What: Enter a route number, get a printable PDF file. Print it off, fold it up, and hop on a bus!
Why: Metro offers some useful online services, especially their Trip Planner. But once you know which bus you want to take, you'd like a copy of the schedule. Their online HTML schedules almost never print correctly; my browser seems to always crop part of the table and part of the map image.
How it works: I wrote a script that snarfs the HTML schedule pages from metro's website, scrapes the data out, reformats the table, and packs the map. The page layout is done with LaTeX (!), then the PostScript output converted to PDF with ps2pdf (part of GhostScript).
Disclaimer: Use these schedule files at your own risk. I scrape the data from HTML, plus I'm guessing about the underlying database schema. I hope that no important info is missing from the resulting output, but I can't take responsibility for the quality. It would be better if Metro would simply post PDFs generated from the same source files that produce their printed pamphlets. Their representative indicated that their process makes this difficult. (Plus they'd need to worry about testing, because they couldn't disclaim the data quality with the same cavalier attitude I have. ;v)
Feedback: Please tell me if you find problems with these schedules. Or tell me if you find them useful! Or tell me if they've gone stale. As far as I know, I'm the only user right now, so I just manually re-run the script when metro releases updated shcedules. :v)