Re: [Tlf-devel] TLF-1.1.1 release announcement

[Thomas Beierlein]

Hi Graham,


Am Sun, 15 Jan 2012 21:47:11 +0000
schrieb Graham <address@hidden>:
> Thanks Tom.
> 
> copied, installed, built and working OK.
> 
good to hear :-).

> I used TLF in this weekends North American QSO Party. TLF does not
> export a nice cabrillo format file for this contest. The exchange was
> name and state/province or country. TLF truncates received exchange.

Well that code is really old and dates back to the first years of
using cabrillo format. It supports only the ARRL standard contests. In
menatime some other formats of the QSO lines got added to the standard,
but not to tlf :-(.

> I had intended to dig into the part of TLF which does the cabrillo
> format creation but just haven't gotten around to it. So, I wrote a
> simple perl script called tlf2cab.pl to convert the TLF log format to
> cabrillo.

Very well. I think that may be the best way for postprocessing the log
file - to use some external programs. They can be written in ohter
languages as C and are more easily extensible.

> I can share the script with anyone who wants it or we can place on the
> tlf archive someplace.

That would be very nice. As a first idea - put it on
tlf.wikispaces.com. Better yet, send it to me and I will add it as user
contributed script to the distribution.

> Cabrillo is a standard but version 2 and version 3 are both commonly
> used plus it seems as every contest has their variation on exchanges
> and how the details need to be put in the cabrillo log file. 

See http://www.kkn.net/~trey/Cabrillo_v2/qso-template.html for the
official supported formats. Other ones may be also around.

> I am very comfortable working in a terminal with command lines and
> scripts. I see the task of exporting the tlf log into cabrillo as a
> job for a script. Others are not so comfortable and like the ability
> built into the application. 

If needed we could make tlf's ':wri' command to call that external
script. That would drop the command line barrier for others.

> For now I will use and update my script but will also give some more
> thought to what is needed in tlf to do the same thing.
> 
You can find the code for writing the header in src/getsummary.c. The
real code for writing the QSO lines are in src/writecabrillo.c. It is
not written nice and I am working a little bit on it. Any
help and suggestions for improvements are welcome.

73 for now,
        Tom DL1JBE.



-- 
"Do what is needful!"
Ursula LeGuin: Earthsea
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