PBN software

PBN Verifier

The PBN Verifier checks whether a PBN file obeys the PBN 1.0 standard, the PBN 2.0 standard, and the PBN 2.1 standard. This PBN Verifier is available for a JAVA environment! It means that you can execute the verification process on any platform (supporting Java). The PBN Verifier also enables the generation of portable export PBN files.
All the JAVA source and class files can be found in PbnJVeri.zip . The documentation (also in the zip file) can be viewed here .

There is also a PBN Verifier written in C that only verifies against the PBN 1.0 standard. The source code for this PBN Verifier can be found here . The verifier is available as Windows95, Windows3.11 and MS-DOS program.

PBN Viewer

The PBN Viewer presents all the bridge games of a PBN file. You can view the auction calls, the played cards and the raw PBN notation. You can use this PBN Viewer to view the above PBN databases. The PBN Viewer is available as a JAVA program. The archive PbnJView.zip contains all files. The documentation (also in the zip file) can be viewed here .
Note that this Java PBN Viewer has an extra option to perform a Double Dummy analysis based on the bridge engine of GIB.

There is also a PBN Viewer written in C that only processes PBN 1.0 files. There are two executables.
The Windows95 program pbn_view.exe can be found here (95) .
The Windows3.11 program PbnView3.exe can be found here (3.11) .
At some WindowsNT PCs you need a (new) version of the DLL cw3215.dll. You can download cw3215.dll from this site , or from thecia , where it is updated regularly.

You can also play on this web site with the PBN Viewer applet. It enables you to view several PBN files without the need to download the PBN Viewer (and the Java run-time environment).

HTML5 PBN Viewer

Phil Allen has made a HTML5 PBN Viewer for playback of PBN files in a browser on your (mobile) system. The viewer is available on Phil's website.

Bridge Solver

John Goacher has developed Bridge Solver, a free interactive bridge hand analyser utilising Bo Haglund's well known double dummy solver module. It is implemented in three different versions: an Android app, a Windows program, and a website facility (e.g. at bridgewebs).
Bridge Solver supports the PBN format and other formats. Full information can be found at the Bridge Solver website.

WeWeWeb Bridge

WeWeWeb.NET offers an Android Bridge Client for their online gaming environment. This Android app can also create games and save them in PBN 1.0 format. Further information is available at the WeWeWeb website.

One Table Duplicate Bridge

Brian Schott has made a browser application called "One Table Duplicate Bridge". This app facilitates blind dealing of existing online PBN boards. Details about the sequence of activities are explained on his website.

Shark Bridge

Shark Bridge is an iOS app that can read PBN files. This app can be downloaded from here.

BridgeComposer

Ray Spalding has made a Windows program to create and edit PBN files, and to print them in a pleasing format. It has a number of other features such as creating web pages and converting BridgeBase files. The program can be found on the BridgeComposer homepage.

BridgeFileConverter

Kaj G Backas has written BridgeFileConverter, a Windows 10 compatible program, that reads deal data from/to in following bridge programs:

DeepFinesse
BridgeBaron
BBO and Vuegraph lin files
PBN
Jannersten Duplimate DLM

You can either select a single file or let the program search from a folder (optionally including sub-folders) for selected type of data. It uses a dll, KGBcodec, for the calculations. The program and dll can be downloaded from the archive bridgefileconverter.7z.
Note that many other tools related to PBN can be found on the homepage of Kaj G Backas.

PbnTools

Jarek Czekalski has made PbnTools for converting Kops, Bary, BBO, LIN formats to PBN, and for duplicating boards from PBN files. These tools are available from his website.

Double Dummy Solver

Bob Richardson's program reads PBN and LIN files and uses Bo Haglund's double dummy engine to analyze hands. It has an extensive filtering system to study results on 1,000's of hands. There is also a feature to enter in custom hands. The program is the ideal tool to analyze results obtained from BBO, and it has been translated into 16 different languages. The program is available for free at the BridgeCaptain download site.

RoboBridge

Job Scheffers has made the bridge program called RoboBridge. The program reads PBN files, and after playing a game RoboBridge compares your result with the result in the PBN game. The program can be downloaded from the RoboBridge web site. You can also use this program for playing online tournaments and compare your scores with other competitors.

SmartBridge

Francesco Barcio has written a bridge playing program called SmartBridge. This program is able to load PBN files, and it has a nice user interface for saving PBN files. The PBN 2.0 feature ScoreTable has been implemented for comparing game results of the same deal. SmartBridge 5.0 can be found on this download site. The program is also able to convert LIN files to PBN.

Easy Bridge

Steven Han has made a bridge program called Easy Bridge. The program is able to read PBN games, view PBN games, and to write PBN games (limited number of tags). The freeware program Easy Bridge (recently updated by Norm to version 4.0.3) can be downloaded from this download site or from Steven's website. This program is able to read PBN 2.0 files.

GIB

Matt Ginsberg and his team have developed the (commercial) bridge program called GIB, that can read and write PBN games. You can play yourself a game of a PBN file, and then compare your results with the corresponding, already played games in that PBN file. All information about GIB can be found here.

Wbridge5

Yves Costel has made the PC-Windows bridge program called Wbridge5 (in French). This program is able to read and write PBN files. You can download this freeware program the program's website.

Eindeloos Bridge

The firm Bridgesoft has released a new version (EB6) of Eindeloos Bridge (in Dutch). This program is able to read several input formats including PBN. The program EB can be found at the Bridgesoft web site.

Blue Chip Bridge

Ian Trackman and his team have developed the (commercial) bridge program called Blue Chip Bridge. Version 3 is able to save and import PBN games. All information about Blue Chip Bridge can be found at the Blue Chip Bridge web site.

Bridge Baron

The Bridge Baron team has adopted the PBN format. Version 10 of Bridge Baron is able to import PBN games. All information about Bridge Baron can be found at the Bridge Baron web site.

Q-plus

Hans Leber has added PBN support in version 6 of the Q-plus bridge program : the program is able to import and export PBN files.

Jack

Hans Kuijf developed the bridge program 'jack', that has full PBN support. The program can be found at jack's website.

Micro Bridge

Tomio Uchida and Yumiko Uchida developed the bridge program 'Micro Bridge', that since version 11 fully supports PBN format and allows playing team match if the PBN file contains one or two results. It also supports network play using PBN files, a variety of cards (graphic, character, and eight regional notations), etc. The program can be found at the website of Micro Bridge.

Jill

Ian McKinnon has made bridge editor Jill that supports PBN format and other formats. The program can be found at the asecomputing website.

RealBridge

PBN is the standard format for importing deals to use in a session at the RealBridge site. After each session a session organiser (a bridge club or organisation) is able to download PBN files with the bidding and play at every table. Also a collection of teaching material in PBN is available here.

BridgeVu

Fred Gitelman of Bridge Base Inc. has written a Windows program to view bridge movies. The program can handle several bridge formats among which PBN. The program can be downloaded from the web site of Bridge Base Inc..

Hand dealer

Jens Brix Christiansen has written a card dealing (MS-DOS) program used in Denmark for official tournaments. This program (and a suite of other programs) can be found at Alesia. The suite includes a utility to convert the deals to PBN format.

Dealer

Henk Uijterwaal has written a bridge hand generator program using the original code of Hans van Staveren's dealer program. The output of the deal is in PBN format. All information about this program (including source code) can be found here.
A MS-DOS version can be downloaded from Kaj's place.

BigDeal

Hans van Staveren and Jeroen Kuipers are working on a new version of a deal program with a guaranteed random generator. The program has several output formats, including PBN format. All information about this program (including source code in C) can be found at Hans' web site.
Kaj G Backas has made a PC Windows front end to the deal program, that can be downloaded from Kaj's place.

ShuffleBridgeCards

André Wolff has made the Windows program ShuffleBridgeCards for generating bridge card games. It shuffles bridge cards, and saves results into a PBN-file and into a Html-file. Optionally, it uses the output games of BigDeal. All information about this program can be found here. The Dutch version of the program SchudBridgeSpellen can be downloaded from André's website.

Dealmaster

The firm Ward & Sons, Inc has developed the bridge Dealmaster software package for processing databases of bridge deals. Since version 3.32 Dealmaster is able to create files in PBN format of generated deals. All information about this program can be found at the Dealmaster web site.

Bridge Manager

Brian Pratt has developed Bridge Manager (version 8), a versatile program for processing bridge databases. Originally, the program acted as a companion product for Bridge Baron. Many features have been added to the program. Since version 8, Bridge Manager can be seen as a PBN editor. You can load and save PBN files; and moreover you can edit (add, change, or delete) the PBN tags including tag values of each game in a PBN file. All information about this program can be found at the Bridge Manager web site.

BRidgeBRowser

Stephen Pickett has developed BRidgeBRowser, a program for browsing through huge databases (databases are available). BRidgeBRowser is capable of outputting its hands to PBN. All information about this program can be found at the BRidgeBRowser web site.

DUPER

David Howorth has made a duplicate bridge utility, called DUPER. You can use it to, among others, generate random hands and print them on handouts for postgame analysis. Generated deals can be saved in PBN files, and the program can read its own PBN files. All information about this program can be found at David's web site.

BridgeScorer

Dirk van der Plas has developed a suite of programs to support the administration of bridge tournaments. One the programs, the deal generator, is able to save a file with deals in PBN format. All information about the BridgeScorer suite can be found at the BridgeScorer web site.

Jannersten products

Per Jannersten has developed a range of hardware products with related software, that is compliant with the PBN notation. More information about these products (Optread, HandyDup, Scealer, Reporter, Raporter) can be found at the Jannersten web site.

Mr_Al

Max Durbano has made a MS-DOS tool, called Mr_Al, to process the score files that come with the PBN files created by Al Howard. It compares the score results of your own PBN file with the scores in the already existing PBN files.
Max has also made 5 other MS-DOS programs:

Program 'add_scores.exe' adds score results to a PBN file. This program is handy, since GIB (2.6.3) does not add scores to user saved deals.
Program 'Deal.exe' is a simple program to enter deals. The program asks for the cards and the dealer, and then creates a PBN file.
Pbn_mixer.exe allows you to add your own PBN file (provided by Gib and corrected by adding scores (add_scores.exe)) to Al Howard's file.
Program 'pbn_extractor.exe' allows you to select different boards from a PBN file and categorise them in one of 3 files: bad.pbn, good.pbn, and worse.pbn .
Program 'pbn_imp.exe' is the same tool as Mr_Al but works on IMPs (instead of Matchpoints).

These 6 programs and their documentation can be downloaded from here.
Max has also written a MS-DOS program to practice bidding. The archive can be downloaded from max_bidder.zip.

PS Bridge Hand

Masakatsu Sugino has made a Windows program that presents bridge hands in a graphical way together with the results of a complete double dummy analysis. The program is able to read and write PBN files. The double dummy analysis is performed with Gib's engine. The graphical presentation is stored in a PostScript file, that can be manipulated with a PostScript viewer. The program (PS Bridge Hand) can be downloaded from Sugino's web site.
Several databases are already available in PostScript format and can be downloaded from Sugino's web site.

Himbuv

The website of Himbuv offers several PBN conversion services: from PBN to HTML, and from PBN to DOC.

PBN2BridgeIt

William L. Deurwaarder has made the tool, PBN2BridgeIt, for converting PBN files to tournaments for the bridge program Bridge'It. You can download this tool from their web site

pbn2html

Program pbn2html is a program from Yvan Calame. It converts a PBN file into HTML, so that the bridge games can be viewed with a HTML browser. This utility is available on the homepage of Kaj G Backas.

Richard's tools

Richard Pavlicek has defined his own notation called Richard's Bridge Notation (RBN). He has also made several MS-DOS programs acting on PBN files. All these tools can be downloaded from Richard's web site. Richard also made a conversion program called Bridge File Converter for many formats including PBN. Furthermore, this tool can be used to convert PBN files to HTML format.

pbn.pl

Bob Crosby has made a Perl script as a Data Entry program for PBN files. This Perl script can be downloaded here. Please rename the downloaded file 'pbn.pl_txt' to 'pbn.pl'. (This trick is needed to enable downloading the file.) For updates visit Bob's Bridge web site.

Kaj's tools

Kaj G Backas has made several tools acting on PBN files. All these programs can be downloaded from Kaj's web site.

PBNfinder : Finds a deal (with wildcards) dash is not yet supported
PBNdistribution : Enumerates a set of deals.
PBNstatistics : Point count counting.
PBNclipboard : Extracts the deal of a PBN file, and converts it to "newspaper" format.

Dré's tools

Dré Ruigrok has made the following MS-DOS programs acting on PBN files. Each program's user interface and the documentation is in Dutch. All these programs can be downloaded from this web page of Dré Ruigrok.

verdelen.exe : a tool to generate random deals, after optionally specifying a certain number of cards. The program saves the deals in PBN format.
leesbigd.exe : a tool for post-processing (read, view, print, unravel) games generated by Big Deal
ontrafel.exe : a tool to unravel PBN files, so that each game is stored in a separate file.

DD-solver

Kaj G Backas has made a Windows95 program that presents the results of a double dummy analysis using GIB's bridge engine. This program can be downloaded from Kaj's web site.

ACBLmerge

This program merges hand records, double dummy results, and electronic scoring info. It reads PBN files and it is able to generate PBN files. The program can be downloaded from here.

PBN form

Kaj G Backas has made a (Word'97) form for logging a bridge game in PBN notation. This form can be used as an intermediate step to creating PBN files.
The form document can be downloaded from Kaj's web site.

Function DLL

David Howorth has written a set of functions for printing bridge deals. The arguments in these function are strings that use the PBN syntax. The DLL and its documentation can be found here.