For The Love Of Port

Many users of the forum will be familiar with Julian's free software to make placemats for tastings. Some users may feel they are not suitably qualified to use the software - if this is you, then a wizard has been developed which allows you to create the postscript file necessary for creating placemats and associated pages.

The wizard can be found here.

Should you encounter any issues using the wizard, please PM me and I will help if I can.

I expect there will be bugs and issues with the wizard - please do let me know if you encounter a problem and I will try to fix it. I have so far only tested the wizard using Internet Explorer. If users of Safari, Firefox, Chrome or other browsers should spot anything odd, please let me know.

This is a first effort to create the wizard, and some enhancements are likely. One enhancement planned will be a facility to save or load parameters from a file, which means that placemat data would not need to be rekeyed each time.

Excellent. Though I've gotten decent at the old way finally. LOL. If it makes it quicker and easier than

Wonderful & Many Thanks----did not work in Firefox but just fine in Windows Explorer. Fun to play with and understand the formats. Will be using this Friday!

John M. wrote:Wonderful & Many Thanks----did not work in Firefox but just fine in Windows Explorer. Fun to play with and understand the formats. Will be using this Friday!

Excellent. First customer a happy customer

Is there a way to rotate the place mats 90 degrees to the right, so you can place the A4 horizontal in front of the participants. Like this?

Thomas V wrote:Is there a way to rotate the place mats 90 degrees to the right, so you can place the A4 horizontal in front of the participants. Like this?

Indeed there is. The wizard is intentionally simplified and does not offer the ability to tweak all parameters. What you can now do however is open the .ps file, search for this line:

/Orientation {PaperType /A4 eq PaperType /USL eq or {/Portrait} {/Landscape} ifelse} def % /Landscape /Portrait

and change it to:
/Orientation /Landscape def

Good luck!

Cool. I will try it out.

Great stuff

P.s. it would be nice with a little red asterisk by required fields. That way you make sure to fill out the form properly on the first go.

One other thing I forgot to mention. I have yet to sort out accepting accented characters like é or ö. Stay tuned...coming soon.

Thomas V wrote:P.s. it would be nice with a little red asterisk by required fields. That way you make sure to fill out the form properly on the first go.

Good spot - will build into the next release! Thank you.

Thomas V wrote:Is there a way to rotate the place mats 90 degrees to the right, so you can place the A4 horizontal in front of the participants. Like this?

Julian's full software is available from www.jdawiseman.com/placemat. Mike's wizard is intended to provide a simple front end to the software to make basic placemats easier to generate.

Note that the default orientation for A4 and US 8.5 x 11 is portrait, but larger sizes (US Legal, 11 x 17) default to landscape.

A small upgrade has been made to the wizard. It is now possible to save and reload parameter files.

Been using this wizard for my next tasting. Some observations

Would be nice to be able to chose landscape layout from the web form.

An option of Producer + Year or Abbrev + Year would be nice for the cicleArray. The initial in the circleArray does not make much sense for me.

Some spacing between the location and time down to the next line with the first house on the taste note page would be great.

Thanks for this great tool. This is what I am going to be using for our club tasting tonight.

Have a great weekend.

Thomas V wrote:Been using this wizard for my next tasting. Some observations

Would be nice to be able to chose landscape layout from the web form.

An option of Producer + Year or Abbrev + Year would be nice for the cicleArray. The initial in the circleArray does not make much sense for me.

Some spacing between the location and time down to the next line with the first house on the taste note page would be great.

Wizard now offers the portrait/landscape option for page orientation.

Producer+Year and Abbrev+Year will be added sometime later.

Julian will need to respond to the point about the spacing on the TN pages - I suspect the spacing is driven by a desire to leave as much space as possible for notes!

Mike Meehan wrote:Wizard now offers the portrait/landscape option for page orientation.

Adding this has caused me to realise that adding additional functionality may create backward compatibility issues with parameter files created prior to the additional enhancement. In this case, older parameter files will simply load with the default of portrait for page orientation.

Thomas V wrote:Some spacing between the location and time down to the next line with the first house on the taste note page would be great.

Mike Meehan wrote:Julian will need to respond to the point about the spacing on the TN pages - I suspect the spacing is driven by a desire to leave as much space as possible for notes!

Mike’s suspicion is entirely correct.

Have you tried playing with TastingNotesColumnHeadingsFontSize?

Perhaps you are requesting an enhancement of the PostScript software, rather than of the wizard. Hmm. I’m not convinced that there’s value in adding the likes of TastingNotesColumnHeadingsExtraSpaceAbove and TastingNotesColumnHeadingsExtraSpaceBelow. And if those are added, for consistency there should be DecantingNotesColumnHeadingsExtraSpaceAbove and DecantingNotesColumnHeadingsExtraSpaceBelow, and perhaps for the vote-recorder and maybe cork-display pages. I’m not convinced that there’s value — if you disagree, please say why.

General point: there are over four hundred parameters and settings. Nobody, not even me, uses all of them. I suspect that few non-me placemat-makers change two dozen of them. So if there’s an ‘enhancement’ that even I won’t use, I suspect that nobody will.

But cogent disagreement welcomed.

Folks, a bit of a webserver disaster has overwritten the wizard code with an older version. I will endeavour to get the wizard restored as soon as possible.

Mike Meehan wrote:Folks, a bit of a webserver disaster has overwritten the wizard code with an older version. I will endeavour to get the wizard restored as soon as possible.

All back up and running now. In addition, accented characters are now available.

Been using the wizard for a couple of years now.

Doing a placemat for at tasting Friday. But when I want to convert the ps to pdf I keep getting a conversion error. Seems something changed?