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+--- Thread: Offline Parts Catalogue (/thread-5650.html)
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Re: Offline Parts Catalogue - Travis Cobbs - 2012-12-23
I use a fixed maximum size, and most parts that are known to be too big (baseplates) get scaled differently than the rest (half scale). A few parts still get cropped by a little bit. Unfortunately, after I made my formatting changes, Libre/OpenOffice could no longer open the big file. They could happily open the smaller categorized files, but not the one file that contained all parts. I'm investigating to see if I can use a master document that contains all the categorized files. I think I can make that work, in which case there will be a separate table for each category.
Re: Offline Parts Catalogue - Travis Cobbs - 2012-12-23
I discovered that Dropbox allows you to publicly share specific files via a link that will work for anyone, including non Dropbox users, so here is a link to the 34MB PDF I produced:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/77319025/LDrawOfflinePartsCatalog.pdf
The above PDF includes keywords, so is nicely searchable.
Let me know what you think.
Re: Offline Parts Catalogue - Michael Heidemann - 2012-12-23
Looks quite good, but still needs a little improvement.
Some text for the pictures is not on the same page than the picture.
If you can not solve this issue it might be a good idea to add horizontal lines after each part. So you can better identify the rows.
Re: Offline Parts Catalogue - Philippe Hurbain - 2012-12-23
Looks great overall... imho, the words "Description", "File" and "Keywords" bring little and eat-up valuable space. What about using color/character coding instead (eg. light gray background for description, italic characters for keywords)?
Like Mike, I think that a thin line below each item would be great.
Otherwise...
- Image for parts 57909, 30163, 776p15, 2586ph1, 30016, 3049a, 3229ac01, 4180a , 3483 and 48169 are truncated
- Perhaps ~ parts should be removed? It seem that overall they are removed, but some crept in (seems this occurs when these parts have a category)
- Mursteen bricks look weird (missing slotm primitive?)
- Wrong decoration subfile for 4346p01, 80394?
- Sometimes the 1st character of keywords is missing (eg. 3837) though it's there in part file. Seems to happen when 1st keyword begins with letter 't'.
Re: Offline Parts Catalogue - Michael Heidemann - 2012-12-23
Yes, different coloring sounds good.
Re: Offline Parts Catalogue - Chris Dee - 2012-12-23
Would it be sensible to include a standard header on each page , to say what this is - "The Offline Illustrated LDraw Parts Catalog", and some copyright notice in a standard footer?
Re: Offline Parts Catalogue - Travis Cobbs - 2012-12-24
Unfortunately, I have reached my limits on getting it to look nice. I may change "Description" to instead say "Name", which will decrease the amount of space taken up by that column, and I think I'll also make the font for those labels one size smaller. However, my original HTML has very carefully setup borders (which IMHO look quite nice), but unfortunately, OpenOffice ignores them. (MS Word shows too many borders, including a border between the label column and the other main text column, which looks bad also.)
If anyone else wants to take a stab at generating a better PDF file from my HTML originals, I'll see about getting the HTML posted. I have a few tweaks I want to make, but I'm not going to get rid of the labels, and I'm not going to be capable of adding lines.
Re: Offline Parts Catalogue - Travis Cobbs - 2012-12-24
I checked my HTML, and the image for 57909 is fine there, so it appears to be due to an OpenOffice.org bug. I'm going to assume that the other truncated images are also OoO bugs. I guess we'll see when I do it again if the bug is repeatable, but there's not really anything I think I can do about it.
It seems to me that the ~ parts are necessary for people who want to be able to pose the composite part in a different way than the standard way. For example, if you want the handle on 73037 to be on the top instead of the bottom, you need the ~ parts.
The Mursten problem is my fault. I ran my script against a fresh complete.zip, but forgot to set the LDraw dir on the command line to use that directory to find its primitives, and I didn't have the latest update installed in my actual LDraw dir. That will be corrected the next time I run my script.
4346p01 and 80394 are both broken in the current latest official parts release. What you see in the catalog is what users see in models. I believe that there are corrected versions of both on the tracker.
I'll have to investigate to see if I can figure out why the first character of some keywords is missing. It's definitely a problem with my script, but I can't figure out what would cause it to do that, but only sometimes.
Re: Offline Parts Catalogue - Travis Cobbs - 2012-12-24
My plan (conceived after posting the link) was to add a cover page to the very beginning of the document that gives that kind of information, as well as naming the document, along with including the official LDraw.org logo. If you really think it's necessary to add a footer with copyright info to every page, I'm pretty sure I can do that fairly easily, but I'd prefer to have all that kind of information be confined to a cover page.
Re: Offline Parts Catalogue - Philippe Hurbain - 2012-12-24
Quote:It seems to me that the ~ parts are necessary for people who want to be able to pose the composite part in a different way than the standard way. For example, if you want the handle on 73037 to be on the top instead of the bottom, you need the ~ parts.Actually that's more a sorting issue, since you have ~ and _ parts appear grouped at the end of document. To me it seems that a ~xxx part having a yyy category appears with other untilded parts in category yyy while it should be in ~yyy section.
Re: Offline Parts Catalogue - Travis Cobbs - 2012-12-24
I'm not entirely sure I understand what you're saying. Could you give me an example?
Re: Offline Parts Catalogue - Philippe Hurbain - 2012-12-24
- Parts 30188, 30189, 30189c01 are ~Bike xxxxx, but have a car category. Thus they are sorted with other "cars" in cars section, instead they should be in ~Car section with parts 30242, 30278...
- Part 5051, ~Boat Bow 12 x 12 x 5 & 1/3 Hull Inside has (wrongly) a boat category. It is sorted with other boat parts, while it should be in ~Boat section. Same thing for 2556, 2559, 6052 and a few other.
- Part 80298, _Minifig Shield Triangular with Black Falcon Pattern is in "minifig accessory" section, while it should be in a "_minifig accessory" section near the end of catalog.
Re: Offline Parts Catalogue - Michael Heidemann - 2012-12-24
I like to step in here.
We have decided to categorize the parts. Mainly on the base of the first word, or on special line CATEGORY. The prefixes ~ or _ are never ment to be in any case a category like the first word. They are just indicating other attibutes of the files. So please do not mix that!
Re: Offline Parts Catalogue - Travis Cobbs - 2012-12-24
I agree. I will remove the ~ and _ from the category names, so that those don't produce new categories, but instead push all parts with that prefix to the end of the category's list of parts.
Re: Offline Parts Catalogue - Don Heyse - 2013-04-20
I've been away for a while, so this is a bit late. I didn't see any mention here of the old "printable parts catalog". Maybe it's still useful?
http://www.nightsolo.net/lego/