The magic rules enhancer is a script that generates more helpful versions of the official Magic: The Gathering comprehensive rules reference documents. The official rules texts contain many internal references (often expressed as "See rule "). However, these references are not links, making actually reading the associated text cumbersome. Additionally, while the official documents have a kind of table of contents, that table does not actually include any links or page numbers, making it of limited use.
The magic rules enhancer takes a path to an official Magic comprehensive rules DOCX file and produces a PDF with very similar style to the official one, but with added internal links and a more complete table of contents.
To generate an enhanced PDF version of the Magic rules, first download the official DOCX version from the Wizards of the Coast website (e.g. MagicCompRules20240917.docx). You can then install the requirements (ideally using a virtual environment or similar) and finally run:
python3 enhance.py MagicCompRules20240917.docx
This will produce a corresponding MagicCompRules20240917+.pdf file. Pre-built
versions of the rules PDF are available under Releases.
The enhancer works in a three step process. First, the raw contents of the docx are extracted using docx2python. This is used instead of the raw txt format provided by Wizards of the Coast, because it maintains style information like which phrases should be italicized. Once this is completed, the contents are converted to HTML, with associated CSS styling to make the contents render in a form very similar to the original document. During this phase, rules references are resolved and converted to internal hyperlinks within the document. Finally, pdfkit is used to convert the HTML to a PDF, while also adding a table of contents derived from the headings in the HTML.