Hi Andrew,

1. Open Office is a glaring example of why being unconcerned about OS guidelines is somehow a reason to not be concerned about a given OS’s guidelines. Open Office does honor the default page format in Windows; and it supports multiple cultures; and it supports multi-OS. I have felt for some time now that PCGen considers Windows as something that needs no particular attention to standard Windows patterns and practices and is mostly only supported because Java happens to support it. The responses to this and other issues I’ve brought up in the last several months do little to assuage that feeling. It may simply be that there are no Windows centric developers to take on the mantle to assure that Windows guidelines are honored with conditional compilation code segments where appropriately divergent from Unix-isms. I completely understand that this is a volunteer project. But everyone in the PCGen development team is surely aware that this project appears to be in a slow death (fewer and fewer volunteers) precisely because Windows users (the largest desktop segment) is going to Hero Lab and other software due to the perceived buggy nature or usability issues (deserved or not) of PCGen. I don’t want that to happen. I would like to see what is probably the projects largest user segment to be so happy with the core usability of PCGen that we attract many new volunteers. That extends to the code team as well. From what I’ve seen so far that the new formula parser is evolutionary. But to get new volunteer coders you must first get their attention. And that becomes more difficult as the audience declines.

1. The issue with this is not that a homebrew is broken. It is that PCGen gives no useful error message to tell someone WHERE it is broken. In my case, this homebrew is little more than a huge multi-set and commenting out all the lines in the PCC file to find out which line is causing the issue is something that no other homebrew user *should* have to do. The error message for the load failure should be enough to find out what the issue was. In this case, after uninstalling PCGEN and reinstalling and making sure to select the _universal and the other _xxx entry the error did not recur.

1. As for the source. Like I said I know very little about Java programming, and less about the specific coding in PCGen. For me to spend, probably hours, digging through PCGen to understand its internal structure enough to submit a PR for the code is ridiculous on its face. The chance that I could even attempt to identify a fix that would not have unintended consequences without such study is presumptuous at best.

As for the remainder of your comment… Try developing two different programs, pascal and C, at the same time. The languages are so close in syntax you quickly get mired in the peculiarities of the two and spend a lot of time bug-fixing and referring to API docs. This is not efficient coding. Efficient coding is 100+ lines of debugged functioning code per hour per developer, not 700+ lines of code per month per developer. As an example, in the summer of 2005 I started writing a Windows XP application that was ready for deployment in 9 months. It had over 100,000 lines of code (comprising modules written in VB, C++, and 8051 assembler), not counting auto generated code from UI creation tools I used. And not counting the code from the early parts of the project that were deleted or replaced as it was being developed. There was only myself and one other developer working on this project. I produced 95+% of the VB code (the bulk of the application), perhaps 10-15% of the C++ code (high level USB driver interfaces, the other guy did the low level part). You need a singleness of mind and concentration to produce debugged code at that rate. My primary focus now is C# programming on multiple projects with a huge combined code base, and I am the only developer. I cannot afford to get distracted by a similar syntaxed and structured language. Now if PCGen had been written in Cobol, RPG, Fortran, LISP or ASSEMBLER (all of which I have programmed in), then that would be something else entirely as they are all completely different coding syntax and style and could never be confused with C++, C# or Java.

As for JIRA, I wanted to post on the forums first (specifically the null error message issue and the font issue) to see if anyone else (not developers) encountered the same problem. Anyone with JAVA SDK development tools checking it might not encounter the same error if the problem was related to the JRE set installed in windows installer version of PCGen. But I suppose there are so few Windows users who subscribe to the forums or perhaps all other Windows users just all the data sets (by default). I don’t know. Either way, a confirmation of an error on a non-JDK installed machine could have identified the problem. In my case, while the null error went away when I uninstalled and reinstalled (as I identified above) this is not confirmation of the cause since I have not again uninstalled and reinstalled without selecting _universal to confirm that the problem returns since it is completely irrelevant if _universal should not be able to be deselected in the first place.

Mark