After many mistakes and dead ends, I have finally completed the newest version of the baseball scorecard. I made a serious error in my approach which led to many problems: I mistook a high-quality picture on screen for my end product, which was actually a high-quality printout. I had a nice SVG file to look at six weeks ago, but getting it on paper was a great trial. First I tried using the Adobe SVG plug-in in Windows, but that produced a cut-off, distorted page. Then I tried converting it to a bitmap using the batik java tools, but Kinko's choked on the large 600dpi .tif files.

Next I bought a new Samsung Scx-4100 laser printer, which is pleasingly less-than-catastrophic linux support. However, linux printing remains nightmarish to the point where I consider any successful print job, even of a spreadsheet or web page, a blessed event, and the idea (or reality) of printing high-resolution bitmap graphics from linux would require entirely too many dark rituals.

So, I rebooted my laptop to Windows and plugged in the printer. First I tried printing the SVG directly, but the Adobe plugin and two other SVG tools each producing charmingly different, charmingly wrong output. One changed the fonts, one ignored the circles and diamonds, one just shrunk everything. Next, I tried printing the high-quality, 10mb bitmap from Paint, to no avail. Finally I found a free graphics viewer/printer called Brava! which could load and print 600dpi pages acceptably well.

So the process to create my scorecard is:

1. Edit the source SVG files in emacs and preview with batik squiggle.
2. Run this batch script to change them to tif files:

   #!/bin/sh
   for file in baseball_scorecard baseball_scorecard_back
     do
     java -Xmx800m -jar /usr/local/batik-1.6/batik-rasterizer.jar -dpi 600 -m image
   /tiff $file.svg
     convert -compress rle $file.tif $file.tif
   done
   

3. Transfer files to windows
4. Load files in Brava!
5. Print one side
6. Reload the paper upside-down and backwards
7. Print the other side

As a result of this, I had to use the mark 2 scorecard to record Rickey Henderson's debut with the independent Class A San Diego Surf Dawgs (sic). At age 46, Ricky didn't get invited to any major-league training camps this spring, probably because of a batting average barely above the Mendoza line. Thanks to his ability to walk, his on-base percentage is still a perfectly competitive .320 to .360, so I think he's not as washed up as traditional stats make him appear, but he's certainly not a player for the future. Still, he sold out the (San Diego State University) ballpark, drew a walk, hit a towering double to deep center, and stole a base, so no complaints from me.

Now that I have the new model, I'm eager to get to another game and try it out. But probably not a Dawgs' game.