Pebblesoft

Welcome!

Here you'll find some free cross-platform computer programs: two refreshing online games (some thinking required!), an online tool for formatting plain text, an online tool for sorting HTML and DITA table rows, a toolkit for concatenating XHTML files into a single output file with an auto‑generated table of contents and more, an excellent and smart XML pretty‑printing (source‑code formatting) program, a fun program that determines the best way to distribute gifts in a gift exchange, and a program for indexing songs by category (great for music therapists!).

Each program is offered as is, with no liability assumed by Pebblesoft or the author of the program.

The online programs are easy and fun to use. All that you need is a reasonably modern Web browser. For the games (Pebbles and WordRecall), your browser must have JavaScript enabled. It's usually enabled by default.

The downloadable programs (song_indexer, tools4xhtml, ElegantXml, and WhiteElphant) are contained in Zip files, organized by platform. Each Zip file contains a readme file containing the documentation for that program. Just have a look at the readme, and you'll find all the information that you need.

Online Programs

WordRecall is a matching game that uses words. You can be creative in thinking of associations to help you remember which words are where.

PebbleWrap is a very useful tool for wrapping (or unwrapping and then rewrapping) lines of text, attractively indenting paragraphs and lists, making flowing columns from single-column text, and making great-looking tables from delimited text.

PebbleRows takes the source code for an HTML, XHTML, or DITA-XML table and sorts the rows based on a particular column (and an optional secondary sort-by column). PebbleRows can also delete a specified column from the table.

Downloadable Programs

song_indexer takes a song list in XML format as input and produces a song index in PDF format as output. In the output, the songs are alphabetized and associated with categories. There is a listing of all songs and then a listing for each category. The output document includes appropriate customizable front matter, such as title, author, and date.

tools4xhtml takes one or more XHTML source files and concatenates them into a single output file with an auto‑generated table of contents, optional section numbering, and all HTML comments stripped out. You specify the order and hierarchy of the input files using a file list in a simple XML format.

ElegantXml performs intelligent pretty-printing on each well-formed XML file within a specified directory tree or on a single such file.

WhiteElephant calculates which distribution of "white elephant" gifts maximizes the joy for a group while taking the individuals into consideration as well. The program takes as input each participant's rankings for the gifts and determines which distribution of gifts, out of all possible arrangements, is the best.

To obtain one of the downloadable programs, choose your platform and download the appropriate Zip file:

NOTE: For best results on Linux and Mac OS X, make sure that your system has Perl version 5.8.8 or later installed (but not Perl 6). You can enter perl -v in a Terminal to see what version of Perl you have.