ASL Cards

If you're a fan of ASL, then Chris Edwards' ASL Cards are a useful play tool. He provides PDF's with data cards for every AFV and Gun in the system, which are handy to reference as you play a scenario.

However, unless you print them out, it's difficult to quickly switch between the ones you want, so I wrote this program that lets you pick out the ones you want, with a tabbed viewer that lets you quickly flip between them.

Installing and running the program

To run from source, you need Python 3, and some requirements:

pip3 install -r requirements.txt
pip3 install -r asl_cards/requirements.txt
python3 main.py

If you want to compile it:

python3 _freeze.py --output /tmp/aslcards.tar.gz

Pre-built versions are provided for Windows, since setting up a build environment is a messy affair. On Linux, it's straight-forward to run from source, or compile a binary. Things should work on a Mac, but I don't have one, so can't test this.

Analyzing the PDF files

The first time you run the program, it needs to analyze the PDF files, to extract each data card (this only needs to be done once).

Simply point to the directory where the files live, and click Analyze. This process can take some time to run, ~5-10 minutes at the lowest resolution, ~1 hour at the highest (so it might be a good idea to do a test run at the lowest resolution first).

You need to have Ghostscript installed to do this (although once the database has been generated, Ghostscript is no longer required).

Selecting cards

Once the files have been analyzed, you can pick out the cards you want.
The cards are now easily accessible as you play the scenario.

FAQ

I'm getting errors about the number of cards and images not being the same.

The program needs to know basic details about each card e.g. the name of the AFV/Gun, it's nationality. There is code to extract this text, but unfortunately, due to the way the PDF's have been constructed, it comes out garbled. To work around this, the cards have been indexed manually, and were correct at this time of writing, but if your PDF's are different to mine, you may get this error. In the index/ sub-directory, there are files that list the cards contained in each PDF - edit them to match the contents of your PDF's, and things should work.

Windows is complaining about a missing DLL.

You need the VS 2015 Runtime installed.

Can I change the keyboard shortcuts used to flip between cards?

Keyboard shortcuts can be used to flip between the cards of commonly-used nationalities e.g. ^G for the Germans, ^R for the Russians. These are defined in $/asl_cards/natinfo/natinfo.json, and you can change other nationality-based settings here as well.

Can I run this on 32-bit Linux?

Probably, but setting up the requirements is tricky. PyQt5, in particular, only offers 64-bit versions for Linux and OS X at the Cheese Shop.