Notices

Just headsup - I am in the middle of upgrading my development pc so that's why I have been and probably will be for some time a little bit offline. I'll let you know once I have everything setup again.

added NOS-information to the wiki and fixed missing prediction information (next/previous buttons) while i was at it.

Dexter 0.2-3 is making it's way to Extras-devel right now. The biggest changes are in the markup for the config file. If you update to this version, you need to go and edit your existing config file or it probably won't work!

• [x:subpage] replaces padding! x is the amount of padding wanted and therefore it can vary from place to place, unlike padding setting. Hopefully this will make a lot more sites compatible. [2:subpage] for subpage 2 would return 02 and so on.

• subImageUrl to make it possible to use those sites that have different url for main pages and subpages. This is optional - if not set, imageUrl will be used. If subImageUrl doesn't work, it will fallback to imageUrl (thanks benny).

• startPage setting to set which page is loaded at first. 100 is the default usually, but for example nelonen was missing it and starting from 101 so I decided it would be good to be able to set it as well. Sometimes the user might also want to look for sports only and set the default to be 201 or something.

• [topicpage] should now work

• .. probably something small that I don't even remember right now!

I have tested finnish sites (Yle, Mtv3, Nelonen) and they all seem to work now 100%. I also tried quickly RAI to see if the subImageUrl worked and it did. Now it's your turn to go ahead and try all the sites and report them to the Wiki. If problems, report back here.

One small thing I noticed - when making those prediction regular expressions, be careful to escape with \ characters that need to be escaped for regular expressions. I had one prediction not working and the problem turned out to be that question mark (?) is one of them. Instead of ? I put \\? and it started working.

I am hoping we have these configurations modifications soon done so I can start working on some feature enhancements.

Cool. Edited NOS and added ORF (Austria), which works fine now. Very happy!

I think that was a misunderstanding - at least for Swiss Teletext, it should be just the other way round. See, I have:

imageUrl=http://www.teletext.ch/pics/SF1/[page]-00.gif
subImageUrl=http://www.teletext.ch/pics/SF1/[page]-[2:subpage].gif

This is the usual pattern. You go to [page]-00.gif, which doesn't have a sub-page. Only sometimes there is no [page]-00.gif. The next thing you'd have to do then is check for [page]-01.gif - because that's either the first sub-page or the page is "irregular".

So with the current setting ("If subImageUrl doesn't work, it will fallback to imageUrl"), I never get Dexter to try [page]-01.gif if [page]-00.gif fails. It should be "If imageUrl doesn't work, it will fallback to subImageUrl for sub-page #1".

I thought for a moment that I could simply ignore all this and switch the lines like this:

subImageUrl=http://www.teletext.ch/pics/SF1/[page]-00.gif
imageUrl=http://www.teletext.ch/pics/SF1/[page]-[2:subpage].gif

That wouldn't work though, would it? You couldn't go to sub.page -02, -03... etc then, if I understood it correctly.

Anyway, an updated config how SF1 could maybe work is on the talk page now.


EDIT: ... just thought: maybe it's a good idea to not change the direction of the fallback, but just add the other fallback. so if imageUrl fails, you try subImageUrl - and when subImageUrl fails, you try imageUrl. - Just to make it more error tolerant. That wouldn't break anything, right?

The page 100 has existed in the past. Nelonen teksti tv has many major problem when we are talking about sync between content and the images so it didn't surprise me that there is no page 100 available.

Thank you very much! Dexter now loads correctly the RAI text-tv.

Unfortunately I could not add a working configuration to the Wiki, because I discovered a bug in RAI's HTML code that prevents subpage prediction from working correctly.

The problem is that the links for previous and next subpage are not distinguishable by a regular expression, because they have the 'alt' attribute wrongly set to the same value (both are 'Next subpage' while one should be 'Previous subpage'). This occurs on text-only version; full graphic version has links with images and they have all the same structure, so they are not usable.

I sent an email to RAI text-tv service address, I hope they will fix the code. I will let you know

BTW, page prediction works.

Good to hear the changes made things better. One thing I forgot to mention is that the dependency on having Yle in config is gone - the first site is loaded by default instead of Yle.

@Benny1967 I think that fallback could be added the other way around as well without breaking things too much.

Now that the config stuff is in good condition, it would be nice to gather a list of feature todo's. I have some in my mind but you can add your own and we could brainstorm about them.

My ideas (in myprobable order of implementation):

• Busy indicator when loading page
• Image to display when an error occurs (page not found etc).
• Optimize layout usage. Right now there is some room between page number and image. Also, the buttons are resized when the image first appears. I'm not familiar how to adjust Qt layout though, probably just need to test it out. Any suggestions here how to do the layout better?
• Some way to navigate in full screen mode. Onscreen buttons on the sides and volume keys have been suggested. Haven't decided what would be the best solution. Ideas?
• Eventually have all the sites collected to a one list grouped by country, have a menu action to select which ones you want to use. Then the switch site action would only list those that you have selected beforehand. This way a normal user would not need to touch config file ever. This is probably needed for Dexter ever to get out of extras-devel.
• Timer to reload current page
• Favorite page shortcuts to menu?

That's it for me right now, go nuts and add your own!

I have a problem after update: I can start Dexter but I can not see TextTV data (Yle or MTV3). I can only see page number (and change it). I am online (web working). I have tried to uninstall/re-install Dexter. Any hints?

@JKO65: That is most likely due to the changes to the config file parameters. You can either 1) delete your config file from ~/.config/Dexter/dexter.conf and start Dexter - it will regenerate Yle site with the correct values for the new version 2) Edit config file and change the values yourself (Wiki has working examples for Yle and Mtv3)

Ah... my favorite part in software development: wish list! enhancement requests! *LOL*

OK, in no particular order and some of them considerably less important than others... but i'll list them anyway:

• in both portrait and landscape mode, add new standard button to toggle image size upper half double height / lower half double height / full page normal size (usual feature on teletext TV sets)
• Add feature to read parameters from command line, so you can start application with --show site,page,subpage from command line. (Useful for putting a shortcut on desktop that takes me right to the train schedule) - oh, and there could also be a command line switch for --displaymode full|keypad or such...
• change config fies so that each site has its own config file in the Dexter directory. Easier to manipulate this way. (Dexter would look for *.config files in the directory; if you don't want a site any more, you can just re-name the file from orf.config to orf.old; also, you can easily drop in new sites.)
• Add setting which site/page to show when application starts.
• Add bookmark features that work across sites (so i'd have page 834 from ORF as bookmark and page 102 from SF1 and page 200 from NOS etc.)
• in landscape mode, have a button that makes numeric buttons disappear and displays image in larger size. buttons like forward/back, the suggested full/upper double/lower double and reload should remain visible.
• in portrait mode, have a button that hides the numeric keyboard and stretches picture in height (x2). (the toggle.button mentioned earlier should still be there also in portrait - sometimes you might want to enlarge text and still have the numeric keys present.)
• offer the possibility to have some pages ("News", "Sports", "TV",...) as part of the config... like pre-configured bookmarks. don't know how that would work in the UI then.