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Text File | 1994-10-17 | 21KB | 473 lines

READ - A Text Browser ===================== (Siehe READ.DEU für deutsche Dokumentation) 0. Why READ? ------------ Archives, Public Domain disks and other software is often shipped with ready-to-print documentation (like this file); you just have to send it to your printer... and then you've got 100 sheets of paper less, and ribbons or toner cartridges cost money, too. So it's advisable to have a look at the documentation file first, maybe you don't need it printed. Just type TYPE PROGRAM.DOC | more <┘. But what was that just one screen ago? ****, same procedure again. Well, that's really not comfortable. You might say: 'Well, I've got a README.EXE or LIST.EXE (or something) to read texts.' Fine. Ever tried to read texts that are formatted with more than 80 columns? Sure, you can scroll horizontally, but maybe your video adapter is capable of some extended text modes... even if the manual doesn't specify them... READ uses them! Text files often contain formfeed characters. Does your lister show them as a female sign, or does it show clear page separation? Can you leap page-wise through your text? Does your browser recognize the longest line on screen and scrolls horizontally as far as necessary to display the right- most character? Does your lister recognize typical text files if you don't specify them? Can your lister be used as a replacement for MORE? Can it accept data piped in from another program? Does your lister understand UNIX files (without CR in front of LF)? Is your browser able to show text files with different charsets? Like ISO-8859-1? Can your lister be mostly operated with a mouse? Is your lister capable of maintaining bookmarks, even with several files and even over several sessions? Ever tried to list files with 1000 characters each line with other browsers? Or very large files of up to 4Gb? READ won't barf on them... Well, I hope you're convinced that READ is just what you've always wanted. 1. Requirements --------------- READ is fairly modest. It gets along with about 122k of memory (58k if you have enough EMS, and just 95k/31k if you use a small filetable), and it's already fast enough on an XT. Nearly every graphics card is supported, even in its special modes. DOS 3.xx is required, DOS 5.xx or 6.xx advisable. A hard disk is not needed. In DesqView(tm), READ runs in an 128k window if you zoom it; when idle, READ does not consume any considerable amount of CPU time in multitasking environments like DesqView and Windows. [DesqView is a registered trademark of Quarterdeck Office Systems. Windows is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corp.] 2. How to start READ -------------------- Simply specify one or more filenames on the command line, eg. READ *.TXT *.DOC One availabe switch is /S; if specified, READ takes its input from STDIN rather than files. This allows you to 'pipe in' text: DIR | READ /S READ /S <text If you didn't specify a unique file name (maybe you used wildcards), READ offers you a list of possible files (max. 128, configurable), from which you choose one with the cursor keys, PgUp, PgDn, Home, End, and Enter. Use Del to remove files from the list, or add others with Ins (of course you can give one or more templates at a time!). Abort READ with Q or Esc. If you like to, you can sort the file list alphabetically or according to file size. Just press A, Shift-A, S or Shift-S. You can also select a file with your mouse. Hold down the left button, then move mouse until the wished file is highlighted, then release the left button (to lock the mouse) and press the right button. If you press both buttons, READ quits. Save the file data with W if you want to quit READ and continue reading later on. READ notes down all chosen files, all your bookmarks and other info (the charset you used, where you were reading, etc.) and allows you to read back this info by pressing R. If you call READ next time with /R on the command line, READ will reload the previously saved file info. There is another command line switch: '/M'. This switch makes READ minimize its memory usage (well, READ does that anyway, but with this switch the file table is never larger than 16 entries, no matter what you specified in the config file). This is useful if you call READ from another program. 3. How to move round in your text --------------------------------- Use the cursor keys to scroll one line up/down or some characters left/right. Ctrl & cursor left/right uses an alternate stepsize (see configuration). PgUp/PgDn jumps one screen page up or down, Ctrl-PgUp/PgDn jumps to the nearest formfeed character in the text or to the text start/end if there are none. If you wish to jump directly to the text start/end, press Ctrl-Home/End. Home/End does the same as with your full-screen editor: it aligns the screen in a way that allows you to see the leftmost/rightmost character of the longest line on screen. Q quits immediately, Esc takes you back to the file selection. A special feature is the space bar: it moves to the next formfeed character if there's not more than one screen page to go; Otherwise, it acts like the PgDn key. You can also move round with your mouse. See the chapter on mouse configuration. Of course you can call DOS at any time: just press Alt-Z. Make sure you don't install any memory-resident programs. EXIT takes you back to READ; READ normally occupies 58k of memory when swapping to DOS (31k with a small file table, but just 29k if you have XMS or EMS memory (eg. if you installed HIMEM.SYS, EMM386.SYS or QEMM386.SYS). Searching for a key-word? Press F to specify one; press N to search again. The search is case-insensitive as long as you don't press Shift-F instead of F. Do you wish to drop bookmarks? Of course you can! Use Alt-1 to Alt-0 to mark positions within the text, then jump to those positions with 1 to 0. READ remembers the current location and the bookmarks if you choose to read another text in the meantime. Bookmarks are text-specific! You want to jump to a specific line? Type G, then enter the line number. This may take a while since READ must count the lines from the beginning of the text. If you type Shift-G, READ calculates the line number of the upmost line on the screen and the total number of lines. With long files, this may take some seconds. Of course you can abandon functions that take a while by pressing Esc. If you hit Q instead, READ quits immediately. 4. How to influence the text display ------------------------------------ Well, READ makes use of up to 48 screen modes that can be selected with F1 to F12, combined with Shift, Ctrl or Alt, but they have to be defined first (see later on). Then you can freely choose foreground and background color: use < and > for the foreground color and ( and ) for the background color. Are there Tab characters within the text that don't refer to 8 colums margins? Adjust the tab spacing with T and Shift-T. Does your text make use of the ISO-8859-1 charset? Select a charset with C. Is your text taken from the Usenet and coded ROT13? Type R. Don't you like the elevator bar to the right? Toggle it on/off with E. Your text is narrow compared to the screen wide? Indent or unindent with I and Shift-I. You prefer long lines to be wrapped-around rather than shifting the screen window horizontally? Switch to wrap-around mode with W. Note that one line is still one line internally, even if it is splitted into ten! But if you put a line "W 0 1" in your config file, READ tries to estimate the start of the screen lines in your text when you scroll back in wrap- around mode (without putting you in it at first, of course). 5. Is that all? --------------- No. READ is capable of printing, cutting and catenating text parts; charset conversions and ROT13 are taken into account if you wish. Type P to select Printing. Then select a start and an end (READ offers you a list of salient points that can be used) and choose if the text in-between is to be sent to a printer port or to be written/appended to a file. Of course you can abort printing at any time with Esc. If you wrote the text to a file that is not already in the file selection list, READ suggests it to be added. Of course you may add or remove CRs... 6. Am I to remember all these keys?! ------------------------------------ No, of course not. Just one: H. It displays a help screen. 7. Well, READ is rather cute, but I don't like XXXXX. ----------------------------------------------------- If XXXXX is a feature of READ, you can probably change it. READ has a config file that's called READ.CFG (change this if you renamed the executable, eg. if you renamed READ.EXE to LOOK.EXE you'll have to use LOOK.CFG). It's normally located in the same directory as READ.EXE itself, but you may specify another path using the environment variable READPATH=... (useful if several users use different configurations, eg. in a network). And this is what the .CFG file looks like: Each line contains one of the following: ; comment line (not evaluated) F x foreground color, hex (00-0F, default: 0) B x background color (00-07/00-0F, default: 7) Z xx color of file selection screen (two hex digits; the first one specifies the background color while the second specifies the foreground color; default: 07) M dd initial mode (eg. 1=F1, 11=F11 etc.) V dd xxxx xx dd dd mode definition. See READ.EXA for details O xx xx xx mouse settings (see below) K d d d d Keyboard orientation: 1=normal, 2=inverted. The first adjusts the cursor up/down keys, the second adjusts the PgUp/PgDn keys (0=normal, 1=QuickHelp, i.e. pressing an operational key when help is being displayed is effective to the text display). The third digit sets the help mode, and the fourth allows you to define the operation of the Esc key during text display: 0=normal, 1=if only one file in the file list, exit immediately. E d d=0: position display (elevator) off, 1=on H dd dd Horizontal stepsize; 2nd value is alternate stepsize (0-255, default 32 both) T dd Tab spacing (0-16, default 8) I dd Indent text (0-255, default 0) X dd X scale with mouse movements (0-15, default 5) Y dd Y scale with mouse movements (0-15, default 0) C dd Charset (1=IBM, etc., as in the menue) N cccccc... Default file templates (eg. '*.txt *.doc') W dd Wrap-around (0=off (default), 1=on) R d Restart search when EOF encountered. If 0, the user is prompted; if 1, yes is assumed. P d Show page boundaries (form feeds) (0=off, 1=double line (default), 2=female sign) A d Automatically write filetable on exit if 1 (as if you'd press 'W' on the file overview screen prior to exit) or not if 0 U dd File table size. min 1, max 128. Each entry needs about 240 bytes of memory. xx is a hexadecimal, dd a decimal number, and c is a character. Leading zeroes can be omitted or added. Numbers are separated by spaces or tabs; spaces and tabs are ignored where they aren't necessary. Upper-/Lowercase is of no im- portance, and empty lines are allowed. Please regard that H, T, X, and Y allow 0 to be specified. T0 makes Tabs being ignored, X0 and Y0 select the highest mouse speed possible. H0 switches off horizontal movements of the mouse. 8. Mouse operation ------------------ If and how mouse movements result in screen scrolls can be specified by the user. It's possible to only allow scrolls in a certain direction if special conditions are met (that is, left/right mouse button pressed/not pressed and Shift or Ctrl key pressed/not pressed), and these conditions don't have to be the same for all directions. The "O" line in the config file specifies the details; it has this format: O <vmode> <hmode> <bmode> <vmode>: vertical mode, range 00-FF hex <hmode>: horizontal mode, range 00-FF hex <bmode>: additional button settings <vmode> and <hmode> are hex numbers and work as follows: Bit 0: 1=enable direction, 0=disable direction Bit 1: 1=inverted scroll, 0=normal scroll Bit 2-4: normal speed settings Bit 5-7: high speed settings Bit 2/5: 0=left button not pressed, 1=left button pressed Bit 3/6: 0=right button not pressed, 1=right button pressed Bit 4/7: 0=Shift or Ctrl not pressed, 1=Shift or Ctrl pressed Slow speed has higher priority if settings for slow and high speed are identical. Note that Bit 1 of <bmode> overrides some scroll conditions if it is set. <bmode> is a hex number: Bit 0: 0=vertical fast scroll half page wise, 1=full page wise Bit 1: 0=pressing both buttons has no special effect, 1=pressing both buttons does the same as pressing Esc, no matter what the scroll conditions are. Bit 2-7: no operation; set them to 0 for compatibility with future releases. For those of you who are not familiar with hexadecimal and binary numbers, here's an example that should explain just as much as we need here. Write down the bit setting you like, starting with bit 7 and ending with bit 0, eg. "01000111". Then separate it into two halves, eg. "0100 0111". Each half is represented in hexadecimal by one digit; use this small conversion table: 0000 = 0 0001 = 1 0010 = 2 0011 = 3 0100 = 4 0101 = 5 0110 = 6 0111 = 7 1000 = 8 1001 = 9 1010 = A 1011 = B 1100 = C 1101 = D 1110 = E 1111 = F So our example is "47" hex. Some examples: O 47 D7 2 This is the default setting. It means that pressing the left button enables slow scrolling, pressing the right button enables fast scrolling, pressing both buttons simultaneously works like Esc. If neither Shift nor Ctrl is pressed, the text is only scrolled vertically, while it is only scrolled horizontally if Shift or Ctrl is pressed. Moving the mouse seems to move a piece of paper before your eyes. O A5 C9 1 Pressing the left button enables vertical scroll, pressing the right button enables horizontal scroll, and pressing both buttons allows both scroll directions at the same time. Whenever you press Shift or Ctrl with one or both of the mouse buttons, this results in faster scrolls. Moving the mouse results in text movements as if an imaginary cursor would reach the screen border in a text editor. Vertical fast scroll is page wise. O 47 47 2 This is the default setting of old releases of READ. 9. Now how about those video modes? ----------------------------------- You can define 48 different video modes which you can select with F1 to F12 - combined with Shift, Ctrl and Alt. This is of special interest if your graphics card offers extended text modes, which most VGA cards do. Just take a look at your manual, there should be a table of such modes in it. You find example definitions for several cards in READ.MOD. I've added a little program called MODES.EXE that determines your graphics card's video modes for you. See MODES.ENG for details. A definition line consists of the following: V F-key base address mode number horizontal vertical eg. V 5 b800 3 80 25 V1-V12 equals F1 to F12, V13-V24 equals Shift-F1 to Shift-F12, V25-V36 equals Ctrl-F1 to Ctrl-F12, and V37-V48 equals Alt-F1 to Alt-F12. That's enough for you? :) Base address and mode number are hexadecimals! A base address of b800 should be adequate in most cases (monochrome cards: b000). Most EGA/VGA cards are capable of additional text modes that are often not listed in the manual. READ activates them by manipulating the charset size. Just try the following modes; if you don't get a picture with the appropriate number of lines, that's bad luck. But it's most likely that it works fine. EGA: V ?? b800 80 80 43 VGA: V ?? b800 80 80 50 V ?? b800 81 80 28 Note: Replace the ?? by a decimal number between 1 and 48. It's possible that if you have a monochrome monitor you'll have to use b000 instead of b800 with these modes (e.g. with a PS2). If a video mode that's definitely supported by your graphics card doesn't work correctly this may be your monitor's fault. If it's not a MultiSync or a MultiScan, then it's rather unlikely that all modes work. If your graphics card offers text modes that are not listed in READ.MOD, please tell me about them. I'll ship them with the next version. 10. My, this function is slooooow.... ------------------------------------- Probably it's a function that other browsers don't even offer used with a text that other browsers can't process. For example, it can take up to one second to find the rightmost character in a text with lines of up to 1000 characters viewed in a high resolution display mode. But that should only happen on very slow computers; on my old XT (10 MHz), READ is fast enough. But there's one thing that can get on your nerves: if you don't have a cache installed, READ makes intense disk access showing texts with very long lines. This is due to the segmentation of the PC's memory and could only be avoided on the cost of speed (in normal operation) and space. Anyway, READ isn't slow at all! It's completely written in assembly language that is highly optimized at critical points. 11. What does READ cost me? --------------------------- READ is Shareware. That is: You may copy it as often as you want, you may give copies to friends (as long as you copy READ completely and you get no benefit from it; postage and other expenses: OK). READ is not to be delivered with commercial products without my written consent! You are granted permission to test if READ matches your requirements for a period of four weeks and to add it to your archive. I also agree with uploading READ to BBSs or ftp-sites etc. AS LONG AS IT IS NOT FOR PROFIT. (See remarks for SysOps in SYSOP.DOC). After four weeks you should have made a decision if READ is a program that you'd like to use permanently. If yes, you have to register. A donation of DM 5 (US $3 or other equivalent) should be OK for everybody and encourages me to keep working on the program, add new functionality etc., and it gives you the possibility to take influence on the development of READ since I'm thankful for any suggestions. 12. And now for the usual: Disclaimer ------------------------------------- READ has been carefully programmed and should not be able to do any damage due to its structure. However, you are using READ at your own risk. I will not be liable in any way for any damage on neither your hardware nor your software. I also do not guarantee READ to fit for any purpose; you've got four weeks to try and find out yourself. If you don't agree with these terms, don't hesitate to delete READ right now! 13. How can I contact the author? --------------------------------- Either by snail mail or by email. My snail address is: Christian Blum, Friedrich-Ebert-Str. 50, 66578 Heiligenwald, Germany You want to call? Sure, it's your money. :) Dial +49 6821 632589, but please make sure it's some decent time of day in Europe... eg. late evening. Or email to: chris@phil15.uni-sb.de or chbl@stud.uni-sb.de BTW: I also talk to non-registered users... since I want to convince you!