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-dictionary Enable dictionary 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
40 Files we use and update
41 -----------------------
43 The program reads and writes the following files:
47 Contains one or more images (as raw ppms, end-to-end) which are the
48 screenshots taken in the last run. This is (over)written whenever
49 we take screenshots from the YPP client. You can reprocess an
50 existing set of screenshots with the --same (aka --analyse-only)
51 option; in that case we just read the screenshots file.
53 You can specify a different file with --screenshot-file.
55 If you want to display the contents of this file, `display' can do
56 it. Don't try `display vid:#pages#.pnm' as this will consume
57 truly stupendous quantities of RAM - it wedged my laptop.
61 Character set dictionary. For the semantics of the contents of this
62 file see README.charset. There is not currently any accurate
63 documentation of this dictionary format.
65 If you delete this file you'll have to re-enter a lot of glyph data
66 (and probably get it wrong and make the program misrecognise
67 things). If you want to undo any mistakes you may have made
68 answering OCR questions you can safely revert this to the version
73 Map from commodity names to the numbers required by the PCTB
74 server. This is fetched and updated automatically as necessary.
75 It can safely be deleted as it will then be refetched.
79 When any of these tools overwrite one of the persistent dictionary
80 files, they temporarily write to <file>.new.
82 These files are all in the current working directory. There is not
83 yet any feature to have them be somewhere else. The helper programs
85 yppsc-commod-processor
86 must (currently) also be in the current directory.
88 Future versions may have more helpers and more data files.
91 Installation requirements
92 -------------------------
94 This program has quite a few dependencies:
97 - For building, C compiler and build environment build-essential
98 - pnm library, including dev files for building libnetpbm10-dev
99 - pnm command line utilities for image manipulation netpbm
100 - X11 libraries, including dev files for building libx11-dev
101 - XTEST library, including dev files for building libxtst-dev
102 - Tk interpreter /usr/bin/wish tk8.4
103 - Perl module XML::Parser libxml-parser-perl
104 - Perl module JSON::Parser libjson-perl
105 - XTEST extension in the X server (part of X package)
106 - Perl interpreter and basic modules perl (usu.installed)
108 On other Linux distros the packages may have different names, but
109 these should be roughly right for Debian and its derivatives.
115 If you need to report a bug, for example an inability to recognise,
116 please be sure to remember the exact error message and circumstances.
117 Also, for recognition problems there will probably be a very useful
118 screenshot file called `#pages#.pnm'. This is likely to be very large
119 so don't just email it to me, but if you can put it up on a webpage
120 for me to download that will help. At least keep a copy of it.
122 If the problem is a failure to cope with some particular YPP client
123 display and is reproducible, try running:
124 ./ypp-commodities --raw-tsv --single-page
125 If this reproduces the problem, please email me the screenshot file
126 #pages#.pnm, which will consist only of the single screen, plus the
127 error messasge. I'll then be able to understand what's wrong,
131 Phoning home - privacy
132 ----------------------
134 The main purpose of this program is to connect to the PCTB server and
135 upload data. The program does not currently phone home at all in
136 modes other than --upload, and when it does it connects to the
137 PCTB server not to a system of mine.
139 However, there are some improvements which I may introduce in the
140 future which may change this. I am considering:
142 * Having the ocr character resolver talk to a server run by me
143 to look for missing glpyhs, and/or upload those glyphs back
144 to that server so that they can be shared.
146 * Having the upload client upload a copy of the data to a server run
147 by me, when run in --upload mode.
149 If I do do this these new functions may be enabled by default, but it
150 will be possible to turn them off, or direct them to different
151 servers, with command-line options, and they will be documented here.
155 ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk
156 Aristarchus on the Midnight ocean