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mpogue2 / SquareDesk

Fully-featured music player and sequence designer, designed for square dance callers
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Feature: make colored cards, beginning of sequence handling #487

Open mpogue2 opened 5 years ago

mpogue2 commented 5 years ago

I have a 4x6" card maker utility, that uses basically a mail-merge program that is part of Google Docs (AutoCrat). The input is a spreadsheet of sequences, one per line in the CSV, with level, number, call count, etc. Output is a PDF file which when printed can be used with a hand-fed color printer.

The output is quite nice, but the input is a PITA to make, and the process is complicated and easy-to-mess-up.

I'd like to see the start of sequence handling, but just the following:

1) Database of sequences that can be created from popular sources (cedar, text files, excel) 2) Ability to tag each sequence with level. [optional] Ability to figure out what level the sequence is automatically, by running through internal SD 3) Ability to filter (sequences must include X, Y, Z, and must not use W), based on current Callerlab lists (leverage dance programs tab?) 4) Ability to select sequences for output (I'll take this one, etc. OR I'll take ALL that passed the filter) 5) Ability to output selected to PDF, using a mail-merge-like operation on a template (html? OpenOffice?) 6) Ability to choose backgnd color of a section of the template based on the level 7) Ability to ignore headers, separators, stuff in parentheses (comments) in text files 8) The template would decide the size of the resulting card. Templates could be edited outside of SquareDesk, e.g. in OpenOffice -- no need to reinvent that wheel.

mpogue2 commented 5 years ago

Sample output looks like this:

SEQUENCES.pdf

mpogue2 commented 5 years ago

NOTE: This is not a trivial enhancement. It will require thinking about how we might want to do sequences in the future, too.

9) Output could also optionally be TXT format, suitable for cut/paste into Notes (iPad). I have used iPad for reading from cards before, and it works quite well.

danlyke commented 5 years ago

I'm starting to solidify on a schema that I think can both represent everything I want to do in the future, but will handle the "import Andy Shore's list of singing calls" case... I'll put a little more writing on this thread about that.

mpogue2 commented 5 years ago

I'd like to suggest a heuristic here: "Import All The Things". :-). So, "yes" to every reasonable format that has substantial usage out there. Maybe clipboard, too...

I would love everything to end up in a canonical SD format (verifiably correct), but I think that's fairly hard to implement. Might be able to get 90% of the way there, though. I did some work on this before, when I looked at Rich Reel's and Andy Shore's singing call lists programmatically. (That's how I know what the most generic singing call is, taking the Most Travelled Path at each step of the singing call: H Sq 4, Swing Thru, Boys Run, Ferris wheel, Centers Pass Thru, Touch 1/4, Scootback, Swing and Promenade). It took me a while to put them all into a common format to be able to calculate this (I used Rich's abbreviation format, ending up with one singing call per line). I'd love to be able to import all of those at once!

I'd also like to be able to generate Rich's format on the output side for cards. I worked with Rich to disambiguate a bunch of things, so when we get there, I think this is possible.