing fonts

After a new font is installed in the operating system, the application must be restarted if you want to use the font in it.

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