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Resources

We offer here resources which are used in this parish and may be useful to others.
  1. Calendar and rota maker
  2. Text formatter
Liturgical calendar and rota maker
 ROTA.BAS is a small program written in QBASIC which produces a user-selected number of rotas (eg for readings, intercessions, after-service coffee duty, etc) based on the liturgical calendar for the selected year.

Features of the output include The program is configured using an INI file, which includes You need to download both the program (supplied as plain text) and the INI file (also plain text). Right-click on the links and choose Save file as... or Save link as... to do this. The ini file contains comments on its structure and usage; if you have problems please email the developer. Please note: the program is QBASIC source-code and is designed for DOS-based systems. It’s possible that the code will run as-is in other BASIC interpreters, but this is not guaranteed.

QBASIC Program icon
rota.bas (13kb)
INI file icon
rota.ini (1k)
*NB: The program does not handle the anomalous placing by CW of the Baptism of Christ on a weekday when the Epiphany falls on a Sunday (eg in 2002). The Baptism of Christ is always placed on the Sunday after Epiphany, and Sundays are numbered as Sundays after Epiphany. (In most years this is the same as Sundays of Epiphany)

Text formatter
 A small (31k) executable program for DOS which formats verse-numbered Bible-software output to Windows text, including smart quotes, printer’s dashes, paragraphs, etc. The program reads a user-specified file and outputs the text to another user-specified file for import into Windows publishing/word-processing software. The QBASIC source code is currently being made ready for publication.

The program is designed for the output produced by Lion Publishing software. This has a specific format, as in the following example:

Luke 1:57
57:The time came for Elizabeth to give birth, and she bore a son.

58:Her neighbours and relatives heard that the Lord had shown his great mercy to her, and they rejoiced with her.
59:On the eighth day they came to circumcise the child, and they were going to name him Zechariah after his father.
60:But his mother said, "No; he is to be called John."
61:They said to her, "None of your relatives has this name."
62:Then they began motioning to his father to find out what name he wanted to give him.
63:He asked for a writing-tablet and wrote, "His name is John."
Any file which conforms to this layout will work. The first line (the reference) is ignored; the third line should be empty; and every line of text starts with [a figure followed by] a colon, which is ignored. The output for the example quoted is: The time came for Elizabeth to give birth, and she bore a son. Her neighbours and relatives heard that the Lord had shown his great mercy to her, and they rejoiced with her. On the eighth day they came to circumcise the child, and they were going to name him Zechariah after his father. But his mother said, “No; he is to be called John.”
       They said to her, “None of your relatives has this name.”
       Then they began motioning to his father to find out what name he wanted to give him. He asked for a writing-tablet and wrote, “His name is John.” It’s possible that additional paragraphs may need to be inserted into the text, but most formatting is handled automatically. For quotations and reported speech the program assumes the convention that the first quotation marks are double, and reported speech is in single quotes.

EXE file icon
textconv.exe (31k)

This file was scanned prior to uploading to the web, against Norton Anti-Virus definitions of 17 June 2001, and reported virus-free. You should satisfy yourself of its status before running it on your system.

The output is Windows-specific because of the Windows character set. For example, a printer’s single apostrophe (’) is Windows character number 146: in DOS character 146 is the Æ (AE) ligature; on the Mac it’s different again.

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