$faf|1-Lordy me, it's the... $ffa|2-Article Formats $faf|1-Text file, with many fine examples! $fff by Freak of NFA With the new format of The Word comes a new control code for your article, so now's a good time to go over the lot of them so that your articles will look good and we have the minimum of formatting to do. If you're unsure about anything in this article, go into your favourite text editor and load the file "00-ArticleFormats.txt", and examine it. $ffa|1-Plain ASCII Please! $fff Please don't use a text editor that inserts control codes into the doc to make it look pretty. We require only plain ASCII text and so recomment that you use the same thing that you'd use on your Startup- Sequence, something like CygnusEd, or just plain old Ed will do. The width of the articles is set to 72 characters and the text is indented by four spaces. This means that if you format your text so that it is 72 characters wide it will appear centred on the screen. Lines longer than 72 chars WILL be displayed and will wrap around the screen on a graphical basis, so that text that comes in from the left after wrapping will be one pixel lower than that on the line it originated from. Either set CygnusEd to a 72-character width (Shift+Amiga+"6") and set word wrap to ON (Amiga+"6") or tap the spacebar 71 times, followed by a character to act as a marker, and don't go beyond this marker when you type your text. $ffa |1-Big Text! $fff Big Text is a single phrase that you want to appear in the above 24-point font. Because it is a 24-point font it takes three lines of the normal text to display, so you should leave at least 2 empty lines after it. To display a string in Big Text you simply preface it with the control string "|1-" and ensure that the "|" character is the first character on that line. For example: The string: |1-This is Big Text when placed up against the left-hand edge of the screen, will produce: $faf |1-This is Big Text $fff and two blank lines are left after it so that the bit text doesn't over- write any subsequent lines of ASCII. $ffa |2-Big Big Text! $fff Big Big Text is another single phrase, as above, but it is displayed in a stonking 60-point font for super-emphasis. As it's 60-point it needs 6 empty lines after it to ensure it doesn't overwrite anything else, and if you want to display descender characters (g, j, p, q, y) then you should leave 7 blank lined after it. Again, the display code is similar to the Big Text, you simply preface your string with "|2-" and it's all done automatically, so for example the line: |2-Blimey! when placed up against the left-hand border of your file, will produce: $faf |2-Blimey! 1- 2- 3- 4- 5- 6- 7- $fff and in this case 7 extra lines are required as there's a "y" in the string, taking up another line. In both of these bigger-text examples, no small (normal?) type can be on the same line that the bigger stuff starts on, it'll be included in the big text string, however you CAN put normal ascii on the subsequent lines if you take care that they don't overap the main text, illustrated by the numbers 1 to 7 above. $ffa |1-Clip Art: $fff Due to time constraints, Clipart is yet to be included in this version of The Word's magazine engine (many apologies to Bootblock/Terraform who spent ages inserting requests!), however it'll be first on the list of "Things To Do" for issue 11, and should see a much easier-to-use control method than before. $ffa |1-Colour!! $fff This is a new addition into the article text, every line in your article can have it's own colour assigned to it. By default your article text will be displayed in white, but you can change the current line colour at any point by inserting a standard 2-Byte RGB value into the start of the line. These values are used by all paint programs, such as Deluxe Paint and Personal Paint, and so you can find nice colour combinations beforehand by playing with these packages. As before with the large text codes, these sequences must appear at the start of the line where you want the colour change to take effect, the codes go in the format $RGB where R=Red, G=Green and B=Blue, all colours having standard values from 0 to F. Note that full green *must* be requested with $0F0 and *NOT* $F0, which would be logical. $ffa |1-What's first then? $fff Here's how you should produce your articles, this is the easiest order for less-experienced people. $faf 1> Main body of text, type your article, leave titles and subtitles as normal text for now, don't worry about spacing. Format the text to 72 columns, and split it into paragraphs where required. 2> Go to each title or subtitle in turn, and insert either "|1-" or "|2-" (do not include quotes) at the left-hand border to use the larger fonts. If you have used font 1 then ensure there are 2 blank lines AFTER the one starting "|1-", if you have used font 2 then ensure there are 7 blank lines (8 if you have used either q,y,p or j in lower case) AFTER the one starting "|2-". Ensure there are no spaces between the "-" and the start of your title. 3> Change the colour at the START of any line by inserting the hex value for it at the left border. It DOES NOT MATTER if a colour code pushes the width of your text beyond 72 colums. $aff |1-The Word Article Tester... $fff The Word Article Tester (TWAT :) can be found on disk 2, you should copy it to your C: directory (on your hard drive, non-HD owners should SERIOUSLY think about getting one!) and run it from the CLI. Simply load any .txt article file via the gaudy green requester and you can see what the file will look like in the magazine. $aff The keypresses for TWAT are as follows: C/Up - Scroll upwards through the text C/Down - Scroll downwards through the text Sh+C/Up - Scroll quickly upwards through the text Sh+C/Up - Scroll quickly downwards through the text Esc - load another file view the requester F1-F8 - Speed set to 1-8 pixels per frame F10 - Quit $fffTWAT will search the Ram Disk for a file called "TWAT.loadme" which should contain the full name (including path) of the file you want to pre-load, so you can use it via Directory Opus by creating a MENU entry: AmigaDOS C:Echo >RAM:TWAT.loadme {f} AmigaDOS C:TWAT End