41CL image identifiers

[Jurgen Keller]

As I can't remember the image identifiers of the 400+ modules the 41CL provides, I often have to look them up in the manual. Today I decided to implement a faster way for searching image identifiers. The ad hoc plan was to convert the table in the manual into a CSV file and somehow create a searchable HTML page out of it.

Extracting tables from PDF files can be a nightmare. Luckily there is a tool that does the job: Tabula. So after a few minutes I got the CSV file. After some unsuccessful attempts I also found a way to create a searchable HTML file out of it. The key was another tool: CSVtoTable.

The image identifier table in the 41CL manual uses colors to indicate on which hardware version the image is available. I decided to add another column to the CSV file that contains this information (HW). That was a bit of work and hopefully I didn't do any mistakes. The last problem was that I also wanted to search by group name. As CSVToTable always searches the full table, I simply added a dollar sign in front of the group names. Now, searching for, e.g., $GAM provides all the game related images.

I've published the HTML page on my web site, see:
41CL Image Identifiers

So the only problem left is to keep the table up to date.