ufo_data/README.md

# UFO Event Timeline Processing Tool

## Copyrights:
ufojson tool: Copyright (c) 2023 By Richard Geldreich, Jr. (Apache 2.0 license)

[libsoldout](https://github.com/faelys/libsoldout): Copyright (c) 2009, Natacha Porté (ISC license)

Data files (in 'bin' directory): George M. Eberhart - Copyright 2022, LeRoy Pea - Copyright 9/8/1988 (updated 3/17/2005), Dr. Donald A. Johnson - Copyright 2012, Fred Keziah - Copyright 1958

## Instructions

This C++ command line tool reads several source files containing UFO related events, which were compiled from a variety of sources, and converts each of them to JSON. It then sorts all of these events into a single large timeline and outputs them as Markdown. [pandoc](https://pandoc.org/) can then be used to convert this Markdown text to HTML.

Currently, the tool is Windows only, but it would be trivial to port to Linux/OSX. (I'll do this soon.) To run it: compile the .SLN using Visual Studio 2022. There are no 3rd party dependencies (other than libsoldout, which is included in this repo). Run it in the BIN directory. It'll convert all the source files to JSON then output a file named timeline.md. 

Here's the output [Markdown file converted to PDF](ufo_timeline_v1_04.pdf).