Category:Macro

Welcome to the Macro Documentation page for MapTool, from the RPTools.net developers!

Macros are a way of automating tasks within MapTool. They can be attached to tokens, allowing any owner of the token to execute them via a right-click context menu or via the various panels available from the Window menu. (Actually, the macros can be edited by any owner of the token or by the GM, if MapTool is running as a server.)

There are also two other categories of macros that are not attached to tokens: global and campaign. Be aware that if these macros are going to access properties on a token, the token must be identified somehow. The two common approaches are to apply the macro against the currently selected tokens or for the macro to be written such that it prompts for the user to select a token. The only other difference between the two categories is that global macros are stored on the local computer under your username and will exist in any campaign that you connect to (as a client) or any campaign you load (as a server). The campaign macros, as their name implies, are saved as part of the campaign and will not be available when MapTool is not accessing that campaign (as either client or server). In addition, campaign macros are sent to clients when they connect to a MapTool server so that they can be used on the client as well.

The MapTool macros should be supported for quite some time, but the reader should be aware that as MapTool transitions from a Java 5 application to Java 6, there is a stated goal of using Javascript as the macro language instead of these "home built" macros. There are a lot of reasons for this, but suffice to say that when Javascript becomes the macro language of choice, it is unlikely that these macros will see much further development or even bug fixes. However, MapTool is open source software so anyone moderately competent in Java will be able to download the source code and make enhancements themselves, if necessary.