>A thought:
>
>You know, Tim, if there was a way to put the TB into some form that was
>more than text (like some sort of DB or the like), then Jeff might even be
>able to generate an output from his FT to act as an input to the Bio (to
>aide in automation). Maybe a bit of work to setup, but might be an
>interesting long term approach to support some automation.
It should be noted that every issue, I update the Complete Article Listing
document at
http://www.freelancetraveller.com/magazine/ConsolidatedListing.pdf to
reflect the most recent issue. I used to include a subset of the document
in the final issue of the calendar year, covering the articles published in
the calendar year just concluded, but that fell by the wayside some years
back.
It wouldn't actually be impossible to generate a CSV file from the
document, and then keep both updated (or re-generate the document from the
updated CSV), and the CSV could be made downloadable so that it could be
sorted or searched according to any criteria the user wished.
Hmmm, that's a thought and might well help. It would save a fair bit of detail work even if it needed some sorting and tidying up. I've currently done issues 1-27, 44 (for Reasons) and 73 onwards (which is where I started doing them as they came out). So I've done half. Or in fact more than half as the latter ones have been much larger. But still a lot of work to do.
The sixty-four dollar question (probably overvalued by two orders of
magnitude) is whether there is any other information I should include to
make it useful for tc.
Yes!
rule set or 'era' as I used to call it but now just as sections covering the different rule sets. This is one of the things that takes the longest time. Often it's very obvious because the author says in the intro or there's some really clear 'marker' such as Ewan's vehicles which can only be MegaTraveller. But other times I'm rootling through skill lists to see if I can work out what the author might have been using for one NPC where it-actually-doesn't-really-matter-and-could-easily-be-generic-but-I-like-to-make-an-effort (sad person that I am). And yes, quite a lot can go in the "T" section (for no rule set or multiple rule sets) that's not a problem, but if I can assign it to something I else, I do.
After that, the most helpful thing would be for the data to be in the same order of a bib entry - but I'm pretty sure I can just move columns around in Excel until I'm happy, so that's not critical for you to fix.
(Essentially I want in this order:
rule set.
Title as on the article (ideally with a marker to say the contents page gives a variation where applicable).
Author (Firstname Lastname).
Then I'd need a column that said "Freelance Traveller" but I could add that.
Issue number
year
p. - if one page, pp. if multiple pages
page range
number of pages
page or pages - depending on above - but I imagine this isn't simple and it wouldn't be hard for me to add manually
"US Letter & A4, PDF and online" - which will be on every FT entry so that's easy enough to add
collation is rather hard so I imagine I'll have to do that myself for each one.
and in fact everything after that, the 'contents' and the comments would all have to be manual.
So I guess that much of what's needed is probably already there and what's not, I'm prepared to do, so yes, it might well be an interesting exercise to see how much this speeds things up if you're willing to send the csv. 'As is' to save you time, tweaked as above if you can do that easily and want to.
One thing I am aware of is that I work from the A4 versions and in my dreams of actually being 'finished' I was then going to go through the whole lot of US Letter versions and note the differences. (Did I mention I was sad?). So I suppose I would be VERY interested in your csv *having* those differences marked in some way. (I'm assuming there will be no textual differences ONLY page start/end and pagination variations.)
Oh, the other thing that is time consuming is reading the fiction to create a summary in a line or two. But can't really see a way round that... :-)
Of course, if someone could do this for Stellar Reaches too... (next biggie on my list). Then I could focus on the old fanzines. Many are done so I'd be within striking distance of the end at that point. (I may not have reported that I think I've now done all the miscellaneous articles in non-Traveller specific magazines. Well, all the ones I have sight of).
Wow. I've not dreamed of an 'end' for a long time.
Oh, hang on. I've forgotten online JTAS. That's a job. Particularly as the only way I've come up with so far of offering an indication of size (in the absence of 'pages') is to provide a word count. And the only way I've come up with doing that is by pasting the article into Word and reading the page count. If anyone could spare me doing *that* 1500+ times (I think it is), that would be marvellous. Nay, it would be MARVELLOUS.
Thank you for the offer on FT though, the more I think about it, the more I suspect it would be a big help and I should have thought of it sooner.
cheers
tc