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Text File | 1997-08-16 | 23.5 KB | 669 lines

----------------------------------------------------------------------- NOTE: Textra 1.18 and 1.19 were bug fix releases. Textra 1.20 adds only the FREE startup announcement. No new functionality has been added since 1.17, described below. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- !!!NEW!!!!!!NEW!!!!!!NEW!!!!!! In V1.17 !!!!!!NEW!!!!!!NEW!!!!!!NEW!!! NOTE: Textra 1.17 requires AmigaDOS 2.0 or later MAJOR NEW FEATURES... o Ok, you asked for it! The most often-asked for feature is now implemented! Real-time margins, and, of course, a GUI to set margins for each paragraph. Quick Start... 1. Pull down "Project, Open New File..." (a new window will open.) 2. Pull down "Edit, Activate Margins" See the new docs file "Using Margins" for more info AND an example of a formatted margins file. GENERALLY GREAT NEW STUFF... o No longer limited to a line length of 255... any line length is now possible. o It is no longer necessary to have a selection to set a mark... marks can now be set for just cursor positions. Accordingly, the menu text has changed from "Mark selected text..." to "Set Mark...". o Improve scroll gadgets functionally and cosmetically. o SPELL-CHECKING PROGRAM AVAILABLE! Watch for Fergus Duniho's excellent AlphaSpell, which includes support for Textra. This well-done application provides convienient spell-checking in Textra at the touch of a key! The archive I use is ASpell.lha. IMPORTANT: If you use AplphaSpell with Textra, BE SURE to read the "Using AlphaSpell" doc file. THE AREXX INTERFACE... o TEXTRAVERSION returns "1 17 13" o New commands for getting and setting the current window's font (See RexxCommand.doc) BUGS FIXED IN 1.17... o Fixed problems with selection updates if the line was scrolled at all horizontally. Different bugs caused normal and columnar selections to be incorrectly rendered. o Added the busy cursor in a few places that needed it. o When using the ASL file requester, the "Insert File..." requester could show up pointing at the wrong drawer. o Fixed problems in MARKS management that would cause marks to become invisible or out-of-sync. o Fixed problem where the shadow file would become invalid if last character of disk file was neither EOL or visible ASCII and the document was saved. o Fixed screen updating problem when cutting large blocks of text near end of file. o Fixed printed page format if skip perforations is enabled... puts more even separation area at top and bottom of page. (Before, was starting printing on the very first line, and putting 8 blank lines at the end!) o The SELECTTO ARexx command would crash if the specified column/line position was out-of-range. o The LEFT and RIGHT ARexx commands had some subtle problems which could cause subsequent commands to behave unexpectedly. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Was new in V1.16... MAJOR NEW FEATURES... o Added Columnar Cut & Paste!! Of course, in Textra, it's Graphical! Hold down an ALT key before you drag-select an area... then Cut or Copy. --OR-- Hold down an ALT Key before you Paste. o Added Textra.font. o Added CBM Installer script, put old installer script in the "scripts" drawer. (move the old one back up a level to execute, like if you don't have the CBM Installer program.) GENERALLY GREAT NEW STUFF... o The system "Printer Preferences" is now accessible from the Textra "Print Preferences" requester via the "SYSTEM" button. If your Preferences are where God & Commodore put them originally, this will work just fine. o Added a new 'docs' file... 'TextraScripts.doc' which describes all of the scripts that come in the 1.16 release. See the file v1.16.NewScripts.doc for the latest new-file information. o Added "Reverse" search option to Find requester. o Asl requester positions are now persistent and re-appear in the same position the next time one is opened. o Added graphic to "About..." Requester. NEW PREFERENCES STUFF... o Add string-gadget which will accept up to 16 characters to Edit Preferences "Double-Click Selects Alpha-numeric" selection gadget. Any non-numeric entered here will be considered alphanumeric for the purposes of double-click text selection. THE AREXX INTERFACE... o TEXTRAVERSION returns "1 16 12" o See V1.16.NewScripts.doc for new AREXX scripts. o No new commands in this version. BUGS FIXED IN 1.16... o Fixed a problem that caused print page formatting to be incorrect on some printers if the "left margin" was set to anything but 1. o Fixed text selection irregularities when drag-selecting near the top or bottom of a file. o Editor would hang if an attempt was made to print an empty file. o Fixed infrequent but possible crash when a line was wider than the window; crash would occur only during entire window updates (like when the window was expanded by the grow gadget). o The "Project, Print Selected Lines" menu item printed one line too few. o INSERTFILE was not documented in RexxCommand.doc ------------------------------------------------------------------- Was new in V1.15... MAJOR NEW FEATURES... o Textra now includes a full-featured interface to the popular SAS/C development environment. The best news is that the Textra interface was developed and generously contributed by SAS Institute's Jim Cooper. If Textra becomes the national text editor, Jim has his own room in the Bahamas mansion :-) See 'docs/SASC.ReadMe'. o The new MARKS facility allows you to assign any selected text to a logical name of up to 31 chars long. Any number of assignments can be made. A convienient GUI-based interface is provided (of course), as well as complete ARexx command equivalency. o Users may now opt to use the ASL File requester in place of the native Textra file requester (choose in Edit Preferences). Default is the Asl requester. o Under 2.0 or later, the CUT, COPY and PASTE functions now operate with the standard clipboard device (unit 0). o This is the first version to be low-memory-failure-proof! ANY MEMORY REQUEST FAILURE WILL FLASH THE SCREEN 3 TIMES in 1 second, then wait until the memory comes available. GENERALLY GREAT NEW STUFF... o Textra now supports just about any mail reader known to Amiga-Man! Textra 1.15 sports both a command-line option as well as an ARexx command which tell Textra to "hold" the calling program until the specified window is closed. (See Textra.doc and RexxCommands.doc). Even when Textra is "blocking" an external program in this way, you are free to open, close, or edit other files! o Program now takes note if a file is MSDOS format or Amiga format and will preserve the format when saved. This means that Textra is now MSDOS-text-format-compatible and can be used across MSDOS bridges like CrossDOS to edit MSDOS files. You can even determine/change the current format of a file via the SAVE AS... requester. o Added the ability to write-protect a window so that it cannot be accidentally altered while open. o Before you SAVE a file over an existing disk file, Textra now performs some checks that nothing else has messed with the file on disk while the editor has held a copy in ram. o Under 2.0 and later, Textra will display the 2.x-style 'busy pointer'. NEW PREFERENCES STUFF... o Removed "Strip extra blank lines on SAVE" gadget from Edit Preferences requester due to an incompatibility with Marks. If anybody cares if this goes away permanently, let me know. o Choosing between the use of the ASL and native TEXTRA file requesters is done via the Edit Preferences requester.. NEW AREXX COMMANDS AND SCRIPTS... o TEXTRAVERSION returns "1 15 12" o GET file info - return info about mem & disk sizes, etc. o GET window info - return dimensions, changed status, etc. o GET window <num> - get the 'window-pointer' by index o PREFS WrapFind [option] - set FIND command behavior o PLACEWINDOW - relocate the window to anywhere onscreen o LINE, LINE1, COLUMN, COLUMN1 and GOTOXY1 - easy new cursor commands. The '1' variants are for use in interfaces which require 1's-based cursor addressing. o Added the 3 Marks-related ARexx commands: MARKSELECTION, GOTOMARK and DELETEMARK. o STATUSTEXT - display a status message in the status line (click on status line to restore normal status line) BUGS FIXED IN 1.15... o Fixed a rather serious bug that was always in "Insert File...". If you inserted a file that was 5 lines long, it would wreck memory in the machine, most probably resulting in you going down in flames. Actually, it would do this while inserting a file that was (multiple-of-256)+5 lines long (5, 261, 517, etc.). o In some cases, if you responded CANCEL to the system "Insert volume xxxx into any drive" requester, the editor would crash. o Fixed a problem preventing the state of the Status Line Preferences setting from being saved. o Fixed a crash if an attempt to open a new window failed. Now no dire effects will occur... the new window just doesn't open. ------------------------------------------------------------------- Was new in V1.14 MAJOR NEW FEATURES... o Registered users may now disable the 2.5 second registration notice at startup. Textra will not present it if it finds a file called "ram:Textra.Reg.Known". I suggest you add a line to your startup-sequence similar to: date >ram:Textra.Reg.Known o Added the status line and a Preference item for enabling and disabling it. o The ARexx requester now permits 10 strings. The F7 through F10 keys activate four of them, as before. Additionally, Shift-F7 through Shift-F10 now activate another four. o By default, CTRL+any alphabetic key will execute an ARexx script named after the key. For example: CTRL-A will lookfor and execute a script called CTRLA.textra. CTRL+HELP will try to run CTRLhelp.textra. EVERY ALPHABETIC KEY ON THE KEYBOARD IS THEREFORE USER-DEFINABLE. o If you double click on any of these characters... ( ) < > [ ] { } Textra will search through the file in the appropriate direction for a "balanced match" (handles nested substrings). This is great, for example, when programming C and you want to see everything that the { you're staring at encompasses. Textra will highlight everything forward to the balancing } character. (If you are in Textra 1.14 or later, try double-clicking on either of the above { or } chars or parens, etc.) Note that you can also find corresponding double-quote characters "like around this", but Textra assumes you are clicking on the LEADING double-quote. (In other words, it will only conduct a forward search for a corresponding double-quote). GENERALLY GREAT NEW STUFF... o By special request, at startup Textra now checks the relative average color intensities of the active intuition screen and if SAME AS wb 2.0+, (color1 darkest, color0 medium, color2 brightest), it will use shaded gadgets and 2.0-style checkbox imagery (even if under 1.3 and earlier). Earlier versions checked if 2.0 or later, use shaded gadgets. o Right-Amiga-W will now close the current window (same as the CLOSEWINDOW gadget). o Shortly after Textra opens its first window (and before any file requester is presented), Textra will look for and execute an ARexx script called 'Startup.textra'. o At startup, Textra now also checks that ARexx is actually running before enabling the ARexx... menu item. (It used to just check that both the RexxSysLib.library and its own message port opened successfully). NEW PREFERENCES STUFF... o The new Status Line may be enabled/disabled via the Edit Preferences requester. NEW AREXX COMMANDS AND SCRIPTS... o Added the QUITTEXTRA ARexx command. See RexxCommand.doc o Added new DelToEnd.textra, DelToStart.textra and DelWholeLine.textra scripts. All deal with deleting the current line or portions thereof. o New StartTextra.rexx script for using Textra with Paul Kienitz's Q-Blue Offline Mail Reader program. (with the script in your rexx: dir, use 'rx StartTextra RAM:Bluedit' for your Editor command.) Actually, StartTextra.rexx is a general purpose script that any application may use to easily load a file into Textra, (if already open, it doesn't open it again, but fronts the existing one). BUGS FIXED IN 1.14... o When a window would close, a bug would cause the newly-selected window to be incorrectly chosen. o A bug was fixed in determining invalid F1 Toggle-Size parameters if the Workbench screen left edge was greater than 0. o Fixed a crash that could occur if you were using a font with a width less than 8. o UNDO operations were not resetting menu states. o The CLOSEWINDOW ARexx command was quite likely to crash. The only place this would show up in the release package was at the end of the Tutorial.textra script, where the tutorial window closes. o There was another problem with the CLEAR Arexx command. If it was followed by certain commands like NEWLINE the editor could crash ---------------------------------------------------------------- Was new in V1.13 MAJOR NEW FEATURES... o Supports any fixed-spaced font. (See the 'Fonts' section below) o Reworked event handling such that all tasks are independant of each other. This means you can edit in one window while another is printing while another is running an ARexx script. Multi-processing! o Added "Print Selected Lines" menu item o Added "Insert File..." menu item (and an ARexx command, see below) o Added 'Install_Textra' program to release package. o Added Tutorial ARexx script to release package. GENERALLY GREAT NEW STUFF... o If "Print File..." is run on the only open window, a requester asks if a second window should be opened. o When you manually close a window, TEXTRA will now activate one of the remaining TEXTRA windows. o Print algorithms now correctly process manually imbedded Form-Feed (Ctrl-L) chars. o TEXTRA ARexx scripts are now nestable, they can be used in a script just as they are used in a string gadget. o Buttons are now rendered as being "sunken" when clicked on. Booleans (Radios) now "popup" & "popdown" when clicked. This is 2.0 Workbench compatible. (no change under 1.3 & earlier) o PARAGRAPH.textra sped up by a factor of, geez, several times. o Properly handles the file's ARCHIVE bit on file modification o Enhanced About... Requester. o OPEN BY NAME... now preloads string requester with selected text. FONTS... o TEXTRA can now support different fonts both in the window title-bars and in the window text. The fonts must be non- proportional. o Added the ASL font requester (needs asl.library) o Can change the font in the current window. o Can set and save the font that will be used for newly- opened windows. NEW PREFERENCES STUFF... o Preferences can now be set to strip extra blank lines at the end of a file when SAVE-ing. (slows down the SAVE operation, though) o New Double-Click selection configurability added to Edit Preferences dialog. Now can select either contiguous non-whitespace characters or Alpha-Numeric strings. o Can now disable the "Skip Paper-Perforations" feature via TEXTRA's Printing Preferences dialog o Added 'F1 Size Toggle' to Edit Preferences. This allows the user to configure an alternate 'size' for the F1 key (other than full screen). (Particularly handy in 2.0 with virtual screens larger than the monitor screen size or in SuprerHires 1280x400 mode.) o Edit Preferences now have the Rt-Amiga-E key equivalent. o Added 'Eject Page' configurable items to 'Print Preferences' o Can set and save the font that will be used for newly- opened windows. NEW AREXX COMMANDS... o INSERTFILE "filename" (at current cursor/select location) o CLOSEWINDOW (close the currently selected window) o CHECKCANCEL (allows user to signal script to exit) o RETURNPROMPT & RETURNPROMPTN - allow an ARexx script to interact (prompt for a response, wait for RETURN) with the current window o PREFS command now has 'Alphanumeric' and 'AlphanumericHops' attributes. See RexxCommand.doc. o TEXTRAVERSION returns 1 13 5 BUGS FIXED IN 1.13... o If the cursor was at the very end of a file, the DEL key would crash. This is, of course, fixed. (I am so embarrassed!) o When TABS were present in a line, it was possible for repetative Search & Replace operations to miss a second occurence on the same line, if it was close enough to the first. (Got that?) o ARexx "next word"-type commands no longer have to ignore 0-9, now can operate AlphaNUMERICALLY if set with PREFS command. (see RexxCommand.doc) o When reading in a file, Form-Feeds no longer trigger "doesn't seem to be text" message. o The "Please Note..." requester that appears when ARexx has sent TEXTRA an "Unknown Command" now waits for user to click OK. o Fixed bug where line-indenting was lost if cursor was at the beginning of line and RETURN was pressed. o Fixed problem in ARexx interface that would cause adeadlock if 'address "TEXTRA"' was used within a .textra script o Fixed problem when searching for one or more TAB chars (and nothing else)... select range would end up incorrect o New files no longer have the 'EXECUTE' protection-bit set. (now just 'DELETABLE, WRITABLE and READABLE are default). o Fixed crash that could occur sometimes after the ARexx CLEAR command. o SHIFT-extend of select range would only work with the LEFT shift key. o Fixed crash if window close gadget was double-clicked. o Fixed problem with FINDFILE and OPENFILE ARexx commands. in that NEW files, not yet saved, would not be found. FINDFILE would return 0 and OPENFILE would open a new window with the same name. ---------------------------------------------------------------- was new in V1.12... o Added UNDO o Greater stability in low-memory situations o change SAVE-AS to accept a dir name like OPEN by NAME... The 'USE LIST' button is therefore gone. o Continuous scroll in file requester scroll gadgets o 5-10 times faster searching for text o Added OPENFILE, FINDFILE, SELECTWINDOW, SAVEAS and TEXTRAVERSION to arexx i/f command set o Slightly cleaner 'resize window' algorithm (when not large enough for a requester) o Added 2 more possible diskbuttons in file requesters, now can have up to 8 o Requesters which can automatically pop up when quitting (such as the "SAVE CHANGES?" one) now also do a WindowToFront() o Changed F6 so that it toggles between the last 2 selected files (instead of cycling through the entire list). o Cleaned up HELP...a little easier to read. o Fixed 'double-draw' when a requester was opened immediately after its window was fronted. o If a second TEXTRA is launched, it will send the appropriate OPENFILE AREXX commands to the first, then exit. (That brain-damaged "TEXTRA is already running" system requester is gone!) NOTE: AREXX needs to be installed for this to work. o While reading in a file, and funny chars are seen in the first 32 bytes, put up a requester asking if loading should continue. (funny=not visible, white, lf or cr) (Hmmm...should also check for cls) o New PARAGRAPH script for paragraph formatting...replaces the WRAPAT script ---------------------------------------------------------------- V1.11... Graphics/gadget-imagery now Workbench 2.0-oriented. (Under 1.3 and earlier, requesters & gadgets now appear primarily monochrome.) New WrapAt.textra AREXX script. Select a paragraph or paragraphs, then try WRAPAT 60. (Assuming paragraphs are separated by a blank line) While printing, TEXTRA v1.11 should not significantly slow down other processes anymore. Fixed a bug where, if an AREXX script called GET CURSOR CHAR when the cursor was at the end of a line, very strange (and usually bad) things would happen later on. ---------------------------------------------------------------- V1.10... The BIG, BIG news is, of course the AREXX port (TREXXTRA?!!?). See the file RexxCommand.doc for details on the TEXTRA/AREXX command set available and other special notes. Added Preference item for stripping CR from CR,LF sequences when reading in the file. Added horiz scroll gadget. Fixed 'Open by Name...' to NOT ask for floppy, if ejected. Changed up & down arrow keys to center the cursor line if off-screen. Made 'keyboard help' prettier, more complete. Cleaned-up arrow gadget images Change window sizing so that if necessary, last line of file will 'move down' do a new 'bottom of window'. FIXED In V1.10... Enforcer CLEAN! (At least *I* can't squeeze any more outta it!) (Let me know if *YOU* can!) Fixed printing problem with leading space at beginning of each line Trying to exceed a line length of 255 used to crash. not anymore. 'Go To Line' on last line (the always-empty one) would cause it to become selected all the way 'cross the screen (inferring a next line). This would cause bad array pointers and the like to be used for virtually any further operations, and ultimately a crash. fixed. Up- or down-arrow into middle of TAB would cause problems With only one blank line at the eof, select FROM past eol on line last-2 TO last. Hitting backspace caused last-1 to stay visible. Fixed problem where double-click, even if curs pos changed, would not allow drag select on second click. Under 2.0, in Super-Hires (1280-wide screen), the F1 key didn't enlarge to full-width (just half-width, 640) AND didn't return to small size when hit again. If, while opening a file, a line was longer than 255, the open would stop at that line with no error message. The (partial) file could be written out, destroying the (complete) original. Now, Textra wraps the line and informs the user of such and the open continues to completion. Incorporated Commodore's CloseWindowSafely() algorithm. Earlier stuff could, on rare occasion, crash. New stuff also feels much 'snappier' when closing windows (takes much less time). Fixed problem where funny text would sometimes corrupt "open file" requester when diving down into a directory that was double-clicked. Fixed random write when closing files individually (thanks, enforcer) Fixed random read resulting in possible (but unlikely) crash in some instances of string gadget usage. (thanks, enforcer)