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PDFer Instructions
How to use this document
In various places throughout these instructions you will notice a set of square-brackets
in bold surrounding some text (e.g. [L]). This represents
a button you will see on the screen.
What is PDFer ?
PDFer (pronounced : "PDF"-"er") is a utility
to create PDF documents from SSI-style email text reports that you receive
by playing the various Play-By-(e)Mail games offered by the likes of Software
Simulations, Ab Initio Games and Kage Interactive.
It was created because the officially provided "SSI Printer" program
only prints to paper, and only works on the Windows platform.
PDFer is available for Mac OS X, Windows and x86 Linux.
Loading a Report
There are two ways to load your report into PDFer :
The easiest way is to use the Browse [...] button and select
your report via a standard file-selection window. The location of the report
will then appear in the filename box.
(You can set the default folder from which to load reports in the Preferences
window)
The other way is to simply enter the path and filename of the report you'd
like to load and then click on the Load [L] button.
If there are any problems loading a report, PDFer should inform you, but otherwise,
once a report has been loaded successfully, the large [Process]
button will be enabled.
Creating a PDF
You are able to create a PDF once the large [Process]
button becomes enabled on the main screen.
You will be prompted for a file name to save the PDF, and then the new file
will be saved. You can define your preferred location for saving your PDFs
in the Preferences screen.
If you also chose to open the PDF after saving, the PDF should now open in
your default PDF-document viewer (e.g. Adobe Acrobat Reader).
Preferences
You access the Preferences window by selecting the [Preferences]
button from the main window.
The Preferences are divided into pages that you can selected via the list
on the left-side of the window. When you are finished, pressing the [Close]
button in the bottom right-hand corner of the window will return you to the
main screen.
General
Allows you to turn on (or off) certain features, as well as
define some useful default folders.
Misc.
The following options are available to you if you require them :
- Use compression to make the PDF file-size smaller - With this selected,
the overall size of a PDF will be greatly reduced. (For example, a 156k
PDF will compress down to around 37k).
- Launch default viewer after save - This will cause your default PDF viewer (for example, Acrobat Reader) to launch and open the PDF for viewing, after you've saved the PDF to disk.
Output Style
There are times when you may prefer your PDF to look like
a report printed by the SSI-printer program, rather than the style you are
probably used to if you ever received your reports by post. Here, you can
choose which style you'd like to use.
For example, Star Chase maps look better in the SSI-style.
Default Folder - Emails
This is the folder in which PDFer will look for your reports. You can change
this location by clicking on the [...] button and then choosing
a new folder. The small [D] button will set all the default
folders to this one.
Default Folder - PDFs
This is the folder where PDFer will ask to save your PDFs. You can change
this location by clicking on the [...] button and then choosing
a new folder. The small [D] button will set all the default
folders to this one.
XML Import
Some email clients, such as the one included with the web-browser
Opera, save their emails as XML documents instead of a plain-text file. This
page allows you to configure PDFer to load these files, by specifying a "tag"
order from the "root" tag to the tag that defines a line of the
original email. An example is provided.
Version Updates
Pressing the [Check] button will cause PDFer
to check the website to see if you have the current version, or if a newer
one is available for download.
About PDFer
Simply a page of information about PDFer with some useful
internet links, should you need them.
Information on Email Clients
PDFer's main function is to read game reports sent by email. With this in
mind, PDFer has the ability to import reports that may have been garbled by
your email client software.
For most people, their email client will not be a problem, and the report
will remain in its original condition.
The following describes how you would generally save your report from your
email client.
Standard Clients
Software in this category includes Microsoft Outlook, Eudora, Apple Mail,
and some web-based (online) mail clients such as Lycos.
Hotmail
There are two ways to access your hotmail email. Ideally you would use Outlook
to retrieve your reports (as above), as this removes all the problems associated
with saving your reports from the Hotmail webpage.
BTInternet / BTOpenworld
Using you browser, view the report as you would any other email, via the inbox.
The whole mail will be opened in the webpage. Depending on which browser and
Operating System (Windows / Mac / Linux) you are using, the following process
may be slightly different, but the end result will be the same.
If you are able, shift/right click on the web page and choose "Save As"
from the popup menu, and save the page as type "HTML Source" or
"Web Page Only".
Or, from the File menu, choose "Save As" and select the page type
"HTML Source" or "Web Page Only".
On Internet Explorer in Windows, you'll have to give the filename an extension
of ".html", otherwise it will convert the page to text. Netscape
in Windows, and Mac browsers, you can give it a file extension of ".txt".
Once saved, you can open the report as normal in PDFer.
Yahoo!
(web-mail)
In your browser, click on the mail subject-line to view the report. Your
report will be displayed. Scroll down to the bottom of the page, where you
will find a link with the text "Save Message Text".
You can either click on this, and the file will open in your browser as
plain-text, from which you can "Save" the page.
Or, you can shift/right click on the link and choose "Save link as" (or something
similar), which will save the plain-text version of the email without first
displaying it.
Once saved, you can open the report as normal in PDFer.
(POP3)
Yahoo! also provide what is called a POP3 mail service, which allows
you to receive your Yahoo! email via your own email client (such as Outlook).
See Yahoo! for details on how to access your Yahoo! mail via your email-client.
Credits
I'd like to thank the nice people who take their life in their
hands and do their best to try and break my code ;-)
Thanks go to : Alan M, Rob C, David T, Mark D, Dave M... and many others,
for all their efforts in pushing through improvements.
The PDF rendering engine also appears in gp_vcon, the Gameplan report viewer
and convertor.
An online version of PDFer is available at http://brucey.net/nflab/pdfer/live.
PDFer also includes code by the following :
- Z-compression plugin - Einhugur Software
- RTF-file conversion classes - Marc Zeedar - (modified so that they actually worked ;-)
PDFer was written in REALbasic on an Apple Mac :o)
© 2004 BaH