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Textengine
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1991-06-14
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Textengine V1.0 (C) Copyright Nicholas Harvey 1991.
This program is public domain shareware, so please register ownership
by sending £5 to:
Nicholas Harvey
149 Manor Road North
Thames Ditton
Surrey
KT7 OBQ
England
The story so far...
At the beginning of the 1990 summer holidays, I thought to myself, "I
need a word processor!" So, after looking through magazine adverts I
came to the conclusion that I was not going to spend £100+ on a
wordprocessing system, so I wrote my own. Ten months of R&D (and
thousands of problems) produced TEXTENGINE V1.0 - a word processor to
my own specification written entirely in assembly language. If you use
it, please send £5 (or more) to me at the address above, and maybe, a
version 2 will appear soon, with cut & paste, search & replace and any
other features I decide to add.
Loading Textengine from Workbench.
Double click on its icon and the program will load in a few seconds.
Loading Textengine from the CLI.
Type RUN TEXTENGINE <filename> where the filename is the name of the
file you want the program to load automatically when it loads. If you
don't want to load a file on start up, ignore the <filename> option.
Instructions.
Control of the cursor and input of text is the same as any text editor
you may have used during your life. There is a text buffer of 50kb,
which should be large enough for most documents. When the text buffer
is full, all text input will cease until some text is deleted, or the
buffer is cleared. You can check if the buffer is full by selecting
ABOUT from the EXTRAS pull-down menu.
The delete key (marked DEL), deletes the character to the left of the
cursor (like backspace) instead of the character underneath the
cursor, and the TAB key produces a space character instead of a tab.
These should hopefully not cause you much of a problem. To move
quickly through the file, you can hold SHIFT down while using the up
and down cursor keys. This moves you 27 lines at a time!
The word-wrap works well if used properly. The width of the page is 70
columns with a 5 column margin at either side. The word-wrap activates
when the current line being edited becomes 71 characters long. When
this happens, the last word in that line is pushed onto the next line.
For this to happen, though, the cursor has to be at the end of the
line, as if you were typing a line of text from scratch. If you are
inserting text into the middle of a line, text input will cease when
the line becomes 70 characters long.
Disk operations.
Loading and saving files is simplicity in itself. Selecting LOAD or
SAVE from the PROJECT pull-down-menu presents you with a string gadget
(where you input the filename) and two other gadgets (LOAD or SAVE,
and CANCEL). When you have entered the filename, you can either
load/save the file, or cancel the procedure by selecting the
appropriate gadgets.
Selecting CLEAR from the menu will clear the text buffer after
confirming the operation with a requester.
Selecting QUIT from the menu will quit the program after confirming
the operation with a requester.
When you chose SLEEP from the menu, the program closes the main
editing screen and opens a small window on the workbench screen. In
doing this, the program can multitask more easily, and releases about
50kb of memory. To get back to the editor and any text you may have
been editing, simply click on the CANCEL gadget. This returns you to
the editor, at the top of the current file.
Printer styles.
In the STYLES menu, there is a list of many different styles that most
printers can produce. Selecting one of the styles will produce an
unusual character in the text. Eg Ë is the character for PICA text.
When using these control characters, the first time you use them, the
effect is turned on, and the next time you select the same style, it
is turned off. For instance, in the text
Textengine V1.0 - The ªbestª wordprocessor for the Amiga.
the word "best" is printed
ENLARGED, whereas the rest of the sentence is normal print. The only
two control characters which don't work like this are ELITE and PICA.
These only work as ON switches as they cancel each other when
selected. For instance, selecting ELITE cancels PICA, and selecting
PICA cancels ELITE. If you want to cancel all of the styles that have
been selected, us the CANCEL STYLES character. This resets the printer
to normal draft mode.
My advice to you on using control characters is to type in the entire
file first, making sure it is correct, and then turn off the word-wrap
and add all of the type styles that you need. Save this off as the
finished file, and then print it.
Special tools.
In the EXTRAS menu, a few useful tools can be found. The first is WORD
COUNT which simply counts the number of words and lines in the file.
To stop counting, click on CANCEL.
The next menu item is the WORD WRAP switch. If there is a * symbol
before the words WORD WRAP, then word wrap is activated. If the * is
not present, then word wrap is switched off. To change the status of
the word wrap, hold the mouse pointer over the WORD WRAP menu item,
and then let go.
ABOUT gives a little information about the author of the program, and
also displays the size of the current file, and the amount of free
memory available.
The next 3 items concern the set up of the word processor. The first
item, PRT: PREFS is short for PRINTER PREFERENCES. Here you have 3
inputs. TOP MARGIN is the number of lines you want left clear at the
top of a page. BOTTOM MARGIN is the number of lines you want left at
the bottom of the page. LINES PER PAGE is the maximum number of lines
of text you can fit onto the piece of paper you are using with no gaps
at the top or bottom. It is very important that you get this value
correct.
After PRT: PREFS comes PALETTE, which allows you to change the screen
colours in the usual amiga way. Select the colour you want to change
by clicking on its box at the top of the palette, and then alter the
red, green and blue values of that colour using the sliding gadgets.
To save this setup, select SAVE SETUP from the menu. This writes a 48
byte long file to your disk called TEXTENGINE.CONFIG which contains
information about the screen colours, printer setup, and wordwrap
status. This file is automatically loaded up when Textengine is
started. If Textengine cannot find the configuration file on the disk,
or the file does not exist, then the default settings are used.
Final note.
I hope you find this program as useful as I do, and get many miles of
printout from it!
Many thanks to Martin Guy and Mark Higgins for testing and ideas.
Mega banana-like hellos to Peter Lee, James Stuart (both Acorn users -
yeuch), Warren Saunders, Gary Taylor, and everyone else.
Keep on Amiga-ing.
Potential Difference rule the Nimbus network.
Anyway the wind blows...