Restrictions for Schedule Viewer

Some restrictions in how the course data input must be prepared have already been discussed, but here we point out some other restrictions.

• The current implementation always produces a plot for Monday through Friday. If there is demand for it, I could make alterations, but note that some variations can already be done by "tricking" the software. For example, you could produce a plot of weekend courses by using one of the letters MTWRF to stand for Saturday and one to stand for Sunday.
• The current implementation of the plots allows for up to four courses to be placed side-by-side. A very simple heuristic is used to place courses so that there will probably be room as long as there is no time at which more than four courses are meeting. If there is demand for plots with more parallel courses, I could make arrangements for that, but it would probably be necessary to print less information in each course box or plot fewer than five days at a time.
• The current implementation of the plots works pretty well for the samples, based on the minimum course duration, the amount of information to be placed in the boxes, and the range of times that the schedule covers. The implementation is designed so that if your time grid needs to cover a wider span of time, it will be accomodated, but then boxes for courses of short duration might be too small to hold much information.
• The implementation of the listings assumes that your data at whatever typesize you select will fit in 7.5 inches of width for printing on 8.5x11 inch paper. If you want to produce wider listings, they could be printed sideways on the page; if there is demand for this, I'll set up that capability.
• You could get in trouble if your input data has more than 93 columns, but that isn't much of a limitation.