 It was
David Stevenson (Great
Britain) who first came up with the idea of making a WWW version of
the Rubber Bridge Laws (July 20, 1998); and with great speed, he
obtained permission from the Portland Club - and later from the EBL -
(two of the copyright holders) in order to make a WWW version. The
ACBL (another copyright holder) later decided (October 14, 1998) to
join in the decision to place the Rubber Bridge Laws on the WWW.
The next step was to get an
electronic copy of the Laws. Although the American edition had been
reprinted as recently as April, 1997, no electronic copy was in
existence.
Kent
Burghard, ACBL, suggested OCR-scanning of the American paper
edition pages and then he did it! He scanned the 64 pages of the
American law book and got the content as RTF files. From these files,
the text of the law book could be extracted as text files.
The text (and the RTF) files
were filled with scanning errors (probably because the font size used
in the American edition is very small), so there was a considerable
work with fixing those errors (done by Kent Burghard and myself).
Guess what this line - taken from one of the unfixed text files -
should be:
The ACBL supplied me with the
paper edition of the Laws (to see the layout - and to use it for
proof-reading).
The conversion of the text files
to html (and making the links) didn't take much time, since it was
done using a PERL script (PERL is a programming language - available
for both UNIX and PCs).
After the American version, the
English version was made. Here
David Stevenson was (as
usual!) very helpful and carefully proof-read the text of the English
version. The errors he found were corrected in the English version and
most of them also existed in the American version (there are some -
mostly smaller - differences between the English and the American
version and the American version contains a section called
"Alternative Club Laws", which is not in the English version).
The final proof-reading of the
American version has been done by
Chyah and
Kent Burghard, ACBL.
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