fdeal is a free program to create hand records (PDF files) and dealing machine files (Duplimate .DUP files) from hand files generated by Thomas Andrews' Deal program.

You can download fdeal here. The latest version (1.7a) includes a Windows/MSDOS executable. The Linux version is unchanged from version 1.7.

I wrote fdeal to format printed hand records, with double dummy analysis.

fdeal produces some extra formats from deal files created by Thomas Andrews'
Deal 3.1.7 program.

These files are useful for club duplicate tournaments, particularly for clubs
which have a dealing machine.

The files produced are:

-   A board dealing file (.DUP), for Duplimate(TM) dealing machine. This format is
    accepted by (at least some) other dealing machines, including Dealer4(TM)
    ( http://www.esd.com.au/Dealer4/ ) (the machine my club uses).

-   A hand record file in PDF format, for printing, and distribution to
    players after the event. A sample hand record can be viewed here.

The input is one or more files created by deal (only tested with Version 3.1.7) in the
"ddline" format (e.g. "deal -i format/ddline 32 >set1.ddline").

Usage:
    fdeal [-s skip] [-n boards] [-t title] [-f free text] [-o pdf] [-d dupfile] ddfile ...

It can alternatively read a single file from stdin.
                    e.g "deal -i  format/ddline 32 | fdeal"

History - The Original Motivation for fdeal

Sometime in July or August of 2008, the club rooms of my Bridge club suffered a break in, and the theft of the club computer. The computer had been used for scoring, for dealing boards (using a dealing machine), for generating hands to be dealt, and for printing hand records of the boards dealt. The hand records included a double dummy analysis of makable contracts. The generation of hands and hand records was done with Dealmaster Pro, and the double dummy analysis by the Deep Finesse engine built in to Dealmaster Pro.

A new computer was purchased, and most of the software from the previous machine was installed on the new one. A pertinent exception was Dealmaster Pro. We were unable to locate the installation CD. For a while, we used the dealing machine control program to generate hands & hand records (without any double dummy analysis) while we considered our options. The obvious course was to purchase a new copy of Dealmaster Pro. If Dealmaster Pro was a compelling piece of software design, well packaged and marketed, that is probably what we would have done.

But I never liked Dealmaster Pro. After the lapse of 18 months or so, I can't remember all the reasons why. Its user interface is so unlike the typical, standardised, CUA interface that I found it difficult tonavigate. Things just didn't work the way I expected them to. Usually when I can't intuitively find something in a program, I use the Help function. The Help function in Dealmaster Pro is provided in audio format. This is probably not the worst design decision ever, but offhand I can't think of one to top it. The granularity of searching is limited to the file level. I think there are 6 or 7 files, covering 6 or 7 topics. If you want to scan within those topics for something more specific, you listen to the audio until it gets to the subtopic you want. If that subtopic isn't there at all, you could spend hours listening to stuff you already know, to find out that the thing you don't know isn't covered. And can you imagine a director trying to deal a few hands during the quiet periods of a duplicate session? We tell players to turn off their mobile phones, but we risk inflicting a long running audible description of the operation of Dealmaster Pro on them, while they are playing.

Dealmaster Pro / Deep Finesse is slow. We normally deal sets of 32 boards. Deep Finesse usually takes at least 15-20 minutes to analyse 32 boards. Deal/DD takes under a minute. We used to manage the slowness of Deep Finesse by dealing the boards while it was chugging away doing its thing, and then come back after dealing to print the hand records. Most of the time the analysis was finished by the time we had finished dealing. But not always.

The Double Dummy Solver page on Thomas Andrews site says that DD may take one and a half hours or so to analyse worst case hands. In practice I have never seen it take more than 2 minutes.