Generating Bridge Hands for Reports/Blogs

[ajm218]

I'd really like some software to allow me to write reports of matches and move smoothly from prose to a hand diagram to a bidding auction and back to text again without too much hassle.

 

Anyone know of anything?

[TimG]

I'd suggest making your own HTML (or Word, or whatever you're using) template. That way you can make it look just like you want it and then repeat it easily.

[inquiry]

BBO member and bbo forum member firmit has created this free tool....

 

firmit bridge generator

[mikegill]

You could also try Richard Pavlicek's (free) software

 

http://www.rpbridge.net/rpbr.htm#11

[Rossoneri]

If you are making into .pdf files, LaTeX is the way.

[P_Marlowe]

If you are making into .pdf files, LaTeX is the way.

http://forums.bridgebase.com/index.php?showtopic=23763

 

Just adding the link, who mentions some LaTeX

macros for creating Bridge Hands.

 

With kind regards

Marlowe

[inquiry]

If the hand was played on bbo then you could output it in html format from bridgebrowser, assuming the hand has made it into the database. If it is really urgent, i could capture the hands and move them into a bridgebrowser database and create the html for you. I guess there would have to be some strong reason for me to do this however. I can create results like this Results for me within a minute of a team match or tournament being completed...

 

You can do this yourself if the hands have made it to bridgebrowser (minus the makeable contracts and hyperlinks to other tables--but you could include all tables on one page).

[firmit]

I have been thinking of making a ... what do you call it...uhm....

(checking downloaded files) BULLETINS - jeez.

 

My idea is a site, where one simply inputs the hand diagram, bidding with optional alerts - and comments on whatever, maybe even picture upload of a cat, a door - or maybe the players!

 

Let's say there are 5 different comments. And you want the option of arranging the sequence of when the diagrams, comments, bidding etc is ordered. So my plan is, if any interest, to make a bulletin-template html, pdf generator, nothing spectacular, where the order is user specified, as a free online version.

 

I may have time after the 15th to look into it, but it may not be scheduled before summer. Kind of depends if anyone finds the idea useful.

 

BTW - latex rules B)

 

ps: the template generator has its followers - which is great! Hope more people find it useful :)

[y66]

Would love to know what Brian Senior & Co. used to produce the bridge bulletins for the World Team Championships in Shanghai. Best I've seen. Will try to find out.

 

Bridge Composer (commercial, nominal price) has some nice features. More info here.

[Cascade]

Would love to know what Brian Senior & Co. used to produce the bridge bulletins for the World Team Championships in Shanghai. Best I've seen. Will try to find out.

 

Bridge Composer (commercial, nominal price) has some nice features. More info here.

Does anyone have this download.

 

I am not sure if it is temporary or permanent but the site was down when I tried to download it just now.

[y66]

The site appears to be up now:

 

http://bridgecomposer.home.mindspring.com/

 

email: bridgecomposer@mindspring.com

[Cascade]

Thanks it is too.

 

Some sort of temporary glitch.

[JanM]

My brilliant husband, who hasn't been able to figure out how to post on the BBOF (actually, something seems to have gone wrong when he registered and now he's not allowed to post :)), has this to recommend:

 

The site:

 

http://www.noozit.com/

 

Has special software for inputing hands and auctions as well as displaying them in an article. It can be posted online or put in printable format (and then saved as pdf).

 

You can see several articles I have posted there writing up hands from world/national championships.

 

Chip

[inquiry]

Noozit is easy to use, and has a very nice hand input utility. I gave it a whirl to see how it goes, creating three "articles" (each post in a noozit article). I am not entirely sure if I am doing it right, as it seems my articles are intermixed with book reviews, obama voting issues, and flowering. But I think this is the way that site works. Sadly, i dont think noozit gets much traffic and certainly not much bridge traffic.

 

However, one can copy and paste the article stuff from there into other sites, but I don't believe the hands go as easily. But if you are interested in looking at a hand input routine or maybe cutting and pasting things, noozit isn't bad.

 

My 3 articles are:

 

1. A post about a round of 32 hand from the Spingold, same hand I wrote about in the thread on commentators

 

2. An inverted vise squeeze hand needed to make a slam, found by phil and echnognome. I believe that hand has been written up on this forum somewhere.

 

3. A combination clash and double squeeze requiring careful play from several years ago on rgb that no one found the correct play too (at least in my opinion).

 

The last two were written up to be "funny" so I created a composite character who is like most "BBO EXPERTS", totally clueless... but with ego's to large to fit in Texas. Of course, the writing could have been a lot better, but I think all three hands are interesting.

[Echognome]

The last two were written up to be "funny" so I created a composite character who is like most "BBO EXPERTS", totally clueless... but with ego's to large to fit in Texas. Of course, the writing could have been a lot better, but I think all three hands are interesting.

I read them. Pretty good stuff. I can't believe you have a character named echknowme!

[firmit]

About noozit.

 

I can see they are using the FREE FCKEditor. And they have an extension which generates an image with the actual bridge diagram - thus, you may link to it or just copy it to your own destination. In that way you are only using the hand-generator, and not the blog-tool itself.

 

This may not be a "nice thing to do", given it is their extension (don't know about rights) - but it is possible. In fact - they may be used in BFF, which - IMHO - should consider upgrading the hand-layout-thingy.

 

On the other hand - this made me think - about my template generator. It is not very difficult to generate an image rather than html text. I don't know what is more preferable in a blog - what do you bloggers out there think?

 

Edit: FCKEditor it open-source! Thus, implementing it in BFF and any other place is a peace-of-cake! The extra extension is probably easy to implement.

[inquiry]

Review of Bridge Composer.

 

I have downloaded and played with Bridge Composer. It is shareware, and if you decide to keep it more than 30 days, the price to pay for it is $19.95. I think it is clearly worth that amount.

 

A couple of nice things.

1. It reads BBO's lin files just fine.
   
2. It has a very quick double dummy solver built in, but it only works for before play begins.
   
3. It presumably allows gib to run on the hands, but I am not so sure how that works.
   
4. You can input part of a hand, a full hand, etc
   
5. You can copy a deal and paste it into a new page (again only at the top).
   
6. You can save output as PBN or HTML or PDF
   
7. Their is an OLE complaince that allows you to put hands into word etc.
   

Bad things

1. It works on one page at a time. The hand diagram goes to the top of the page. If you are typing text, and extend beyond the bottom of the page, tough luck. You can manually create a blank page, and then switch to the blank page and start typing again. There is no automatic flow from one page to the next.
   
2. The user manual is hard to find things an online help is poor
   
3. The shortcut key to find fonts is difficult to fiind, but it is \d \h \c \s which is easy enough to remember.
   

I think if you are interested in writing a report of an event, and you have pbn or lin file, this is so worth the 19.95. Just import the hands, save as html, read the html into word and go from there. Or, if you are going to only restrict the writing to one page per hand (or don;t mind manually inserting extra pages, you can do it all from within the program.

 

To give you an idea of the output and ways to use it, I have attached two pdf files. The first one, entitled ofipd001.pdf is a slightly edited version of one of my noozit post. This one required saving the hand info on different pages as html, opening that in word, adding text, removing page breaks, making it into two columns in word, and saving it as pdf.

 

The second one (to be added to the next post in this thread) is a quick frivilious write up of a BBO tournament played about a week or two ago with me and sfbp were we were fortunate to come in second place. This was done entirely in bridge composer and saved in pdf format from that program.

ofipd001.pdf

[inquiry]

Continued review of Bridge Composer... see the post before this one in this thread.

 

This is a 10 board file (so 10 pdf pages) created using Bridge composer. I would guess people looking to keep some kind of record of their play with comments or teachers might like this mode. Bridge composer is very good at this.

 

Note in this PDF file i had teh hands left justified. Bridge Composer allows you to center them or left justify. You can also put more than one hand per page, and has a two column feature where you can have two hands per page, with bidding, comments, etc...

stephen_and_me_001.pdf

[TimG]

I can't read either attached file and I generally have no trouble with .pdf files.

[hotShot]

I can't read either attached file and I generally have no trouble with .pdf files.

It is transmitted with the wrong mime-type.

 

Select "save link as" and rename it to something that ends with .pdf , after that open the file from disk.

Ignore the error message from the PDF reader.

[y66]

I purchased Bridge Composer a year or so ago. I like it.

 

If you're looking for an easy way to import LIN or PBN files, annotate them and save the output to HTML or PDF, it's definitely worth taking a look at.

 

Installation on my Windows XP PC was smooth. As was integration with GIB for double dummy analysis (I have a GIB license. Can't remember if you need this).

[inquiry]

Another point. If you import your BBO Team matches, and put the format into two hands per page, you get the open hand (bidding and play) on the left side of the page and bidding and play from teh closed room on the right hand side of the page.

 

That is nice. (this is ofcourse from your C-drive when you log hands, not from myhands site)

[inquiry]

I also forgot to mention, you can have it print all makable contracts just under the hands diagram... that is a big nice plus, and very quick.