Bridge in the East Anglian Daily Times

I have been writing an article, at first bi-weekly but for many years now every Saturday, in the EADT since 1988. I hope to eventually bring all the material here for amusement and access and to establish a historical context for Suffolk bridge.

The is usually updated a few days before appearing in the printed newspaper the following Saturday. Other years converted to an on-line format are to the right. There are various links to the latest article.

I'm always on the look out for information about Suffolk players, table tales and interesting or amusing hands – email me at .

Updates

Thirteen years on from the last post, I have retired the old articles, those where diagrams are formatted as tables. Rather strangely, despite there being few explicit references to these files (which terminate '.doc.htm') Google seems to find and prefer them. I have used a server directive to redirect those to default version so old links should not be broken. Internal references to 'old style' have been removed.

After only a year in testing, I have switched the default style for the articles here to 'new'. I recognise that 'New and Improved' are terrifying words on anything to which one has become accustomed. However I hope the introduction of a 'baize' for hand layouts will help readability, especially for settings where only dummy and defender are shown. The code behind this is smaller and tidier and conforms more to current best practice.

If you do have problems, there is a link to original-style articles and indexes but please get in touch and if a solution is possible – other than updating your browser – I'd be happy to investigate.

2011 – starting promptly on Saturday 1st.

I have created a beta version of the articles, a new layout. Under the hood it's much cleaner but I also hope it actually looks better. Modelled on international bulletins (the green 'baize') I've also added a number of other refinements to make the auctions clearer.

So, give the new layout a try and let me know what you think.

2010: I have some changes planned for this year - watch this space.

Another year is upon us - 2009 - who knows?

The first article I wrote for the EADT appeared on 3-March-1988 and to celebrate the anniversary, I transferred the whole of 1988 into web format and posted them. Quite nostalgic - almost brings a lump to the throat.

2008 - new year, new look - I hope it makes the content easier to read.

Happy new year! - 2007.

Another year, another new link - 2006.

A new year is upon us - 2005 - remember where you saw it first.

I started placing these articles here as I write them in 2002 and until now I have made scant progress in getting the back years up, however, 2001 represents a step in that direction.

In connection with that I have been honing the system I use to transfer the documents from their Microsoft Word format into HTML. I know there have been some systemic failures in the past, most noticeably the appending of text to hand-diagrams (such as dealer, vulnerability, 'Room 1' etc.) that has caused the suits to misalign. This has not been that easy. The template I use houses code in VBA to do this but though I have dabbled extensively with Excel VBA, the inconsistencies I find frustrating there, are nothing to those in the Word model. If anyone is interested in how to make bridge articles into reasonable HTML then I'd be happy to tell them (note however, that there is an element of CSS and some personal customisation about what I have done).

Unfortunately I am not out of the wood yet with mis-formatting and I'm beginning to have considerable sympathy for the type-setters of the EADT for their occasional faux pas. The pages now look great to me but I use Firefox which is a strongly compliant browser. There seems to be a problem with Internet Explorer 6 (at least) for the colgroup and col tags and the colspan attribute for the td tag. I'm aware that IE6 is the most used browser so I'll seek some fix for this. Fortunately it leaves hand diagrams alone and is principally seen in results and where I've listed bidding sequences (not auctions).

As I iron out the mechanism for pain-free conversion from the original Microsoft Word documents, I will bring more on-line. Some of the mis-formatting you see here was in the original, some in the transfer to a web-readable file, I hope it will get better over time but it least it allows me to strike a sympathetic chord with the setters on the Newspaper: it's not as easy as it looks.

Further to that, I've revised the formatting and I think the suit symbols should appear on all browsers. That said, they may not actually look as good on IE as the used to - an effect of moving from the Symbol font and the hard-coded character codes to the entity codes '♠' etc. together with a regular font (I chose Courier).

There are some problems with browsers not being able to recognise the Symbol font. Though this is on (virtually) all PCs, only Internet Explorer 5.0+ seems to render it prettily - Opera 6.01 and Mozilla 1.0 release candidates certainly don't, providing the reader with the familiar paragraph and copyright signs that appear in the printed newspaper from time to time.

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