There was a way to look up a 200 point range of players in a State with the old system;can it be done with the current one?I think this might be helpful for those events where internet access is not available,especially when the bimonthly Supplements are discontinued.
That’s on the list of things to be added when MSA is rewritten.
You can order a custom ratings list through the TD/Affiliate Support Area, that might help too.
Thanks Mike;the Custom list is super!!!
With the discontinuance of the bi-monthly printed supplements, we’ll need to rethink what we offer.
One of the things I’ve done on occasion is to create a custom supplement PDF. (For example, I could generate one for all the players in Nebraska whose rating had changed in the past 4 years.)
We could offer this in at least two different forms:
-
Create supplement pages for each of the states for each supplement cycle in addition to the full supplement PDF.
-
Offer the ability to order a custom PDF (like a custom ratings list), so you could order players in 2 or 3 states over some time span. These would probably have to be emailed like the custom ratings lists, they take a little too long to generate to offer them as the output of a web page.
There’s a new supplement update file format in the works, it combines the best features of the bi-monthly update and the Gold Master file. With this format, I’ve thought about offering custom rating update files for use by WinTD and Swis-Sys, so you could order all players whose rating or membership has changed since some date. (The bi-monthly supplements only include those who have played in rated games, not those whose membership has been renewed.)
Tom Doan and I had a short email discussion last week on the new supplement update file format, but I don’t know if it’ll be in the upcoming release of WinTD. (I’m actually more interested in whether that release will prepare the new format rating reports, since those contain some additional fields that will help catch validation errors.)
What I’d like to see is a PDF version of the bimonthly supplements for download. Not everyone uses pairing programs, and even for those who do there are times (admittedly rare) when you want both the current and previous list in hand. (I can do this by cloning the database and updating one copy, but why should I have to do the USCF’s job?)
“October 2006 Rating List (0.4MB - Please refer to the readme.txt file in the zip file for information on extracting these files to a floppy disk.). Also available as a tab delimited text file (0.4MB) and a PDF file (0.9MB).”
The above quote comes from the Ratings Supplement Downloads Page.
John, we’ve been making PDFs of the bi-monthly supplements available for download on the supplement files page (Members Only or TD/A) since April.
Howver, they don’t print out quite the same as the pages in a printed Supplement unless you have the Bell Centennial font package installed.
Earlier this week, while working on generating PDFs as proof copies of print TLAs (you will be able to go online and enter your TLA, generate a proof as a PDF file and pay for the TLA insertions VERY SOON), I learned that Adobe permits embedding fonts in a PDF under their license terms, so I’m going to change the program that generates the rating supplement pages to embed those fonts.
Update: That program has been changed and the October 2006 supplement PDF on the website now has the Bell Centennial fonts embedded in it, so when you print that file it should look the same as the printed pages in a supplement.
But while you were mailing hard-copy rating supplements, this was not particularly important. Now this will be the only way to get a true bimonthly list, and I want to be sure it will continue.