Evolution of a Go program

About the development of Moyo Go Studio, software to (help) play the Oriental game of Go. Go is a two-player zero-sum game of perfect information. It is considered much harder than Chess. Currently, in spite of enormous effort expended, no computer program plays it above the level of a beginner.

Tuesday, November 21, 2006

PowerPoint, Excel, XML and DOC

My current report generator is lousy in producing editing-friendly RTF/DOC, so I evaluated five more PDF2RTF solutions, none of which satsified my demands bar one, and that one had two showstopper bugs. It's also the most expensive but I am very impressed.

I notified them of the bugs and suggested they were trivial to fix and they mailed back within 24 hours with their acknowledgement! They would have a fix ready the next day or so, which means I'm now ordering their software for embedding into Moyo Go, as soon as as I have their confirmation that redistribution as an embedded app is OK.

Their solution also properly supports Excel and Powerpoint and even XML for maximum flexibility, so this would mean that Moyo Go will be able to make powerpoint presentations and Excel spreadsheets and produce Word documents that are compatible with OpenOffice. Thirteen major formats is a good start ;-)

So it will be DOC, EMF, EPS, HTML, PDF, PNG, PPT, PS, RTF, SVG, TIFF, XLS and XML. And not half-assed, shitty-rendered, nasty-looking, often-crashing either, but stable, fast, high-quality, exactly-what-you-would-expect output, tried and tested and every single output format looking identical to the other, including page margins, CJK fonts and images. This is another reason why it's taking so long. And - I want to bet you a free copy that AGA will not publish an independent review of this rather spectacular publishing module, or, if they do, they'll crush it into the ground :-)

And yes, the HTML publishing will FTP your games straight to your website!