Tex-Edit is a multi-window, styled text editor that fills the gap between Apple’s bare-bones TeachText and a full-featured word processor such as WriteNow. Tex-Edit is small, fast, easy-to-use and requires little memory. Tex-Edit is ShareWare ($5). (4/5/94)
With Tex-Edit you can:
• Quickly create, edit and print short (32000 character) styled text documents.
• View and print TeachText or SimpleText read-only (“ReadMe”) documents, including
pictures.
• View and print color PICT files, such as those produced by draw programs or
Apple’s built-in screen snapshot utility.
• Copy a selection from a PICT file, cropping the image for use in a word processor, etc.
• View, edit and print text documents created by virtually any word processor or computer.
• Reformat downloaded e-mail or text, correcting word-wrap problems and removing
extraneous, non-Mac characters.
• Prepare text for upload to a BBS, so that people with MS-DOS systems can view the
document as it was intended to be viewed.
• Instantly quote a brief passage from received e-mail, allowing the sender to remember
their original message.
• Read any text document aloud, if you have Apple’s Speech Manager extension. (Listen
to a TeachText read-only file, for example, as the text and pictures scroll by!)
• Quickly optimize a document for printing, substituting professional-looking typographical
characters for generic, typewriter-era characters.
• Create simple hypertext documents.
• And more…
MS-DOS versus the Mac…
You may have noticed that your e-mail sometimes has funny little boxes at the beginning of each line. This problem arises because MS-DOS and the Mac have different opinions about line endings.
MS-DOS editors commonly use a character-based line width. When the cursor gets to the last (usually 80th) character position, the editor obligingly backs up to the beginning of the word being typed, inserts a CR (carriage return) and LF (linefeed character) and then carries the unfinished word down to the next line. This prevents lines from extending past the right margin and also prevents words from being split between lines. In a similar manner, most generic BBSs terminate each line with a single CR.
In the Mac world, text editors dynamically “word-wrap” at the right margin and do not insert any special characters until the end of the paragraph, at which point they insert a single carriage return. When viewing a non-Mac file, therefore, the Mac user may note that each line is preceded by an empty box (signifying the terminating LF character from the preceding line). In a large window, the text may not extend to the right margin, and in a small window, there is usually an odd mixture of alternating short and long lines. The Mac thinks each line is a separate paragraph!
You may have also noticed strange squiggles and misspelled words scattered throughout your downloaded text. This is because the Mac and MS-DOS have different ideas about the use of the “upper” ASCII range. (ASCII is a standard convention used to define how all computers store alphanumeric characters.) Unfortunately, the ASCII convention only specifies values for the first 128 (out of 256) characters. The Mac uses the remaining upper range of characters to hold diacritical markings, foreign characters, typographical (curly) quotes and a host of other goodies not found on a standard typewriter. Unfortunately, MS-DOS uses this upper 128 characters for a completely different set of characters.
Fortunately, Tex-Edit can easily handle all of these problems using the Modify dialog (below).
Tex-Edit versus other Editors…
You will discover that Tex-Edit documents lose all their style attributes when opened by other word processors (and visa versa). This is because most word processors use their own private method for storing character styles (font, size, color, etc.)
Tex-Edit can swap styled documents with America Online, Joliwrite, SimpleText and Stylus, since they all store style information in the same way. You have to rely on the clipboard, however, to swap styled text with most other word processors. Curiously, at least one expensive word processor does not support Apple’s standard clipboard format for styled text. Go figure…
Apple Menu
About Tex-Edit…
Here you will find a few helpful hints as well as instructions on how to contact me for suggestions or bug reports.
File Menu
New
This opens a new blank document window. Up to nine windows can be open simultaneously, depending on Tex-Edit’s memory allocation. To increase Tex-Edit’s memory allocation, enter a new “preferred size” in the Finder’s Get Info dialog box. You will need to add about 50K per extra window.
Open…/Open Any…
Use this command to pick the TEXT or PICT document you wish to open. If the text exceeds 32000 characters, you will be asked to select a 32K portion of the document.
If you wish to view a non-TEXT document, such as a Normal Word document, hold down the shift key before choosing this command. (Technically, Tex-Edit only opens the “data fork” of the chosen file.) You may notice some strange characters embedded in the text. (For example: “ 4 4 2Real Mac users do it with