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Welcome to the Hero Lab Authoring Kit Wiki.

The Authoring Kit for Hero Lab provides a vast array of capabilities, and those capabilities will continue to evolve with the product. As such, we needed a means of documenting all those capabilities that could readily adapt and evolve as well. We concluded that the best way to accomplish this is to create a wiki that we can extend on an ongoing basis. As an added bonus, the wiki can also enable users to share tips and suggestions.

If you are not familiar with wikis, you can think of them as an intelligently structured assortment web pages. For information on using this wiki, please refer to the User's Guide.

Wikis are designed to be easily searched, so you can enter whatever term you are interested in and quickly find all the various entries pertaining to that topic. This will be invaluable as you become proficient with the Authoring Kit and want information on specific capabilities. Until you reach that point, you can simply start with this page and follow the various links below to read through all the various topics.

Introduction to the Kit

The goal of the Authoring Kit is to provide everything you need to create and/or edit data files for Hero Lab. When adding material to an existing game system, you can typically utilize the integrated Editor within Hero Lab. However, if you want to create data files for a new game system, you can use the information provided in the Authoring Kit to achieve that objective.

All public file formats utilized by Hero Lab subscribe to the XML standard for document exchange. By adhering to this international standard, Hero Lab makes it easy for you to utilize off-the-shelf tools for editing and manipulating all of the data files. It also makes it straightforward to write custom tools that utilize and/or interface with the various file formats used by Hero Lab.

Documentation Conventions

Within the Authoring Kit documentation, there are a few conventions utilized. Anytime that important points arise within the text, they will be flagged appropriately using one of the techniques below.

WARNING: Used to flag the most critical items, which have significant impact on the usability and maintainability of your data files

IMPORTANT: Identifies considerations that impact the way in which you create your data files, but the results won't usually be horrible if you ignore them

NOTE: Indicates topics that may influence your choices in data file creation in some situations

PDF Available

The Authoring Kit documentation is also available in PDF format for offline reference. The PDF version requires Adobe Acrobat Reader to view. You can download the PDF document via the link below. Please note that the PDF version will often times not be as up-to-date as the online wiki, since the wiki is updated on an ongoing basis and the PDF version is updated only periodically. http://www.wolflair.com/download/hp/hl_kit.pdf