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PalMate

A graphical interface to design and generate Palview webpages

PalMate makes it easy to design and generate Palview webpages for replaying chess games on the Internet. You don't need to know any Palview commands and you don't need to know how to write a CSS stylesheet. You design the pages by selecting board, pieces, colors, fonts etc. and PalMate writes all the necessary files in co-operation with Palview. Pages can be previewed at any time, and when you're satisfied just save and upload your work.

PalMate is freeware, but if you find the program useful you shall hear no harsh words if you link to The Palview Pages as a token of your appreciation :-)


Why PalMate?

Creating webpages manually with Palview can be a bit complicated, because Palview - being a console program - has no direct user interface. You tell Palview what to do by writing commands into a text file (ini file), and when Palview is started it reads these instructions before it creates the webpage(s).

Palview offers a wealth of possibilities and - not surprisingly - this requires a whole set of commands that can have different values, and they can be hard to remember. Also the webpages use a CSS stylesheet, and this stylesheet must be written by you. Finally it takes some file handling to pass the pgn and ini file to Palview, and to view the page you must load it into your browser.

PalMate makes this much easier. You select what pgn file(s) to convert and where to save the webpage files. Various options like page style, board and piece images, colors, fonts, font size, text justification, borders etc. etc. are selected from menus and dialogs. When you want to preview the page you click on a button and the built in browser will show the page.

Thus you don't need to know the Palview commands and their syntax and you don't need to know how to format a page using cascading stylesheets. You just select what you want and PalMate writes the necessary commands with the right syntax. You can preview the page any time, and once your satisfied you save and upload the necessary files to your server.

PalMate is installed with help files, and the Palview Manual can be accessed from PalMate - either locally on your harddrive or via the Internet. For PalMate to work you must have a local mirror of your website, and it is recommended that you read the introduction carefully before you start making webpages with PalMate.

PalMate 2 is a Windows program written in Visual Basic 5 and the source code can be downloaded here. Any advice or ideas are welcome.


Important Installation Notes

December 2003, Eric Bentzen