When youve 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 theres an info-plaque up in your face. Youre 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 theres nothing wrong with that, except that even looking at it might be a bit like having stepped onto the bridge of Capn Janeways 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. Thats better. But to get the most out of it, youll want to poke at things and to see more of whats there just under the virtual surface of your screen. So, click the file menu. Look at whats 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 youll 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. Youve already noticed that there isnt 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. Dont be intimidated. Theres a lot there. But a little familiarity will help immensely. To be sure, youll 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 dont 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. Youre going to meet a lot of input dialogs here. So, the first tool is Pathfinder. Its 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 cn be a bear. Youve 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. youll 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). thats my spell checker. To build one in, Id have to buy it. And distribute DLLs or, worse, an OCX. I dont want anything outside my .exe and I havent any income from programming to invest. Im an amateur and wont charge for my product. Anyway, Winword is great because I dont 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 couldve 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 its 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, theres the WinHelp and the eManual. But dont bury yourself in reading material. Just know whats 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 cn write anything. My wife (April Corioso) has been writing the library site at Los Medanos College because nobody was doing it (beyond endless planning). Shes writing the site in eWriter, though everybody urged PageMill upon her. So, weve done some of PageMills tricks, like tables within tables, the outer one sometimes bein commented out when, on the Hours page, theres no outrigger notices. If you cn design it in PageMill, you cn write it in eWriter. And without hand coding so much as simply setting up word processor type customizations.
Or
Now, once Ive 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, Ill just jump in. Im 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. Its 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, its going to mean, once the vendors grip cn be busted, that well form into communities of people who share tagsets for our particular communications. Microsoft and Netscape arent 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 thats 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 thatd fit on a 3.5 floppy disk for carrying around. A pair of guys in a Norwegian garage? Maybe theyd do a companion product. (For gawds sake, dont 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 isnt what Im 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 wed all been using them since grammar school. Our punctuation marks are just such a set. And they arent just formatting tags, either, though they arent the semantic tags that XML-defined sets provide. Thats 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, whats going on in subjective experience even as theres 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 its 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 HTMLd 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. Its just a copy. But you can work on that source. Its 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. Its not a thing any more, not even a file. On your disk, it may be a directory (into which you unzip it). But, really, its 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 youll be making. You cn see ...its going to be serious.
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 Notepads 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 cn take a look at PocketPad if you want. Its free, though without the Beta numbering trick. It just says that through 1.9x it will have no price, no registration. I havent 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 eWriters birthing ...my battle moved from poor, old Notepad to the HTML authoring tools. You cant write in these editors. If you want an anchor, you deal with a dialog and a gang of parameters. Right away, youre a programmer of sorts. Or a designer, perhaps, hand coding for want of a PageMill. In eWriter, when you want an anchor, youll 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. Its inline just like commas and semicolons are. You dont 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 HTMLd text with XML elements embedded and intended for machine extraction and human reading when doubled reading (reading the manuscript) is involved. Ive lots of XML punctuation (useful, mainly, when writing DTDs). But on the Tagset menu Ive power tools for document writers. And, invisible, theres my main invention, the menud 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. Its 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