One common request I get from clients is that they want to add dot leaders to some kinds of tables. Dot leaders are pretty common and also look great in documents but are also deceptively difficult to do in HTML. With regular typesetting software, you can fill white space with periods or other characters using a variety of methods that are relatively easy to employ. Typeset documents have set widths and fonts that don’t vary depending on external factors. HTML, on the other hand, is highly dependent on a user’s viewport settings.

Back in 2017, I wrote a post about a script that would align outline text, which would insert spacers into a formatted outline document to make it consistently spaced. This script has been in use for a few years by a few readers of this blog, and it generally works pretty well, but earlier this week I got a question about it. If a document is otherwise nicely formatted, and you only want to align a section of the document, running the script on an entire document is probably a bad idea, because there is always the possibility of it changing something that already looks pretty good. The question, then, was asking if it was possible to modify this script to run on a portion of the document, instead of the whole document.

This week, we’re taking a look at automating the subject company lookup on SC13D/G filings. This is another request from a client, but I think it provides a good opportunity to look at automation of a pretty simple task that otherwise might be forgotten and overlooked by a busy operator. This script will trigger when a user opens a project file (a .GFP file), if and only if the project being opened is of document type SC 13D or SC 13G. These are the best kinds of tasks to automate, because they are specific, and easily forgotten by an operator. If the document opened meets these criteria, the CIK of the subject company will be looked up, and the name of the subject company will be looked up on the EDGAR system and entered into the name field. This is very useful if you have an automated system that is creating .GFP files (not very hard, it’s a pretty simple file format), but you cannot guarantee that system has access to the most current names of companies. For example, if the system generating the GFP files has an outdated database of names, you would want to make sure that the subject company is replaced with current information on file open. This is where our script comes in.

This week, we’re taking another look at using Legato to enhance GoFiler’s validation. Last month, someone asked me if there was a way GoFiler could check a 10-Q project to ensure a completed XBRL file set was attached to it. Well, this isn’t something GoFiler normally checks for (since there are times when you might want to omit these files), but we can definitely use Legato to enhance the validation of the project file, so we can warn the user if they might have forgotten something. It also gives us another opportunity to demonstrate some of the project file functions, which are always useful if you’re going to be working with GFP files.

Last month, we discussed logging user submissions to the SEC in our blog post LDC 154. Well, thinking more about this, I realized it was probably not a good idea to not secure the log file. If someone makes a mistake, and files a document they shouldn’t, they could simply alter the log to show different times or users filing the document, and there is no record of it. A malicious user could easily just change what the log says! This is unacceptable and easily within our power to fix. To do so, we’re going to use a common function, the MD5 hash function.