5 - screenscrape the commodities trading screen
6 - produce the results as a tab separated values file
7 - upload the results to PCTB
9 To run it, change to this directory, type `make', and then:
10 ./ypp-commodities --tsv >commods.tsv
12 While it is capturing the screenshots, do not move the mouse or use
13 the keyboard. Keyboard focus must stay in the YPP client window.
15 You will probably need to turn off `Use antialiased font' in the YPP
16 client. This is in the Ye panel, Options, tab `General'.
21 Setting the operation mode:
22 --find-window-only Just check that we can find the YPP client window.
23 --screenshot-only Page through and take screenshots, do not OCR
24 --analyse-only | --same Process previously taken screenshots
25 --everything (default) Take screenshots and process them
27 Options to vary the processing:
28 --single-page One screenful, no paging - results will be incomplete
29 --quiet Suppress progress messages
30 --screenshot-file F Store or read screenshots in F rather than #pages#.pnm
31 --window-id ID Specified X window is the YPP client - do not search
32 --edit-charset Enable character set editing. See README.dictionary.
33 --find-island Find and print the ocean and island. Suppresses OCR
34 and output unless used with result processing option.
35 --test-servers Set default servers to be the test servers, not
36 the real live ones (doesn't affect explicit settings).
38 Controlling what happens to the results - only one at a time:
39 --upload (default) Upload to the PCTB server
40 --tsv Print data as clean tab-separated-values file
41 --raw-tsv Dump the raw (not deduped, unsorted) OCR'd data
42 --best-prices Print best buy and sell price for each commodity
43 --arbitrage Print arbitrage opportunities
45 Privacy options, which control conversations with the dictionary server:
46 --dict-local-only * Do not talk to the server even to fetch new dictionary.
47 --dict-read-only * Only fetch new dictionary, do not submit new entries.
48 --dict-anon Don't quote pirate name if submitting entries.
49 --dict-submit Submit entries quoting my pirate name. (default)
50 Please do not use options marked * with --upload. See README.privacy.
52 Options to override which servers we talk to:
53 --pctb-server HOST|URL Talk to the PCTB server at HOST or URL.
54 --dict-submit-url URL Submit dictionary entries with HTTP POST under URL.
55 --dict-update-from SRC Fetch updated master dictionary with rsync from SRC.
56 Or set the environment variables YPPSC_PCTB{_PCTB, _DICT_UPDATE, _DICT_SUBMIT}
59 Files we use and update
60 -----------------------
62 The program reads and writes the following files:
66 Contains one or more images (as raw ppms, end-to-end) which are the
67 screenshots taken in the last run. This is (over)written whenever
68 we take screenshots from the YPP client. You can reprocess an
69 existing set of screenshots with the --same (aka --analyse-only)
70 option; in that case we just read the screenshots file.
72 You can specify a different file with --screenshot-file.
74 If you want to display the contents of this file, `display' can do
75 it. Don't try `display vid:#pages#.pnm' as this will consume
76 truly stupendous quantities of RAM - it wedged my laptop.
78 * #master-newcommods#.txt #local-newcommods#.txt
80 Dictionary of newly introduced commodities. When a new commodity
81 appears in Puzzle Pirates, the PCTB server operators need to add it
82 to their database for us to be able to upload data about it.
84 It can sometimes take a few days to do this. In the meantime, it
85 is possible to upload partial data - data just omitting that
86 commodity. This is controlled by these files: they list
87 commodities which should be automatically ignored if the PCTB
88 server doesn't know about them. The master file is downloaded and
89 updated automatically from my server. You may create the local
90 file yourself. The format is simple: one commodity per line.
92 Unrecognised commodities can also be due to OCR failure so
93 double-check what you're doing before overriding the uploader by
94 telling it to ignore an unrecognised commodity.
96 * #master-char*#.txt #local-char*#.txt
97 #master-pixmap#.txt #local-pixmap#.txt
99 Character set and image dictionaries. For the semantics of the
100 char* files README.charset. There is not currently any accurate
101 documentation of this dictionary format.
103 #master-*#.txt contain the centrally defined and approved data.
104 They are downloaded automatically from the SC PCTB server and
105 updated each run. You can safely delete this file, if everything
106 is online, if you want to fetch a fresh copy.
108 #local-*#.txt are a local copy of your submissions, so that they
109 will be used by your client pending approval by me. You can delete
110 this file if you think you may have made a mistake.
112 See README.privacy for details of the communications with the SC
113 server about the contents of these dictionaries.
117 Map from commodity names to the numbers required by the PCTB
118 server. This is fetched and updated automatically as necessary.
119 It can safely be deleted as it will then be refetched.
121 * #upload-1#.html #upload-2#.html
123 We screenscrape the pages from the PCTB upload server. The actual
124 HTML returned from the upload server is left in these dropping
125 files for debugging etc.
129 When any of these tools overwrite one of the persistent dictionary
130 files, they temporarily write to <file>.new.
132 These files are all in the current working directory. There is not
133 yet any feature to have them be somewhere else. The helper programs
135 commod-results-processor
136 must (currently) also be in the current directory.
138 Future versions may have more helpers and more data files.
141 Installation requirements
142 -------------------------
144 This program has quite a few dependencies:
145 Package (Debian etch)
147 - For building, C compiler and build environment build-essential
148 - pnm library, including dev files for building libnetpbm10-dev
149 - pnm command line utilities for image manipulation netpbm
150 - X11 libraries, including dev files for building libx11-dev
151 - XTEST library, including dev files for building libxtst-dev
152 - Perl-compatible regexp library, including dev files libpcre3-dev
153 - Tk interpreter /usr/bin/wish tk8.4
154 - Perl module XML::Parser libxml-parser-perl
155 - Perl module JSON::Parser libjson-perl
156 - XTEST extension in the X server (part of X package)
157 - Perl interpreter and basic modules perl (usu.installed)
159 On other Linux distros the packages may have different names, but
160 these should be roughly right for Debian and its derivatives.
166 If you need to report a bug, for example an inability to recognise,
167 please be sure to remember the exact error message and circumstances.
168 Also, for recognition problems there will probably be a very useful
169 screenshot file called `#pages#.pnm'. This is likely to be very large
170 so don't just email it to me, but if you can put it up on a webpage
171 for me to download that will help. At least keep a copy of it.
173 If the problem is a failure to cope with some particular YPP client
174 display and is reproducible, try running:
175 ./ypp-commodities --raw-tsv --single-page
176 If this reproduces the problem, please email me the screenshot file
177 #pages#.pnm, which will consist only of the single screen, plus the
178 error messasge. I'll then be able to understand what's wrong,
185 The main purpose of this program is to connect to the PCTB server and
186 upload data. It will do that if you run it with --upload.
188 This program will also, by default, talk to the dictionary server I
189 have set up: to download updated image dictionaries, and to upload new
190 dictionary entries which you create with the PCTB client dictionary
191 GUI. This feature is mentioned in and controllable in the GUI itself,
192 so it won't happen without you knowing about it.
194 The uploads will by default mention your ocean and pirate name; if you
195 don't want that, pass the --dict-anon option, or untick the box in the
198 See README.privacy for full details.
203 ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk
204 Aristarchus on the Midnight ocean