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I am not sure I understand correctly. Do you mean you don't want effective (real) gaps in the students' timetable? So you would like to add a constraint students max 0 gaps per week?

Oh gosh, silly me. Now I get what a "gap" is. I added the constraint and it's excellent =)

I don't have further questions, what an awesome piece of software FET is! Btw I'll be studying how to donate to the project even though getting any money out of the country is such a hassle. (As in a huge chunk is lost to taxes and fees.)

From Monday to Friday, 7 periods a day, we have a maximum of 35 periods in a week. A certain group of students have only 32 periods in a week, another group has 31 periods in a week. Naturally there's some gaps in their schedule. My question is, how can I make sure that those gaps always happen either in the beginning or the end of a school day? I suppose I could create some sort of pseudo-activity with those gaps, but I still don't know how to make FET always put those together either in the beginning or in the end of the day.

For now it's all going fine. Sometimes I get 2+2+2 and sometimes I get 3+3. I have another question, but I'm gonna open another thread to keep things organized in this public forum. This specific issue seem to have been resolved.

You might want to try only on a few activities at the beginning, generating some timetables, to make sure my solution works. You should sometimes obtain 2+2+2 and sometimes (less often) 3+3. So make a preliminary test so that you won't input all the constraints and then we discover I made a mistake in my analysis.

About that third constraint (the tag one), FET tells me that 100% weight is mandatory. Yet it's still running very fast. Maybe my school is just comparatively small. I don't seem to get any 3+3, only 2+2+2, but that's a good thing.

I'll add the rest of the groups to see what happens, but it's looking really good for now. The groups missing might be less than half of the total, and they don't share many teachers with the groups I've already added, so I don't think the added complexity will make it impossible to run.

I am sorry if you have very many subjects like this, because there are a lot of constraints to add, manually. If you know programming, you might develop a program to write the XML fet file. Its structure is simple. Or I could try to help you with automating these tasks from the FET interface as a customization, but I cannot promise.

I could code LaTeX/tikz all day long, but my experience with other languages is limited. Still, I thought about doing that, writing a script to generate my fet file! I'll read your documentation in the next month or so to automate this task, but for now I think I'll be adding it manually. Again, thank you very much for the support!!

Notes: (1) is ensuring no more than 2 activities are on the same day (FET algorithm does not allow this if you add a constraint min days between activities), and (3) - activate the constraint from the advanced settings, without worrying.

First of all, thank you very much for the help!

How exactly do I accomplish Step 3? What kind of tag should I add to what? I think I already "unlocked" it in the settings, but I'm not sure what to do now. Would it be a new tag for every subject that has a lot of periods in a week?

Hi! I want to preface this by saying that English is not my first language, and that I have Autism Spectrum Disorder. Usually I understand most things written in English, but not all the time. And I have a pretty hard time following directions unless I can understand them very unambiguously. Thank you in advance for your patience!

Reading the FET Manual, I couldn't understand how to set up a particular set of constraints. I'll give a concrete example, as follows. I teach Mathematics to 4 different groups of students. Each group should have 6 periods of Mathematics per week. Preferably, those groups should have at least 2 consecutive periods in any given day, and at most 3 consecutive periods. Ideally, they should have 2 periods in 3 different days, but 3 periods in 2 different days is also good. Having anywhere from 1 period to 4 periods in any given day is acceptable, but should be avoided if possible. Is it possible for me to set this up on FET?