home
***
CD-ROM
|
disk
|
FTP
|
other
***
search
/
Collection of Tools & Utilities
/
Collection of Tools and Utilities.iso
/
tex
/
off_09.zip
/
READER.TXT
< prev
next >
Wrap
Text File
|
1993-01-12
|
5KB
|
153 lines
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
__ ___ ___
/ \ |__ |__
\__/ | |
An Informal Documentation Formatter
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
READER'S GUIDE
Vassilis V. Dimakopoulos
--- Last Revision: May 1992 ---
Quick overview
To use OFF make sure that off.exe is in a directory where
MSDOS can find it (e.g. in one of the directories in your
PATH variable). If you want to browse through the file
'fname' then type
off fname
When browsing through the document you can press the
following keys:
■ SPACE or
■ ENTER to go to the next page
■ Q to quit the program.
OFF can also save the document in a file or print it
directly to a line printer.
Plain output
If you want to convert a document file into a plain - with
no screen attributes - file then type:
off -a fname > newfname
and the file 'newfname' will contain plain ascii text. Note
that the '-a' option is necessary because the normal output
of OFF cannot be redirected to a file.
Printer output
OFF can sent a document file directly to a line printer
(which supports the IBM escape sequences) using the '-p'
option:
off -p fname
NOTES:
1. The characters that appear with reversed background /
foreground on the screen, appear as italics on the line
printer.
2. OFF assumes by default that a NLQ (Near-Letter-Quality)
printing is needed. To override this use the '-d'
option:
off -p -d fname
and the printer will use draft quality characters.
3. While the screen output is the default for OFF (and
consequently the page length is 24 lines), when the '-p'
or '-a' option is used, the page length becomes by
default 66 lines. You may need to adjust this to your
printer page length (or to whatever you want) using the
'-l' option. For example
off -p -l 54 fname
will set the page length to a usual single-sheet printer
page.
4. Similarly the '-p' and '-a' options cause the page width
to be initialized to 91 columns. Adjust this with the
'-w' option, e.g.
off -p -w 80 fname
Note that the '-d' option is ignored if the '-p' option is
not used and that the '-l' and '-w' options can be used not
only for printer but for screen output too.
Filenames
To browse through 'fname' you do not need to specify an
extension. If you give one OFF will take it into
consideration otherwise it will supply some extensions by
itself. The extensions OFF gives to 'fname' (in the order
shown) are
1. The user extension (if any given)
2. .off
3. .doc
4. .txt
Also you do not have to give the full path on which 'fname'
resides. OFF will first look for an environmental variable
called OFFPATH which has the directories where the
documentation files can normaly be found. Then OFF will
search for 'fname' in the following directories (in the
order shown):
1. The current directory.
2. The directories in your OFFPATH (if it exists).
Note that OFF will search in the following manner:
for each extension
{
for each directory
{
if "directory\file.extension" found
then Done.
else
Continue.
}
}