DisplayDA is FREE. You may NOT sell DisplayDA, or include DisplayDA with anything else you sell, without my permission. You may GIVE DisplayDA away, just don't remove this text, or my Copyright notices. You may customize DisplayDA's main screen to show whatever text you like (see below for instructions). Bulletin Board Systems, including commercial BBS' such as CompuServe, and Non-Profit user's groups, such as BMUG, may distribute DisplayDA.
DisplayDA is a standard DA. It works well with Suitcase™. You can have more than one copy installed at a time, as long as each copy has a different name. I have three installed to show me different bits of information. You probably received DisplayDA with it already set up to display something useful. I wrote it originally to show an Apple System Errors table I put together.
The return and enter keys page down the display, the tab key toggles between this and the main display, and the period or q key closes DisplayDA. The Copy and Cut menu commands, and their standard keyboard equivalents clover-c and clover-x, will copy all the text, including any style information, to the clipboard. On Macs with the extended ADB keyboard, the home, end, page up, page down, up arrow, and down arrow keys do just what you would expect them to.
The rest of this text is about customizing DisplayDA to show information of your own choosing. If you are not interested in customizing DisplayDA, you've read all you need to read; just click on the DisplayDA notice below (or tap the tab key). This text will go away, and the main screen will return. You can toggle between the two at any time, without loosing your place, by clicking on the DisplayDA notice or tapping the tab key.
DisplayDA can display a scrolling list of any text you want, up to 32K worth. You can control where the window shows up, and what size it is. You can control what font is used, what size the font is, and whether the text word wraps or not. You can change the title in the window, the name of the DA in the Apple menu, and the colors of the window and scrollbar. If you have access to an editor that uses stylized text edit, you can control the font, size, style, and color of different parts of your text, on a character by character basis, as I have done here.
You don't have to be a programmer to customize DisplayDA, but you will have to be able to edit resources (with ResEdit). I'm not going to teach you about resources and how to use ResEdit, but if you already know how, here's the information you'll need:
The 'WIND' resource: You can change the DA window title. You can also change the window size and position as follows: If the window top OR left is anything but 0, DisplayDA assumes all 4 window coordinates (top, left, bottom, and right) are correct as entered. DisplayDA won't try and size or position the window, except to size the bottom in a bit if necessary to make the window height an even multiple of the teLineHite. Ergo, if you want the window to show up in a specific place, you gotta change all 4 window coordinates to what you want. If you leave the topLeft window coordinates at 0,0, the DA will start helping you with the window positioning; When the topLeft is 0,0, the bottom and right coordinates are treated as height and width parameters, and the DA autocenters the window in your main screen. If you leave either the bottom or the right parameters 0 too, (or both) DisplayDA will autosize that dimension for you as well as autocentering it. For example, System Errors DA comes set with window coordinates of 0,0,0,470. This means the window will be autocentered in both the vertical and horizontal planes, (the initial topLeft is 0,0), it will be autosized vertically to just fit your main screen, (the next 0, which is the height parameter since the topLeft was 0,0), and the window will have a width of 470 pixels (the final, or width parameter).
The 'wctb' resource: You can change the window colors.
The 'cctb' resource: You can change the scrollbar colors.
The 'Info' resource: The Info resource holds five bytes; two words and one boolean (a byte). The first word in the resource is the font number to be used (default is Monaco, font number 4). The second word is the font size to be used (default is 9pt). The final byte is the boolean flag for word wrap (default is 0, false, word wrap off). If you put anything but 0 in the final byte (anything but 0 = true), the text will word wrap in the window. Carriage returns in the text will force a new line regardless of the setting of the word wrap flag.
The 'DRVR' resource: You can change the resource NAME to have whatever name you want to show up in the Apple menu.
The 'TEXT' resource: This contains the text of what is displayed in the window. It is nothing more than plain text with carriage returns. (8-bit Macintosh text is fine; you can use all those weird characters if you like, like I did with the 'bullet' characters, which are option-8). Note that there are no length bytes preceding any of the text, nor are there any special terminating bytes. (IE The text is just text, not Pascal or C strings). Since text edit is used to display the text, carriage returns are significant, but tabs and other formatting characters are not, and you are limited to 32K of text.
The 'styl' resource: This contains the style information for the text. DisplayDA fully supports stylized text edit, including different line heights. If you're looking for an editor that uses 'styl' resources, check out JoliWrite, a ShareWare application from Benoît Widemann. ResEdit 2.1 can be used to create and edit 'styl' resources too. Note that you must still include the appropriate info in the 'INFO' resource, as this info is used for the copyright string at the bottom of the window, and when stylized text edit is not available. If you don't include a 'styl' resource, the text is displayed in standard text edit. The 'styl' resource number should match the 'TEXT' resource number.
CHANGES (To DisplayDA, not what it's displaying) LOG:
1.1 - First Public Release
1.2 - Fixed Bug in screen height routine
1.3 - Keyboard support, squarer corners in window, better customizing.
1.5 - Moved copyright notice out of menubar and into content, and made it the "button" to show this doc, which I moved into DisplayDA itself.
1.6 - Added period to close DA.
1.7 - Improved response to low memory when reading in the text.
1.8 - Fixed bug in control routine's handling of non accEvent calls. Added code to prevent Radius window autocentering routines from messing with our window. Changed code to draw text outline box in the same color as the scrollbar, instead of forcing it to blue.
2.0 - Added stylized text edit routines. Added copy and cut, the q key for quit, and the tab key to toggle between this text and the main text.
2.1 - Fixed a long standing problem DisplayDA had with Radius Displays set to display a large menubar.
