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A simple tool for organizing turn reports

Posted: Tue May 22, 2012 2:50 pm
by Navi
I started finally collecting turn reports a short while ago, and found it annoying to read through for a single character. So I made a simple tool that separates the turn reports into the different characters and adds the events to the other reports that have already been added.

Cantr Turn Report Tool

Instructions for its use are included.

Any feedback is welcome. I'll try to address any bugs found. I can also look into adding the ability to read in specific formats if people have been keeping their own separate lists and wanted to add those to save time (the saved file is in text format and can easily be edited too, as long as the format stays the same, the order of dates doesn't even matter as the tool sorts it).

Re: A simple tool for organizing turn reports

Posted: Tue May 22, 2012 4:07 pm
by Doug R.
Wow, I look forward to trying this at home (I have a mac at work). Any chance you have the skill to make it drag and drop to skip the copy/paste step? I just have thousands of turn reports I'd need to copy/paste.

Re: A simple tool for organizing turn reports

Posted: Tue May 22, 2012 4:23 pm
by EchoMan
Did you save your turn reports as text files? Not sure how easy it would be to make something with drag and drop emails that work generic on an arbitrary email client.

I also hope that this tool supports UTF-8 encoding for users with characters in different language groups.

Re: A simple tool for organizing turn reports

Posted: Tue May 22, 2012 4:25 pm
by Doug R.
Saving them to text files kills all the formatting and makes them unusable, so, no, they're still clogging my email.

Re: A simple tool for organizing turn reports

Posted: Tue May 22, 2012 4:48 pm
by Navi
Drag and drop is how I wanted to do it at first but haven't figured it out yet.

If you are using Gmail, or hotmail, you can actually select the entire page and paste it in. I'm sure that is probably the case for other web based email too, but I haven't tested it.

The other possibility I have been looking into is reading in from bulk EML files, which you can dump out of Thunderbird and maybe some other email programs. I haven't done it yet, but it would be quite simple to add. I can try adding support for different email programs too, but I have to know which ones. (I tried doing a similar thing with Outlook just now but crashed it)

Edit: Outlook can dump a selected list of messages into a single text file, so I could get it to work from that too with a minimal amount of work (basically just a minor change to the interface). Outlook 2007 seems to crash every time I've tried it though, but it does complete writing them to the file before it does.

EchoMan wrote:I also hope that this tool supports UTF-8 encoding for users with characters in different language groups.


Yes it does use UTF-8. I have French characters and it works fine.

Re: A simple tool for organizing turn reports

Posted: Tue May 22, 2012 4:55 pm
by Cdls
Great idea Navi, I will be checking it out later on tonight!

Re: A simple tool for organizing turn reports

Posted: Wed May 23, 2012 3:01 am
by masterekat
Wonderful! ...This thing will probably literally give me back hours of my life lol. I'll try it out in a bit and let you know how it goes.

Re: A simple tool for organizing turn reports

Posted: Wed May 23, 2012 5:36 am
by Oasis
I don't have winzip to unzip it, is there something else free that I can use?

Re: A simple tool for organizing turn reports

Posted: Wed May 23, 2012 5:45 am
by EchoMan

Re: A simple tool for organizing turn reports

Posted: Wed May 23, 2012 9:29 am
by jarco
Yikes an exe. My Fedora doesn't like that :)

Re: A simple tool for organizing turn reports

Posted: Wed May 23, 2012 9:41 am
by EchoMan
On Fedora you shouldn't have to bother with external unzipping tools. :)

Re: A simple tool for organizing turn reports

Posted: Wed May 23, 2012 12:13 pm
by jarco
I was refering to the orignal Cantr Turn Report Tool

Re: A simple tool for organizing turn reports

Posted: Wed May 23, 2012 1:20 pm
by Greek
Few months ago I created simple tool to concatenate text messages.
Unfortunately it worked for nobody I asked but me and nobody wanted to send me any log file for tests, so I didn't publish it. It should be pasted and run in the folder with .eml files (I download them using Thunderbird). It doesn't show anything (no GUI/console), so it might look like nothing happens. Creates "logs" directory. Maybe it would work for somebody :P It's Java program so should be OS independent. My turn reports are of type "text" in Cantr settings, maybe that's why it worked for nobody else.
http://www.cantr-mmorpg.pl/progz/logcutter.jar
I'm not going to fix it and I'm glad to see better program for archiving logs. :)

Re: A simple tool for organizing turn reports

Posted: Thu May 24, 2012 2:00 am
by Snickie
EchoMan wrote:Did you save your turn reports as text files? Not sure how easy it would be to make something with drag and drop emails that work generic on an arbitrary email client.

I also hope that this tool supports UTF-8 encoding for users with characters in different language groups.

Doug R. wrote:Saving them to text files kills all the formatting and makes them unusable, so, no, they're still clogging my email.

Wait, so you mean HTML turn reports are supposed to have formatting and links and things like that?

:evil: I should get a new email provider. I NEED THIS.
</offtopic>

Re: A simple tool for organizing turn reports

Posted: Thu May 24, 2012 4:11 am
by Navi
I tried sending the report with both settings (HTML and Text) and they both came out the same, so is there even a difference in choosing one or the other?
Edit: HTML report EML files have a line break (<br />) added at the end of each line. I can't find any other differences (And they both look the same when viewed as a normal email).

I uploaded a new version with bulk EML support (for Thunderbird users), and also able to handle the bulk save from Outlook. As well as fixed some other problems, mostly minor (File->Quit actually does something now...). Instructions on how to use both bulk methods were added to the instructions file.

jarco wrote:Yikes an exe. My Fedora doesn't like that :)

I'll look into getting a version working for Linux. It is currently coded in C#, but I could probably rewrite it in Java, the GUI would probably take me a bit to figure out though as I haven't done GUI programming in Java in several years. The other alternative is to use Mono, which allows you to run .Net programs. I don't currently have a Linux install, so I can't test it.

Cantr Turn Report Tool