Greasemonkey & FIRST Manual direct rules link idea

[Elgin Clock]

Moderators feel free to move this thread if you think it's in the wrong forum, or could better benefit input by the FIRST community by being somewhere other than in the IT/Communications section.

That said;
I actively use the Greasemonkey application talked about & written through collaborative efforts through users here on CD for very quick & easy links to The Blue Alliance page on teams as referenced in this thread:
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?t=65773&highlight=greasemonkey+team+number

For those who don't want to read that, the basics are that if you have Greasemonkey installed (personally, I have it installed in Firefox as an simple add-on) then whenever someone types in the exact phrase "Team ###", then the text is automagically converted into a hyperlink to the Team ### page on The Blue Alliance website.

What if, in the future, there was a more signifigant & important way to impliment Greasemonkey on this site specifically?

My idea (and I have absolutely no programming knowledge, but tons of ideas for what I think COULD happen, so please bear with me) is that whenever someone types in a Game Manual rule such as <R14> in that format with the greater than/less than symbol included, then there could be a link directly to the manual page that has that specific rule listed on a single page.

I am guessing this would require a collabrative effort between FIRST to make the manual available online in something other than a PDF file for this application at least, & also a programmer who could take up the task to write a program in Greasemonkey to link the site here to that depository of Manual Rules (which seems simple enough considering it was done in the case of The Blue Alliance, there just needs to be something to link to from here).

Thoughts? Ideas?
Is there any hope of this ever happening??

[RyanCahoon]

Just to add my two cents, I don't think it would be necessary to have a different different format; it's possible to link to locations in PDFs, as described here (http://www.rdpslides.com/psfaq/FAQ00050.htm).

--Ryan

[Elgin Clock]

Just to add my two cents, I don't think it would be necessary to have a different different format; it's possible to link to locations in PDFs, as described here (http://www.rdpslides.com/psfaq/FAQ00050.htm).
--Ryan

Well that makes it a bit easier. Hmmm...

[Brandon Martus]

A while back someone (Nate Smith, I believe) would parse the PDFs and place them online -- and there was a vBCode you could use to link to a particular rule. That hasn't been done in a while ..

Either way -- if someone does the heavy lifting (parsing the rules, etc.) I don't have any problems auto-parsing <Rxx> .. or at least providing a vBCode to link to the site.



[edit] This was it, back in 2003 : http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?t=16201

[Nate Smith]

Funny this came up...I was actually working on setting up this system (http://hypermanual.appspot.com) earlier in the season, but got it finished up too late to stay caught up on entering the rules into the system. I think there were still a few quirks that I needed to work out as well.

At this point, it's a little late to put anything new in place for this season(at least IMHO, but open for discussion), but if someone wanted to work with me to get the last bits of code finished up, and then ready to use for 2010(maybe with an auto-parser for the PDFs, instead of copying and pasting everything). Maybe(with a bit of code tweaking, it doesn't support it right now), we could use the system as a manual archive for years past...