Tables in Plucker.

[ipl]

Hi All,

I use plucker regularly with a few websites, but anything that's table-based doesn't seem to come out very well. As an example, here's a page showing the weather where I live, but on my Palm it comes out more like this:

Metcheck Forecast
Bristol Forecast
Day
Hr
Tmp
Pcp
Cld
Dir
Spd
Wthr
Mo
15Z
10
0
100
...etc.

Most (or possibly all) of the table data is there, but not arranged as it should be.

I've scoured the web (at least somewhat) and come up with the following things, which I believe to be true:

1. Plucker (the viewer) does support tables.

2. Some of the many Plucker distillers also support tables, some don't.
2a. The Python & C++ distillers support tables, Plucker Desktop, JPluck & Sunrise don't.

I think I've downloaded the Python distiller, (I have a file called plucker_parser-1.8.zip . When I extracted it I got a directory structure called plucker-1.8\PyPlucker , and a whole bunch of files with the extension .py)

I also think I've installed Python (I downloaded something called python-2.4.3.msi and did something with it; I now have a folder on my windows start menu called Python 2.4 with a bunch of things under it)

So, can anyone tell me how I can view table-based webpages in Plucker? What should I do with all this python stuff? Or is there a better / easier way?

In case it's useful info, I'm currently using Plucker 1.8 on a Palm Tungsten E2, and Sunrise XP under Win XP.

Thanks in advance for any help.....

Cheers,

Ian.

P.S. In my web-trawling I've seen more than a few requests for this kind of thing, so if I ever get to the bottom of it, I'd be happy to write it up for inclusion in some documentation.

[Laurens]

Plucker Desktop uses the Python distiller, though it may be bundled with an older version of the distiller that doesn't support tables.

[ipl]

Ah, one more snippet of info I negelcted to mention. The Python distiller apparently needs to be passed a --tables argument on its command line in order to do anything with tables. If there's anywhere to specify these parameters in Plucker Desktop, I couldn't find it :-( Perhaps I'll re-install it and have another look....

Ian.

[ipl]

Assuming anyone else is interested, here's what I've found:

Plucker Desktop doesn't appear to let you set the command-line parameters, but does have a tick box for 'use enhanced table support (currently experimental)' (On the 'formatting' tab of the 'configure channel' dialog). I think this may cause spider.py to be called with the --tables argument.

If you tick this box and sync with a page with a very simple table e.g.

<TABLE>
<TR>
<TD>A1
<TD>A2
<TD>A3
<TR>
<TD>B1
<TD>B2
<TD>B3
<TR>
<TD>C1
<TD>C2
<TD>C3
</TABLE>

Then the table appears in the page just as you'd expect. If you have a more complicated table (or perhaps just a larger one) then the table doesn't appear on the page at all, but there's a very small icon (which I missed completely for a long time) which you can tap on. This takes you out of the main plucker viewer and into a separate 'table viewer' which has the table laid out nicely, and will scroll 2-dimensionally to allow you to see all of it. The icon, incidentally, looks like a 3x2 array of boxes. A bit like this in fact:
[][][]
[][][]
Only smaller, and not made out of ASCII square brackets.....

If the page has nested tables (as the link in my first post does) then you'll have to do the tap-on-the-icon thing twice (and the second time I seem to have to tap somewhere below the icon, not actually on it.....).

I spent a while hacking around on the command line so I could explicitly add the --tables and got similar results.

Hope this may help someone, let me know if you learn any more....

Ian.