Narra Nhoj

Well that was quicker than I expected. The PBN to LIN converter has a new home on the Bridgewebs server here: dds.bridgewebs.com/pbntolin/ The old page will direct you to use the new link for a few months when it will go away.

You're welcome. I think I have found a new place to host the converter and, if it works, I will put the new URL here in a few days.

I will be closing the server which hosts the PbnToLin converter very soon. If anyone would like to take over the hosting please contact me by PM. It is a very small installation but requires a knowledge of PHP. Since the start it has currently converted nearly 76,000 files! Anyone interested in receiving the source code please email me: design<at>johnfromarran<dot>org<dot>uk

I will be closing down the server which hosts the PbnToLin converter in a few months and would like to find someone to take it over. The files are very compact and are mostly written in PHP with some HTML. If anyone would like to have copies of the files I can zip everything and email it to you. Since it was first written in 2014 nearly 76,000 files have been converted. Please contact me by private message if you are willing to host this converter. Or email me: design<at>johnfromarran<dot>org<dot>uk

Sorry about the long delay in replying, due to personal circumstances I haven't been on the BBO forum since June 2018. BBO weren't willing to share a spec for LIN so I reverse engineered the commands I needed from examples on the web. The spec for PBN is publicly available on the web so that part was easy. Yes, I'm happy to share my code with you so that you can make any improvements you like. I have sent you a PM.

It's two-and-a-half years since I posted the first version of the converter and, to date, there have been nearly 1100 conversions. I hope it has served you well.

Latest update 2017-01-15: Users may not realise that all converted files older than 1 hour are automatically deleted when a file conversion is performed. Some users seem to have been leaving a browser window open and attempting to download a converted file after it has been deleted, which may have been slightly disconcerting. This will now be flagged as an error.

A few more errors have been noticed since the last update in August and it was down to file names containing the "&" character. This has now been fixed. Also, a lot of work has been done on detecting format errors in the submitted PBN files. Instead of crashing the site, files with errors should now be flagged together with an indication of which line contains the error. I hope it works for you.

Yet another bug has appeared recently where someone was trying to convert a file with a comma in the name. This has now been fixed. All of the following characters will be deleted from the name of any submitted file: <SPACE> ! ' # , and + Also if, after deletion of the offending characters, the resultant file name is empty a dummy name will be created using the local (London) date and time of the file submission. I hope it works for you.

Another bug has surfaced in that someone was trying to convert files with names containing the "+" symbol. This causes problems with the php download code and has now been fixed. If the "+" symbol is contained within a filename it will now be converted to "_". This is in addition to the " ", "!" and "#" symbols which were found to cause a problem earlier.

As we are now in the age of HTML5, I think it's highly unlikely that BBO will be considering an app for Windows 8 or 8.1 or indeed for any other android/iThing/whatever tablet or phone.

If your club has a website on Bridgewebs, you will now be able to download deal files directly in LIN format for uploading to BBO. This has been incorporated into the latest revision 2.19f which was released yesterday

I can't help with the BBO hand editor problem, but this is just to let you know that when Bridgewebs version 2.19g is released in October you should be able to download the hands directly in LIN format.

There were two noticable bugs in version 1. The main one was that file names containing either '#' or multiple periods were getting truncate and causing the download to fail. The second one was that the converted file could only be downloaded once. Both these have now been fixed. If anyone finds any more bugs please let me know.

For anyone who wishes to use BBO for teaching and can only get access to .pbn files there is now an online converter page here: http://johnfromarran.org.uk/Bridge/PbnToLin.html Enjoy.

Anyone???

I have just tried running Richard Pavlicek's converter program on a Windows 8.1 machine. It is a real PITA as it has to be run under the DosBox utility, but does appear to work. I doubt if anyone who is even slightly computer phobic would be able to achieve a result. I have been programming computers for nearly 50 years (I started programming Elliot Autocode in 1965!) and had some difficulty getting it working. The output files will upload to BBO but can't be played on a teaching table coming back with a message that they are damaged in some way. It really is time there was an online converter page to achieve this task. I am quite happy to write one and have a full understanding of how the PBN file format works, but have no information about the LIN format which is proprietary to BBO. If the LIN format was available publicly the task is a really simple one as both formats are just text files. Can anyone offer an insight to the workings of the LIN file?