HOW TO MAKE YOUR OWN BUS SCHEDULES FOR USE WITH NEXTBUS

The nextbus program can read schedules in the following form:

A schedule has two main sections: the timetable section and an optional
notes section.

All lines starting with # are comments, and are skipped by nextbus.

The timetable section consists of a list of tokens, each separated
by whitespace.  

The section for each bus route in the timetable starts with a route name
followed by a colon (e.g. "61C:").

Each bus line then has up to 3 sections for different days.  These
sections are started with one of these three tokens:  "M-F:", "Sat:",
and "Sun:".

These day-type tokens are then followed by a list of times, in chronological
order, in the form hour:minute (e.g. "6:30").  A 12-hour clock is used, with
no explicit AM or PM designation.  A day's schedule goes from 3am of that day
to 2:59 am of the following morning (which should be just like the printed PAT
schedules).  nextbus figures out the am/pm designation from this context.
(If first bus time is in the afternoon, put a "(PM)" token in front of the
first bus-time token.  I have yet to see a case where this is needed, though.)

Each of those times can be immediately followed by a single letter (e.g 
"3:12C").  The 'C' refers to one or more lines in the notes section, which
will get printed out if needed.

A line starting with * marks the end of the timetable section, and the
beginning of the notes section on the following line.  (Usually I put
the word "Notes:" on the *-line, but that's just a convention for human
readers.)

Significant lines in the notes section consist of a letter, followed
by a colon, follwed by arbitrary text (e.g. "C: Trip runs to Clairton").
If nextbus prints out any time tokens which end with letters, it will also
print out any lines in the notes section starting with those letters.

For examples of schedules readable by nextbus, see the directory
/afs/cs/user/spok/bus/schedules.