Re: experimental support for SPV files now available

[Ben Pfaff]

On Mon, Nov 26, 2018 at 08:58:47PM -0800, Ben Pfaff wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 26, 2018 at 03:30:44PM -0600, Alan Mead wrote:
> > Ben,
> > 
> > This is fantastic! I'm about to send you some feedback on three SPV
> > files. The message is about 2.7MB. I'm pretty sure I cannot send such an
> > email to the list.
> > 
> > If it doesn't arrive, let me know how I can get you send it.
> > 
> > Short description: Works pretty well! Which is amazing! But: Images
> > don't appear. Page numbers would be nice. The formatting could be
> > improved which is mainly an issue because of how it would print. SPSS's
> > export allows including non-visible nodes out output (all those "Notes"
> > tables). Editing the SPV caused some chaos.
> 
> Thanks for all the feedback!
> 
> When you say "images", do you mean charts?  SPV files can include .png
> files and other kinds of images pasted in from elsewhere.  It would not
> be difficult to support them but they are rare in practice (I only found
> a few in my corpus) and I haven't done the work yet.  Charts, on the
> other hand, are pretty common but also a lot of work and I haven't
> really started on them at all yet.
> 
> I hadn't looked at page numbers yet.  They are a fairly small
> incremental amount of work.  I'll put them on my to-do list.
> 
> I agree that the formatting is poor in places.  I'm planning to work on
> this too.
> 
> The pspp-output utility underlying the web service supports including
> hidden objects like Notes, but I hadn't enabled it by default on the web
> service.  I've now added an option for this on the webpage.  (Also the
> webpage now allows one to request CSV or plain text output.  Nifty?)
> 
> The chaos caused by editing was easily fixable, once I had an example of
> the problem, and I fixed it.

Page numbers work now--all page headers and footers, actually.  Some SPV
files don't have any configuration for page headers and footers, so they
won't show up for those, but they should work in the ones that do.