Another item regarding TravellerMap....specifically "https://travellermap.com/make/poster"

[Commander Truestar]

Hi All,
I only noticed that as I was designing a new spread map for items from Capital(Emperor's Holiday and Birthday lists)

I was using the Spinward Marches map I created using poster...
And, though I had the two below lines included in my "Sector Data", the solar systems didn't appear on the map after multiple tries:

Zila 2908 E25672C·7 Ag A 701 Im M6 V M3 D
Jesedipere 3001 C775300·7 Ni A 411 Im F4 V

I ended up adding them in with photoshop, but wonder what my next step is regarding this?

I have checked the data, over all, in the "Sector Data" portion of the data I use
And, literally, everything else works...so, I am certain I am doing something wrong.

I am just at a loss for what?

 

[Garnfellow]

Did you run it through the lint tool, found under Custom Data? The site can be a little finicky and even a small error can cause it to skip some data. The stellar data for Zila should probably be M6 V D, but I don't think that's what's causing your problem.

 

[Spinward Flow]

While I was engaging in my LBB S3 Spinward Marches (re)mapping in 1105 project, I would occasionally run into something similar when editing data in files. A lot of the time, the poster maker API would throw errors at me, specifying where the fault was (very helpful!) ... but not always. One of the factors I needed to be constantly vigilant against was EXACT character spacing. Even a single +/- 1 space could throw off the character count and muck up the execution.

A couple times, I encountered the "hey, where did the world go?" problem like you're describing. The most common reason for the disappearance would be that I'd inserted some snippet of data in there that didn't match the coding expected.

Zila 2908 E25672C·7 Ag A 701 Im M6 V M3 D
Jesedipere 3001 C775300·7 Ni A 411 Im F4 V

I believe the proper coding is ImDd for "Imperial, Domain Deneb" not just Im like I'm seeing in the data samples you provided.



I finally figured that one out after having a terrible time trying to modify the colors for borders around Zhodani controlled space (the coding was using Zh instead of ZhIN in multiple places). I had to go through and modify a LOT of the foundational raw coding data from the Spinward Marches map saved on the site into compliance with a more compliant standardization in order to make my own Spinward Marches 1105 map (which I then edited the image of even further to implement my new Trade Coded color and naming scheme onto the sector image poster).

 

[inexorabletash]

From TravellerMap.com/tools/lintsec:

Hint: Parsing as: SEC (Legacy)
Warning: Ignoring non-UWP data, line 1: Zila 2908 E25672C·7 Ag A 701 Im M6 V M3 D
Warning: Ignoring non-UWP data, line 2: Jesedipere 3001 C775300·7 Ni A 411 Im F4 V
0 errors, 2 warnings.

So this simply isn't being recognized as valid data. When you get an error like this, and you just can't figure out what's wrong, try starting with a line that's valid and mutate it slowly into matching the non-valid line. Eventually you'll spot the problem.

In this case, it's because you are not using a - character in the UWP but a · character instead.

 

[Spinward Flow]

In this case, it's because you are not using a - character in the UWP but a · character instead.

Also this.

 

[Kakistocrat]

Zila 2908 E25672C·7 Ag A 701 Im M6 V M3 D
Jesedipere 3001 C775300·7 Ni A 411 Im F4 V

As inexorabletash noted, these two UWPs have middle dot characters [“·”] rather than hyphen-minus characters [“-”].

For these two worlds in particular, I don’t know if the Traveller Map lint tool would also catch these circumstances, but:

• for Zila, a population of 2 can’t add 2D and subtract 7 to result in a government of C (12); the highest government that could be generated by the RAW would be 2 + 12 − 7 = 7 (although its UWP was originally printed with a government of C);
• for Jesedipere, if you use Merchant Prince, a population of 3 should also have the Lo (Low population) trade classification.

Also, Jesedipere shouldn’t have an A (Amber travel zone).

 

[ShawnDriscoll]

I don't think the raw data from a sector can be imported back into the booklet generator without issues. Can someone else check this?

 

[Spinward Flow]

Can someone else check this?

I just copied the Sector and Metadata files I used to generate my version of the Spinward Marches in 1105 into the Booklet Maker successfully, twice (color on white, color on black).

The booklet maker and the poster maker run the same algorithms, they just yield a different presentation for the information. I suspect that if you have a problem generating output with either that there is an error in coding somewhere in your Sector and/or Metadata files.

 

[Commander Truestar]

inexorabletash said:
In this case, it's because you are not using a - character in the UWP but a · character instead.

Also this.

Interesting
In my notepad version, I have dashes, but I note that when I copy that data into the Sector data window, the dashes change to the · character for these systems.
And, oddly enough, it is a consistent behavior, so I need to check why this happens with the character set I use?

 

[kilemall]

Interesting
In my notepad version, I have dashes, but I note that when I copy that data into the Sector data window, the dashes change to the · character for these systems.
And, oddly enough, it is a consistent behavior, so I need to check why this happens with the character set I use?

Classically that happens when translating from one character set to another, typically to or from ASCII. Any kind of nation specific set can do it- I professionally wrestled with EBCDIC and BINARY file issues to/from Unix, so could be a Linux thing I haven’t had to deal with.

 

[Spinward Flow]

so I need to check why this happens with the character set I use?

If possible, FORCE your text editor to operate in Plain Text (.txt) and not in Rich Text (.rtf) when editing coding for use in Travellermap. If you copy/paste from Plain Text, you should not be running into these kinds of formatting issues.

 

[Kakistocrat]

In my notepad version, I have dashes, but I note that when I copy that data into the Sector data window, the dashes change to the · character for these systems.
And, oddly enough, it is a consistent behavior, so I need to check why this happens with the character set I use?

The usual “-” character (“hyphen-minus”), on the key to the right of the “0” (zero) key on English language keyboards with “QWERTY” layouts, is an ASCII character, which is the one that is used in UWPs. There are separate dash characters (e.g. “–” [en dash], “—” [em dash]) and dedicated hyphen-only (“‐”) and minus-only (“−”) characters, but all of those are non-ASCII characters. (Many character sets have ASCII as a proper subset.)

If it’s only the two UWPs for Zila and Jesedipere that are undergoing the change to “·” when pasting them into the Sector data window, and all other UWPs have their “-” character preserved when pasting into that window, then that would suggest that these two UWPs — for whatever reason — do not have the ASCII “-” character in your source text file. If this is the case, you could try copying the “-” character from a different UWP in your source text file into Zila’s and Jesedipere’s UWPs, save the text file, and try pasting the two UWPs into that window again to see if that resolves the issue.

 

[Commander Truestar]

If possible, FORCE your text editor to operate in Plain Text (.txt) and not in Rich Text (.rtf) when editing coding for use in Travellermap. If you copy/paste from Plain Text, you should not be running into these kinds of formatting issues.

Actually,
I am using Plain Text. (TXT)
I've spent far too much time using OS dependent character sets.

I get to play with MacOS, Linux, Various flavors of Unix(gotta love HPUX) and MonDoze...

 

[whartung]

It's not a Plain Text problem per se. Modern "plain text" is UTF-8. Which covers a lot of symbols and such. This is different from ASCII. It's an encoding issue as much as anything.

 

[coliver988]

Actually,
I am using Plain Text. (TXT)
I've spent far too much time using OS dependent character sets.

I get to play with MacOS, Linux, Various flavors of Unix(gotta love HPUX) and MonDoze...

well, just because your extension is .TXT does not necessarily mean your editor is using it as "plain text". NotePad++ on Windows and Sublime on the Mac are what I use when I want to ensure it is plain text. Other editors are often actually using Rich Text Format. You cannot trust an extension!

I've had to use hex viewers to validate text sometimes (ahh, those fun hidden characters that are there but do not show up on many editors). And like several others, I've had to deal with ASCII, EBCDIC, UTF in a few flavors and a lot of binary encoding over the years. So you sort of get used to knowing what to look for when something breaks but looks right. You have to look at the raw hexadecimal encoding sometimes! Even done that w/PDF files on occasion to verify certain things.

 

[Spinward Flow]

Sublime on the Mac are what I use when I want to ensure it is plain text.

I use the TextEdit app on my Mac, which has a Plain Text format option in the menu ... which I use somewhat routinely to clean up text inputs for a variety of reasons.

Hadn't heard of Sublime before.

 

[whartung]

If all else fails on the Mac, fall into vi. About as plain as you can get, much fewer shenanigans.

 

[coliver988]

If all else fails on the Mac, fall into vi. About as plain as you can get, much fewer shenanigans.

Been using vi since college and always install it on Windows. Used to work the same language on both Unix/Linux machines and Windows so wanted to keep things simple in terms of muscle memory. And I install vim emulators on all my programming environments (Visual Studio, Visual Code, Atom, etc). It is easier for me to edit that way. Not that I am an expert in vi but I know enough to prefer it over most other editors.

Anyway - I've used plain text editors that only do plain test to copy formatted stuff into and then copy back out to remove formatting. Things you pick up when writing software for a few decades...

 

[coliver988]

I use the TextEdit app on my Mac, which has a Plain Text format option in the menu ... which I use somewhat routinely to clean up text inputs for a variety of reasons.

Hadn't heard of Sublime before.

I wanted something similar to Notepad++ on the Mac. Sublime is close enough, and each have additional tools and plugins. Used to do a lot of XML & JSON stuff, and you can get linters and things to validate & nicely format the text. And I don't have to worry about making sure I set it to plain text only as that is the only option. I've had to debug so much stuff when people copy/paste things into software and do not know they have copied in hidden characters and stuff that makes for problems later on.

edit: such as that odd dash that started this whole thread. See - I tied it back to the original post!

 

[Kakistocrat]

If all else fails on the Mac, fall into vi. About as plain as you can get, much fewer shenanigans.

Been using vi since college and always install it on Windows.

Same here, but I install it (well, typically vim now, along with a customized .vimrc file in my home directory) anywhere that it’s missing. One advantage of vim over vi is its Unicode-specific commands, two of which I use often: g8 shows the UTF-8 octets that comprise the character underneath the cursor, and ga shows the character’s Unicode code point in decimal, hexadecimal, and octal (and if it has an assigned character entry digraph, what those characters are). For example, when the cursor is positioned over a Unicode en dash, g8 would show e2 80 93 in the status line, and ga would show <–> 8211, Hex 2013, Oct 20023, Digr -N there (so with that digraph, an en dash could be entered using ^K followed by - N).