ORBAT Generators

[3catcircus]

I've been playing with generating some ORBATs on what various units would look like in various times in history (2000 vs. present).

I've found two online tools, but neither of them really gets the job done.

www.orbatgenerator.com is nice for cleanly putting together small ORBATs, but it has a few limitations:
1. You can't free-edit the text inside each symbol and there may be icons that they don't have since it is only using MIL-STD-2525D. For example - I don't see any way of generating an icon for the Security Force Assistance Command or its constituent brigades.
2. Going more than three levels deep doesn't work since you can't array the units horizontally, only vertically.
3. The text can bunch up if you don't abbreviate.
4. You can't properly format data (for example, 5th ID would show "5" on bottom left outside the symbol and "NORTHAG" on the bottom right of the symbol if you were looking at 5th ID in a v1 timeline, but this tool can't do that)

www.spatialillusions.com has a nice unit symbol generator that is compliant with both -2525D and APP-6D (as well as older -2525C and APP-6) but it only generates the symbols themselves. They're properly formatted symbols, but you can't change the filled color to reflect branch (e.g. yellow for Cavalry, green for Infantry, etc.) , and it only generates the unit symbols - not the organization of all of the sub units.

Samples of each type are shown below - first is from orbatgenerator; second is from spatial illusions.

What do you all use to create ORBATs graphically (or do you)?

[shrike6]

Nice find! Bookmarking it. Thanks!

[3catcircus]

Originally Posted by shrike6

Nice find! Bookmarking it. Thanks!

No worries. I'm also working through some of the vagaries of the symbols. For example, an air defense field artillery unit - does it have the field artillery dot and the air defense half circle symbols? I've seen some representations showing that, but both of these tools seem unable to show both symbols on the unit graphic.

[Ewan]

This might be of use
http://www.mapsymbs.com/

[kato13]

I built this font for my GDW/T2K stuff. It is built off the standards from the late 80s.

http://games.juhlin.com/font/TOE_Unicode.ttf

Key commands to get the proper units
https://games.juhlin.com/font/

It is a little clumsy to use. But I have used in doc,ai,ps,visio, etc.

Generally you do the size of a unit first then type. To copy one for reuse you need to select two characters( one right further than you would expect) as technically the unit is a character and a backspace.

Never really made it totally user friendly (it was for generating table top game counters and dynamic map symbols) but if it is on any use I can try to help you figure it out.