Factorio Text Plate Blueprint Generator

Tool that generates Factorio blueprints from any given text using the Text Plates mod.

Features • Installation • Basic usage • Advanced usage

Features:

• Create a blueprint from a text file or string input
• Persistent settings that allow you to adjust:
  • Text plate material
  • Text plate size
  • Line spacing
  • Text direction
  • Max line length
  • Blueprint name
• Register a global command for generating blueprints from and to anywhere on your system
• Decode any arbitrary blueprint to a JSON file
• Write your own code to manipulate blueprints with the provided functions and types

Installation:

1. Install Node.js and npm if you haven't already.
2. Clone or download and extract the repository (green button at the top of the page).
3. Run the command npm i in the project directory (where the package.json file is).
4. Run npm start in the same directory to show the interactive prompt.
   Or:
   Register the global commands textplategen and tpgen by running the command npm run link (not npm link!) in the project directory.

Note

You can also substitute the npm command with pnpm or yarn if you prefer those package managers.

Basic usage:

1. Create a file (input.txt by default) in the directory you're starting the program from and write your text in it.
   You can use all special characters that are defined in src/characters.json
2. Run npm start or textplategen to show the interactive prompt.
3. Select Configure the settings to adjust the generation settings to your liking, then go back to the main menu.
4. Select Create text plate blueprint from a file to generate a blueprint from a text file.
   You can also select Create text plate blueprint from a string to input the text directly via the terminal.
5. Choose Copy to clipboard or Save to a file to export the blueprint.

Advanced usage:

• You can edit the file src/characters.json to adjust which characters in the input text are converted to which text plate variant.
  Make sure to only add or modify the replacements property and leave everything else untouched.
• You can register custom aliases for textplategen by editing bin in package.json and running npm link again.
• If you set the max line length setting to any value above 0, the program will automatically split the text into multiple lines if it exceeds the specified length.
  By default, your line breaks in the input text will be replaced with spaces and then new line breaks will be added wherever the line limit is reached. Change the setting Preserve Line Breaks to true to keep the original line breaks.
• There are shortcuts that will automatically select an option in the main menu and skip some extra confirmations automatically.
  Use textplategen <shortcut> (or tpgen <shortcut>) with any of the following case-insensitive values:
  • createfromfile | createfile | file | f
  • createfromstring | createstring | string | s
  • decodefile | df
  • decodestring | ds
  • settings | configuration | config | cfg | c
• After running the program once, a folder textplategen will be created in your appdata directory, where settings files will be stored.
  Delete this folder to reset everything to the default.
  The locations of this folder are:
  • Windows: C:\Users\<USER>\AppData\Roaming\factorio-text-plate-gen\
  • Linux: /home/<USER>/.config/factorio-text-plate-gen/
  • Mac: /Users/<USER>/Library/Application Support/factorio-text-plate-gen/
  • Custom: if the environment variable APPDATA is set on every launch, the path will be <APPDATA>/factorio-text-plate-gen/
• If you are interested in the blueprint object structure or want to extend it, check out the file src/types.ts which contains all TS types.
• If you know TypeScript, you can create a test.ts file in the same directory as the package.json file and run it with npm run test to write your own code to generate text plates or encode and decode any blueprint string in various ways.
  You can also use the VS Code debugger to debug your code. Select the profile test.ts, set breakpoints and then press F5 to start debugging your code.

Created with ❤️ by Sv443
Licensed under the MIT License