5 - screenscrape the commodities trading screen
6 - produce the results as a tab separated values file
7 - **TODO** 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.
19 Setting the operation mode:
20 --find-window-only Just check that we can find the YPP client window.
21 --screenshot-only Page through and take screenshots, do not OCR
22 --analyse-only | --same Process previously taken screenshots
23 --everything (default) Take screenshots and process them
25 Options to vary the processing:
26 --single-page One screenful, no paging - results will be incomplete
27 --quiet Suppress progress messages
28 --screenshot-file F Store or read screenshots in F rather than #pages#.pnm
29 --window-id ID Specified X window is the YPP client - do not search
30 --edit-charset Enable character set editing. See README.dictionary.
32 Controlling what happens to the results:
33 --upload (default) Upload to the PCTB server
34 --tsv Print data as clean tab-separated-values file
35 --raw-tsv Dump the raw (not deduped, unsorted) OCR'd data
36 --best-prices Print best buy and sell price for each commodity
37 --arbitrage Print arbitrage opportunities
39 Privacy options, which control conversations with the dictionary server:
40 --dict-local-only * Do not talk to the server even to fetch new dictionary.
41 --dict-read-only * Only fetch new dictionary, do not submit new entries.
42 --dict-anon Don't quote pirate name if submitting entries.
43 --dict-submit Submit entries quoting my pirate name. (default)
44 Please do not use options marked * with --upload. See README.privacy.
46 Options to override which servers we talk to:
47 --pctb-server HOST|URL Talk to the PCTB server at HOST or URL.
48 --dict-submit-url URL Submit dictionary entries with HTTP POST under URL.
49 --dict-update-from SRC Fetch updated master dictionary with rsync from SRC.
50 Or set the environment variables YPPSC_PCTB{_PCTB, _DICT_UPDATE, _DICT_SUBMIT}
53 Files we use and update
54 -----------------------
56 The program reads and writes the following files:
60 Contains one or more images (as raw ppms, end-to-end) which are the
61 screenshots taken in the last run. This is (over)written whenever
62 we take screenshots from the YPP client. You can reprocess an
63 existing set of screenshots with the --same (aka --analyse-only)
64 option; in that case we just read the screenshots file.
66 You can specify a different file with --screenshot-file.
68 If you want to display the contents of this file, `display' can do
69 it. Don't try `display vid:#pages#.pnm' as this will consume
70 truly stupendous quantities of RAM - it wedged my laptop.
74 Character set dictionary. For the semantics of the contents of this
75 file see README.charset. There is not currently any accurate
76 documentation of this dictionary format.
78 If you delete this file you'll have to re-enter a lot of glyph data
79 (and probably get it wrong and make the program misrecognise
80 things). If you want to undo any mistakes you may have made
81 answering OCR questions you can safely revert this to the version
86 Map from commodity names to the numbers required by the PCTB
87 server. This is fetched and updated automatically as necessary.
88 It can safely be deleted as it will then be refetched.
92 When any of these tools overwrite one of the persistent dictionary
93 files, they temporarily write to <file>.new.
95 These files are all in the current working directory. There is not
96 yet any feature to have them be somewhere else. The helper programs
98 yppsc-commod-processor
99 must (currently) also be in the current directory.
101 Future versions may have more helpers and more data files.
104 Installation requirements
105 -------------------------
107 This program has quite a few dependencies:
108 Package (Debian etch)
110 - For building, C compiler and build environment build-essential
111 - pnm library, including dev files for building libnetpbm10-dev
112 - pnm command line utilities for image manipulation netpbm
113 - X11 libraries, including dev files for building libx11-dev
114 - XTEST library, including dev files for building libxtst-dev
115 - Tk interpreter /usr/bin/wish tk8.4
116 - Perl module XML::Parser libxml-parser-perl
117 - Perl module JSON::Parser libjson-perl
118 - XTEST extension in the X server (part of X package)
119 - Perl interpreter and basic modules perl (usu.installed)
121 On other Linux distros the packages may have different names, but
122 these should be roughly right for Debian and its derivatives.
128 If you need to report a bug, for example an inability to recognise,
129 please be sure to remember the exact error message and circumstances.
130 Also, for recognition problems there will probably be a very useful
131 screenshot file called `#pages#.pnm'. This is likely to be very large
132 so don't just email it to me, but if you can put it up on a webpage
133 for me to download that will help. At least keep a copy of it.
135 If the problem is a failure to cope with some particular YPP client
136 display and is reproducible, try running:
137 ./ypp-commodities --raw-tsv --single-page
138 If this reproduces the problem, please email me the screenshot file
139 #pages#.pnm, which will consist only of the single screen, plus the
140 error messasge. I'll then be able to understand what's wrong,
147 The main purpose of this program is to connect to the PCTB server and
148 upload data. It will do that if you run it with --upload.
150 This program will also, by default, talk to the dictionary server I
151 have set up: to download updated image dictionaries, and to upload new
152 dictionary entries which you create with the PCTB client dictionary
153 GUI. This feature is mentioned in and controllable in the GUI itself,
154 so it won't happen without you knowing about it.
156 The uploads will by default mention your ocean and pirate name; if you
157 don't want that, pass the --dict-anon option, or untick the box in the
160 See README.privacy for full details.
165 ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk
166 Aristarchus on the Midnight ocean