Scott Nazelrod

How to make a new card deck in KPat 4

Linux is configurable out the wazoo. Even KPat (the KDE solitaire program) kicks the *** out of Windows solitaire in that regard, enabling me to engage in one of the totally pointless endeavors which I enjoy: making card decks with different face cards. Since I'm in love with the SVG file format, and just about everything in KDE4 (the development version, not yet released) is based on SVG, I was able to kludge one up for use when KDE4 gets here. Here's a tutorial on how to do the same if you're so inclined.

You will need:

KDE4 sources checked out from svn, including kde-games of course.
Inkscape
a little artistic talent—wait, I don't have this and I could do it, so go ahead and proceed if you don't either.

Go to $KDEDIR/share/apps/carddecks and make a new directory, named after what you want the theme to be named. Then go into that and make a new SVG in Inkscape. Draw up your cards (this is the fun & tricky part) and then group the elements for each card together. Name your group (Ctrl+Shift+O) with this syntax: rank_suit (e.g. jack_diamond, 2_club - aces are represented by "1", not "A" or "ace"). Also, create a back design for your deck and name the group "back". Pick a card and have Inkscape export it as a PNG; that will be your preview card (for the configure dialog).

Then, make yourself a file named index.desktop and put this in it (replace things in braces)

[KDE Backdeck]
Name={your deck's name}
Name[x-test]={your deck's name, prefixed and suffixed with two x's, like xxfooxx}
Preview={name of your preview card}
SVG={name of your SVG}
BackSize={width},{height}

Save that. Now, you can either launch kpat and configure it for there, or hack the kpatrc itself (~/.kde/share/config/kpatrc) by changing the line "Theme=" to the name of your deck's directory. Launch kpat, and your deck should be loaded.

Some things to note:

Make sure any text is converted to paths (Shift+Ctrl+C).
Check that all groups are properly named, or when you try to play your test game, you'll find that some cards aren't showing up. You could try dropping a ten of hearts on a black jack and not realize that the ten of diamonds is already on it, just not showing up.
Hidden stuff will be displayed. Take care to delete hidden layers if you're importing other SVGs into your deck for use.

Your deck will eventually be available for other programs too, not just kpat. Enjoy your deck!

Last edited 26 October 2007 9:07 pm