These tools are intended to be used with the financial discussion boards that Morningstar has so kindly provided for discussing various financial issues.
Please respect Morningstar's generosity in providing these discussion boards by following their rules at all times.
Enter the address of the web page in the first box (without the "http://"), the title for the link
in the second box and press the button. The link appears in the third box. Paste this into any html document,
including a Diehards post.
Page Address:
Link Name:
Generating a Link to a Diehards Conversation Number
Replace the sample info with the info you want, then push the button to make the link.
Copy the link text and paste it in its entirety on any html page, including a Diehards post.
Posting Legible Tables in a Morningstar Post
If you try to make legible tables in a Morningstar post, you will find that the columns don't line up and your table formatting is destroyed, resulting in an extremely messy and nearly illegible table. This happens because html generally only allows a single space, and ignores multiple spaces.
To make legible tables, use this form and copy the output into your post. You must copy it exactly! Instructions are below.
IMPORTANT: Use this only for the table part of your post.
Replacing spaces greatly expands the size of this portion of your post.
There is a limit to the size of any post, so don't misuse this.
Instructions:
In normal html pages, you use <table> tags to format tables. But Morningstar deletes table tags in your posts, for reasons known only to them.
The alternative is to do the following:
Put "<tt>" tags before your table and </tt>" tags after. This guarantees that the table is represented in a fixed-pitch (TeleType) font such as Courier.
Replace multiple spaces in your table with " ". These are html-encoded non-breaking spaces, and are not ignored by html.
This form below does this automatically. To use it, do the following:
Choose a name for your table and enter it in the first field.
This is optional, and is only useful if you have more than one table
in a post and want to make sure you don't confuse them while you are
entering your post.
Enter your table just as you want it to look in the "Text Table" field.
Note that for Morningstar posts the width of your part is limited to 60 characters
for ordinary text and 56 characters for <tt> text. So this field
limits you to 56 characters to prevent unexpected surprises when you post.
Edit your table in the "Text Table" field.
It is probably best to save a copy of this in a text editor on your computer,
as this page uses JavaScript, and therefore anything you type here will be
gone forever when you close this browser window or quit your browser!
When you are ready, push the "Make Table" button.
Copy the contents of the "Your Table for Posting" field.
You can do this by wiping the contents of the field with the mouse, not forgetting
to scroll if necessary to get all of it.
Alternatively, you can click in the field and use the "Select All" and "Copy"
commands in your browser's "Edit" menu item.
This implementation minimizes the use of " " by only using them if the previous character was an ASCII space(32), LF(10), or CR(13). Thus multiple spaces will have only every other one replaced rather than all of them, reducing the expansion of spaces from 6:1 to something more like 3:1. It is necessary to detect ASCII Character Values of 10 and 13, because (due to html rules) space characters (ASCII 32) immediately following these are at the beginning of a line and are ignored. Thus the "& " must be used to replace spaces
there.
Interestingly, Internet Explorer ends lines with CR(13), whereas Netscape and Safari end lines with LF(10). Micro$oft is the oddball again!
Read More: "Diehards Tools"
These tools are intended to be used with the financial discussion boards that Morningstar has so kindly provided for discussing various financial issues.
Please respect Morningstar's generosity in providing these discussion boards by following their rules at all times.
This page uses JavaScript, a programming language used to make interactive web pages. The JavaScripts on this page do not communicate with my server, except to download the page of course, and will run just fine if you copy them to a file on your computer and then point your browser to that file.
All of the computational effort occurs on your computer and browser and does not involve my server in any way.
The appearance of this page may vary somewhat on various browsers and operating systems, but has been tested on Mac OSX using Internet Explorer, Netscape, and Safari. I have found in the past that this also pretty much guarantees operation on Windows and Linux.
If you find any bugs or issues please use the link at the top of the page to send me EMAIL about it. Remember, this is my hobby, not my business, and I will get to any issues when I can.
I make NO guarantee of any kind.
This page may contain serious errors.
Use this page entirely at your own risk!
Do not use this page for any illegal purpose.
Subject to the above, you may use this page and its included software yourself,
copy and redistribute it, or even put it on your own website. I ask only that
you not make any changes, and that if you reuse any of the code, make sure to
list me as one of your sources.
My only reward for writing this is the 15 milliseconds of fame I receive from
having my name here. Don't deprive me of that.
You can copy this page so that it works when you are not connected to the net
by simply doing a "Save As" in your browser. In order to do this you will have to look
at the features of your browser and decide to save the page as one of the following:
"Page Source", or "Web Page"
This is the html code of the page, including only css and scripts on the page
itself. If you do this, you will lose the hexagon background (maybe you think
that's good) and any images on the page. You may also have to manually change
the extension (the part of the file name after the last "." to "html" or
"htm". This is due to a strange bug/feature of some browsers that cause them
to recognize a page with a .php extension as html if it is on a web site, but
not if it is a local file. Go figure.
"Web Archive"
The html code of the page and any associated files containing css, scripts,
images, and background compressed into the one file that is saved.
"Web Page, Complete"
An html file with a folder or directory containing any associated files with
css, scripts, images, and backgrounds. If you save it this way, you will have
to make sure that you don't lose the associated directory, or else the page
may behave strangely.