These buttons connect to web pages
The “low-down” on eWriter, a 21st century eTypewriter...

Pick up the tool and turn it over in your hands!

Well, you wouldn’t pick up a typewriter and do much handling while looking it over. But if you did, here’s what you’d see peering through our metaphor. eWriter’s a 32-bit 21st century eTypewriter (for the writer, not the clerk typist) for use in Windows 95+ and Windows NT. The box is a .zip file. You unzip it into its own directory and it’s ready to go. There is no setup or install routine and nothing is ever, even during use, written into the Registry or into any .ini file other than its own configuration file.

When you’ve put it down and pulled up your chair (unzipped the file and fired up ewriter.exe), you seem to have come into a text editor or word processor (eWriter has features of both). No editors are open and you see a lot of gray and a few menu items. And there’s an info-plaque up in your face. You’re going to see a lot of info-plaques when you write on, or in, this typewriter of the (near) future. This one tells you that if you have 640 x 480 screen resolution, you might find that if an editor is open the close button [X] for the file drops down to a second line. That can cause problems and the plaque gives a (set one time) work-around. Other info-plaques will guide you through complex processes or use of conceptually unfamiliar features.

The way in... You might figure that your best first step is to reach for the Help menu, and there’s nothing wrong with that, except that even looking at it might be a bit like having stepped onto the bridge of Cap’n Janeway’s Voyager. WinHelp, eManual, Info-plaques, Helpful Websites, and ...an About plaque. Uhmmm. Looking around the room, so to speak, might involve working your way from (your) left to right through those menus. Ending up, of course, at the Help menu. That’s better. But to get the most out of it, you’ll want to poke at things and to see more of what’s there just under the virtual surface of your screen. So, click the file menu. Look at what’s on it, and click New file.

Now, look at that File menu again. You can see that many new items are listed, offering tempting adventures. And you’ll make still other items visible as you “customize” eWriter for your own use. Some of the more unfamiliar items will throw up info-plaques. Now, you can arrow right. The Edit menu (and the Format menu) will be your main coaches as you try your hand at writing. You’ve already noticed that there isn’t a toolbar with illustrated buttons. Now, you see that there are no nested menus. Everything is up front. EWriter is just a typewriter with a mouse. Look at the hot keys for Clipboard action. Before Bill Gates regressed to bad Mac emulations, cut, copy and paste were Shift+Del, Ctrl+Ins, and Shift+Ins. That made sense. These functions were grouped with the navigation keys which, with Shift+, do the selecting that goes with Clipboard actions. But my reason for going back to these keyings is that I need the Ctrl+C, V, and X for “batch typing” and textwriter functionality. Note that the Del key (and the Backspace key) will not delete selected text. Use Ctrl+Del to do that — which makes sure it is on purpose.

Read through the tall middle section carefully. You do a lot of text handling with these items, and most of it is on keys. You get your first encounter with “frame punctuation” here. That is, you throw some punctuation marks out ahead of your writing and write out to the mark. Ever forget that you were in a “parenthetical remark” or a “quote”? Well, try Ctrl+( (really Ctrl+9) or Ctrl+" (really Ctrl+'). Read the list. You not only get both marks, but the cursor is between them, ...so you just keep typing. Everything in eWriter is set up for inline punctuating ...as you write.

The next section was the first HTML punctuation I put into eWriter (or its 16-bit elder sib, PocketPad). Just the Start and End tags with the cursor placed inside. I still use them a lot in several different situations. And they made a heck of a difference from the beginning, used with swappable “boilerplate cylinders.”

Just glance at HTML, Keys, JScr, Meta, XML, Tagset, and RTF. Don’t be intimidated. There’s a lot there. But a little familiarity will help immensely. To be sure, you’ll have to get some grammar books if you are going to write documents (i.e., eletters, web scrolls) using HTML, Javascript, XML-defined tagsets, Rich Text Format (used for WinHelp topics), or anything else.

The Search menu has the usual Find, Find Next, and Replace. It also has some tools for “research writing.” They all have to do to getting into areas of the text you are working on. The Format menu, like the Edit menu, is where you handle your actual writing. You can turn word-wrap on and off, and set the column. You can set the Tab interval ...on the fly. Tabs don’t insert ASCII #9s into the text. Spaces are inserted. Every application will read and display the intervals the same way. Tab and Shift+Tab will float over text. Ctrl+Tab (or Tab at a line end or an empty line) will insert spaces. Use tabs to travel. By default, Ctrl+Tab gets a confirm box. You toggle this on or off on the format menu.

You can work with white text on a black ground, restful to sensitive eyes. Or you can have larger text on screen. In either case, you click the item so it is checked on the menu. Then, every file you load will have that setup. If you want it for the file you are working on, use File/Reload.

On the Window menu, you see some of how you can move among the many files you may wish to work with. In fact, if you have a set you want to bring up from time to time, use Save and Restore Desktop. But notice that for the first nine files, Alt+# will bring that file to the top. For any over (or under) nine, use Alt+0, type the number, and hit OK. The default number is the highest number currently in use. Another way to travel is to click the status bar. Windows’ Ctrl+F6 and Shift+Ctrl+F6 work, and clicking on the list on the menu works.

That brings us to ...tools. You’re going to meet a lot of input dialogs here. So, the first tool is Pathfinder. It’s an open dialog, but instead of opening the found file, it puts the path\filename onto the clipboard for pasting into input boxes or text. Without it, setting up your tools c’n be a bear. You’ve got a tool box. Open any programs in there. It keeps a history list. Then, you can add two programs to the bottom of the tool menu with Add Tool. These will have hot keys. And very important is the Browsers and Mailers lists. you’ll live with these.

I forgot to mention that the textwriter is, in fact, a “duplex” machine. The writing end is ...well, a textwriter. The reading and printing end is a (web) browser. You write a manuscript or “engine” copy, and the browser will present an “interface” copy. So browsers and the mailers that get the manuscript from one part of the machine to the other (usually) are very necessary. One other thing is pretty important. One of my user-set tools at the bottom is Winword (7.0). that’s my spell checker. To build one in, I’d have to buy it. And distribute DLLs or, worse, an OCX. I don’t want anything outside my .exe and I haven’t any income from programming to invest. I’m an amateur and won’t charge for my product. Anyway, Winword is great because I don’t have to run the spell checker. I do a “Copy All” from eWriter. I fire up Winword and paste the file. All the spelling to check is underlined in red. I go down the page. When I come to one that does require change, Alt+Tab puts me back in eWriter. I use Shift+F3 to find the offending word, change it, Save (F2), and use Alt+Tab to go back to Winword. I could’ve written a bit of fancy OLE code and snuck in and out of Winword. But I still miss the handle on my old Underwood. I like to do things myself. I figure anybody that would download something called a typewriter has some of that in his or her nature.

Check out Boilerplate Sets. This is going to be one of your main power tools.

Finally, ...Help... Well, here we are. Now, you can tip-toe down that stack of “Getting started” info-plaques. The text is collected on a page in the eManual, but it’s more fun and useful to get into the habit of checking those on-the-spot mini-manuals. On menus, a label that has an ellipsis before the colon tosses up one of these plaques too. Then, there’s the WinHelp and the eManual. But don’t bury yourself in reading material. Just know what’s here, mainly, and go back to that New file you opened up. Try a little writing, or ewriting, if you want to think of it that way. You c’n write anything. My wife (April Corioso) has been writing the library site at Los Medanos College because nobody was doing it (beyond endless planning). She’s writing the site in eWriter, though everybody urged PageMill upon her. So, we’ve done some of PageMill’s tricks, like tables within tables, the outer one sometimes bein’ commented out when, on the Hours page, there’s no “outrigger” notices. If you c’n design it in PageMill, you c’n write it in eWriter. And without “hand coding” so much as simply setting up word processor type customizations.

Or

The Once and Future Typewriter

From a writer’s point of view, we’ve very odd software devices to write with, these being text “editors” and word “processors” or, as we near the millennium, “HTML Authoring tools.” Huh? I figure that if you’re going to use it to type out what you’re writing, half in your head, half in your hands, it’s a typewriter. We’ll change that name a bit, though. The gadget was named by people focused on the typist’s slapping keys to swing the striker. Print the character on the paper. Writers came along later, made the gadget theirs. And even clerk typists learned not to be conscious of keying the individual characters. So, the software typewriter c’n be called a textwriter. But the real “textwriter,” is the guy or gal sitting hunched over that keyboard and, now, since the eTypewriter is a typewriter with a mouse, a mouse pad. Click and tap. Typing is a bit different nowadays.

Now, once I’ve got a textwriter set out on the table for you, I run into a problem. There are half a dozen mind-shifts to make. And each requires the others as context for real understanding. So, I’ll just jump in. I’m going to break this history up (below) into three layers. This is because of an evolution of ...well, punctuation.

Widespread use of HTML as a “tagset” used for marking up a (very inclusive) “text” for formatted display has set up a context for a different sense of writing. HTML is a tagset, so far as the user is concerned. It’s defined in SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language). What “Generalized” seems to mean is just that specific tagsets can be defined. The relatively new XML (eXtensible markup language) is not a tagset like HTML, but is a sort of SGML-lite-plus. Out on the web, it’s going to mean, once the vendors’ grip c’n be busted, that we’ll form into communities of people who share tagsets for our particular communications. Microsoft and Netscape aren’t ever going to help, whatever they “announce.”

What our use of XML wants is a program like Opera. This is a small, fast, and I understand a pretty good, little browser that’s an answer to the bloatware browsers of the battling vendors. It does what needs doing and, at least a release back, was zipped up into a file that’d fit on a 3.5” floppy disk for carrying around. A pair of guys in a Norwegian garage? Maybe they’d do a companion product. (For gawd’s sake, don’t merge ’em.) XOpera. This would handle all the HTML (well, up through about 3.2, before vendor craziness started stuffing in bloated kitchen sinks) and, then, merge in the ability to handle the built up tagsets that communities forming into virtual intranets on the internet compose. Do the “well-formed” on the fly set handling, read DTDs, read Styles ...but allow style by ref to the HTML tags in a tacked on Prolog. And so forth ...since this isn’t what I’m writing about here.

Back to the tagsets... I was reading a book on XML and the author was talking about the use of tags in the word processors’ proprietary files to govern the display and other features. He was citing this as a beginning of the use of tags. I recognized tags, however, and knew we’d all been using them since grammar school. Our punctuation marks are just such a set. And they aren’t just formatting tags, either, though they aren’t the “semantic” tags that XML-defined sets provide. That’s because “text” is a musical notation of sorts, it captures talk and gesture, speech and suggesture. Our tags mark, mainly, pauses, and, then, for the live folk, what’s going on in subjective experience even as there’s a pause in the sounding. A lot of that near “semantic” meaning comes from the context, of course. In any case, this is an early use of a tagset. The word processor builders needed more complex sets of marks, to indicate shifts (in written form) to italics, boldface, and such, and to indicate hyphenation, word-wrap, and all the rest of it. The old WordPerfect (DOS) presented a view of the tagged file in “Reveal Codes” and just about any editing you did was a lot easier if you watched the tags (in square brackets) moving around.

The demand that things be available in a universal tagset, starting with HTML and maybe, hopefully, involving XML-derived augmentations (and not the bloated DHTML or even HTML 4 type of vendor madness and greed), word processors may come to the point where eWriter is right now. You can read the “engine” text or the “display” text and know the driving force of the resultant meaning. No proprietary, hidden, and unreadable formats.

This is going to change the world. and it’s going to change you and me, deep inside. Do you have a personal library? Books that are dog-eared, highlighted, with marginbalia and pasted in notes? Your “personal copies” of books, periodicals, journals, papers. Well, think about your personal library of hooked in HTML’d papers and such. Not just copies, but personal copies. You know to get a copy by viewing source (reading manuscript). You save it, save images, sounds, etc., with it. It’s just a copy. But you can work on that source. It’s digital, so you better put a note at the top of the body ...just as you would write in a fly-leaf. Now, you can highlight, add marginalia, notes, links, ...and whatever your imagination makes possible and your study needs make desirable. And you can keep a pristine original beside it in your library. Take a book, like the eWriter eManual. It’s not a thing any more, not even a file. On your disk, it may be a directory (into which you unzip it). But, really, it’s a lot of floating materials. The binding is only links. I said at the beginning of this note that there were quite a few conceptual shifts you’ll be making. You c’n see ...it’s going to be serious.

The Three Layers of eWriter

Textwriter: PocketPad, that elder sibling, began for use in Win 3.1 and all the 3.1 handlers like Warp and Mac. A Notepad replacement. All the files you wanted, though each editor could carry only Notepad’s 32K. I wrote some assembly code to handle “paging” for gang-loading, working on, and, periodically, joining back into a whole file. Had that on the tools menu. you c’n take a look at PocketPad if you want. It’s free, though without the Beta numbering trick. It just says that through 1.9x it will have no price, no registration. I haven’t updated it in a while. Certainly not any of the XML preparation.

It was as a Notepad replacement that I built in all my word-wrap and Tab-handling. And many other things. But by 1.1 PocketPad was already becoming an htmlwriter.

HTMLwriter: This is the live center, the main layer, as it were. From PocketPad 1.0 and from eWriter’s birthing ...my battle moved from poor, old Notepad to the “HTML authoring tools.” You can’t write in these “editors.” If you want an anchor, you deal with a dialog and a gang of parameters. Right away, you’re a programmer of sorts. Or a designer, perhaps, hand coding for want of a PageMill. In eWriter, when you want an anchor, you’ll likely type Ctrl+NumPad#1. An input box comes up with HREF=" highlighted. You add an URL and a second quote mark (or type NAME="ref") and hit OK. Another box comes up and you type the clickable text. OK that and the whole link or anchor is printed out. It’s inline just like commas and semicolons are. You don’t stop writing, but simply write some bits and pieces into input boxes instead of onto the page. You come out at the end and just keep going....

XMLwriter: All I read seems to be about how it makes machine handling of documents and data go, but a big source of pride in the builders is that the tags are meaningful to human and machine readers alike. So I figure someday people are going to be writing text and HTML’d text with XML “elements” embedded and intended for machine extraction and human reading — when “doubled” reading (reading the manuscript) is involved. I’ve lots of XML punctuation (useful, mainly, when writing DTDs). But on the Tagset menu I’ve power tools for document writers. And, invisible, there’s my main invention, the menu’d “tagset.” Read the labels. And try Add Tag. You build a tagset on the menu, and, later, once you know the format, you can swap tagsets in and out of ewriter.ini.* This gives a writer access to a core tagset just as the HTML menu gives that writer access to the core HTML tagset. Of course, you can use it for HTML tags with some advantages over using boilerplate. It’s designed so you can define either type of “empty” element, for instance. But this is the heart of eWriter as an xmlwriter.

Gene Fowler
acorioso@ccnet.com
First draft: October 1, 1998