Generating the Report

After you have checked and corrected the data entry, you can generate the report. On the Reports menu on the main window, you can select Show Report to produce a plain text file containing the report in TICA Trend format. TkScore will tell Windows to open the file using the Notepad application. From within Notepad, you can proofread it. Things to watch out for might be:

Misaligned columns caused by stray tab characters in the name or breed fields,
Duplicated finals columns,
Missing finals,
Missing names,
Incorrect judges' initials.

Posting the Report

If it all looks good, you can copy-and-paste the entire report from the Notepad window into an e-mail message and send it to the TICA Mailing List. It's better to use copy/paste than to do an attachment because some mailers always do MIME encoding of attachments, even if the file is plain text. There's no sense in making e-mail more complicated than it needs to be.

You can copy-and-paste quickly with these keyboard shortcuts:

In Notepad, Ctrl-A will select the entire text.
Ctrl-C will copy it to the clipboard.
In your mailer program, Ctrl-V will paste the text from the clipboard into your message.

Report Format Options

From the Report menu, you can select the Options form to specify some parameters to control the report format:

The "Name Length" parameter specifies the number of characters reserved for the name of each cat on the report. The default is 36, which is the limit set by the TICA Registration Rules. (Sometimes exhibitors submit longer names to the entry clerks, but they really shouldn't do that, because they might lose points).
The "Column Width" parameter specifies the number of characters reserved for each column of finals. This is set to 3 by default, which gives the most compact report. For a tiny show with four rings or less, you might want to increase it to spread out the columns, to keep the report from being visually odd.
The "Mixed Case" checkbutton enables the automatic capitalization function. You may have noticed that Deborah likes to type all the entries with the Caps Lock key on. The automatic capitalization function converts the names (including the names of judges, the club, the location, the reporter, and the month) to mixed letter-case with appropriate capitalization. This function is turned on by default because the TICA Trend requires reports in mixed letter-case to save space.
If you have typed all the names in mixed letter-case, you may want to turn off the "Mixed Case" checkbutton, so that your capitalization is preserved for all names.
The "Print Scores" checkbutton causes TkScore to print the points it has calculated for the purpose of ranking the entries on the report. These are not "real" points, since we have no way of knowing if all these finals are among any given cat's top 50 scores. This is useful, however, if there is a question as to why the ranking on the report doesn't match the Best of the Best calculation done by the club. This option is turned off by default.

At the bottom of the Report Format form, the Reset button will reset the parameters to the values that they had when you brought up the form, the Defaults button will set them to their default values, the Cancel button will discard any changes you have made and close the window, and the OK button will apply the changes you have made and close the window.

David Thomas (showreports@ticamembers.org)

26 February 2001