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Text File | 1991-09-04 | 14KB | 447 lines

Instructions for The Magnify System (C) 1991 by Patrick Swayne The Magnify System is a set of programs that double the size of the characters on your computer screen. The characters of the normal 80x25 text mode are dou- bled in both height and width. The system consists of these programs. BIG.COM -- Sets a big character mode that can be used for DOS commands such as DIR. SMALL.COM -- Restores the normal 80x25 text mode. BV.COM -- BigView, a text viewing pro- gram similar to the popular LIST.COM shareware program, except that BV dis- plays text in large characters. MAGNIFY.COM -- A TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident) program that can be used to magnify portions of the screen while you are running just about any text mode application program. Requirements ~~~~~~~~~~~~ The Magnify System programs will run on any IBM-PC or AT compatible computer with a color EGA or VGA video system. They will not work while the screen is in a graphic mode, or while a graphical environment is running, such as Windows. Distribution ~~~~~~~~~~~~ The Magnify System is distributed as "copyrighted but free" software. Feel free to use it as you wish and give copies to others. Shareware distribu- tors may charge up to $5.00 for a disk containing the Magnify System, and are encouraged to include other utilities on the disk to provide greater value to their customers. Warranty ~~~~~~~~ This program is provided AS IS without any warranty, expressed or implied, including but not limited to fitness for a particular purpose. Disclaimer ~~~~~~~~~~ In no event will Patrick Swayne be li- able to you for any damages, including any lost profits, lost savings, or other incidental or consequential damages arising out of the use of or inability to use these programs, even if Patrick Swayne has been advised of the possibil- ity of such damages, or for any claim by any other party. Installing the Magnify System Programs ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ To install the magnify system programs, place the disk containing them in drive A:, and type A: INSTALL path Press Enter after each line. Instead of "path" as shown above, type the destina- tion path for the Magnify System files. For example, if you want to place them in a directory called UTILS on drive C:, you should type INSTALL C:\UTILS Do not put a \ at the end of the path. If you want to place the files on a floppy disk in drive B:, type INSTALL B: INSTALL will run BIG.COM and display Do you see a line of text at the bottom of this screen? Type Y if you see a third line of text at the bottom of the screen, or type N if you do not see it. If you do not see the line at the bottom, it indicates that your VGA system is not 100% IBM compatible, and special versions of BIG.COM, BV,COM, and MAGNIFY.COM need to be used. INSTALL will copy the special version to your "path" instead of the normal versions. After INSTALL copies the programs, it will ask Do you want to 1. Read the documentation now? 2. Quit? Type 1 if you want to read the documen- tation, or 2 if you want to quit. If you type 1, INSTALL will run BigView and load MAGNIFY.DOC (this file). Use the arrow keys or Page Down and Page Up to scroll forward or backward in the file, and press Esc when you are through read- ing it. After you press Esc or answer 2 to the above question, INSTALL will run SMALL to restore normal sized charac- ters. Using the Magnify System Programs ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ If your PATH points to the directory where you installed the Magnify System programs, you can run them from any directory or drive. If not, you will have to make the drive/directory con- taining the Magnify System files the default. Using BIG and SMALL ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ To use BIG and SMALL, just type BIG or SMALL at the DOS prompt and press Enter. After you run BIG, the screen will be in a 12 line by 40 character mode, and will remain in that mode while you use DOS commands such as DIR or CHKDSK. However, if you run an application pro- gram (such as a word processor or spread- sheet), the application will most likely reset the screen to a small character mode. Using BigView ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ To use BigView, enter BV textfile where textfile is the name of the file you want to view. You can include a drive and/or path before the file name. While you are using BigView, use the following keys to move around in your file. Return or Enter Down one line Down Arrow Down one line Up Arrow Up one line Right Arrow Move window right Left Arrow Move window left L Move window to col. 1 PgDn Down one screen PgUp Up one screen End Bottom of file/buffer Home Top of file/buffer Use the function keys as follows: F1 Find a string of text Shf-F1 Toggle Find case sensitivity F2 Mark the top screen line Shf-F2 Mark the bottom screen line F3 Print the marked block+80H To search for a string of text in your file, press the F1 key. BigView will prompt you at the bottom of the screen with Find: Type the string you want to find. Nor- mally, BigView will ignore case, so if you enter HOUSE, it will search for HOUSE, House, or house. If you want to do a case sensitive search, press Shift- F1 before you press F1 to begin the search. The prompt F1 Find(i) at the bottom of the screen will change to F1 Find(c) indicating the change in search mode. To change back to the case insensitive mode, press Shift-F1 again. You can mark a block of text with Big- View, and print it. To do this, move the first line of the block to either the top or bottom of the screen. Press F2 if the line is at the top, or Shift- F2 if it is at the bottom. you will see the number beside the F2 Mark prompt change from 0 to 1. Now, move the last line of your block to the top or bottom of the screen, and again press F2 if it is at the top, or Shift-F2 if it is at the bottom. The number beside the Mark prompt will change to 2. When the printer is ready, press F3 to print the block. To unmark the block, press F2 again. The number beside the Mark prompt will change to 0. If a file is larger than BigView's buff- er, these function keys are active. F4 Load the next 64k of the file F5 Rewind to the top of the file When you reach the bottom of the portion of your file that is in the buffer, press F4 to load in the next portion. When you reach the end of the file, you can press F5 to return to the beginning of the file. When you are through viewing a file, press Esc to exit from BigView. It will leave the screen in the big character mode, so you will have to run SMALL if you want to return to the small charac- ter mode. If you forget these instructions while you are viewing a file, type H. BigView will display a screen of help informa- tion. Press any key to change to the next help screen. There are three screens in all. After you view the last one, press any key to return to your file. Using MAGNIFY ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ MAGNIFY is a TSR program that you only need to run once each time you boot your computer. If you want to, you can add a line to your AUTOEXEC.BAT file to run MAGNIFY when you boot your computer. Once you have run MAGNIFY, you can acti- vate it while you are running a text mode application that uses normal small characters. To activate it, type Alt-M (hold down Alt and type M). A bright rectangle will appear on the screen, which represents the area of the screen that will be magnified. You can use the arrow keys to move the rectangle to the part of the screen that you want to magnify. The up and down arrows will move the rectangle up or down one line for each press, and the left and right arrow keys will move it by one charac- ter. Shift-left or Shift-right will move the rectangle 8 characters for each press. The Home key will return it to the upper left corner. When the rectangle is positioned over the text you want to magnify, press Enter. While you are viewing magnified text, you can still use the arrow keys to move around as described above, ex- cept that the Home key has no effect. When you are through viewing magnified text, you can either press Enter to return to the bright rectangle mode, or Esc to exit from MAGNIFY and return control of the keyboard to your applica- tion. When you are through using magnify, you can remove it from memory by entering MAGNIFY U at the DOS prompt. You can only remove MAGNIFY if it is the last TSR loaded. If you want to temporarily disable MAG- NIFY (so that it does not respond to its hot key), enter MAGNIFY D To restore normal operation of MAGNIFY, just enter MAGNIFY If you have an EGA video system, it can be programed to either allow blinking characters or intense background colors in the text mode. Normally, the blink- ing character mode is set, but MAGNIFY sets the intense background mode while it is displaying its rectangle on the screen (the rectangle is made of black characters on an intense white back- ground). When you exit from MAGNIFY, it will normally restore the blinking back- ground mode. However, an application program may set the intense background mode. A program known to do this is SuperCalc. If you want to magnify the screen while you are running a program that sets the intense background mode, enter MAGNIFY I to tell it to set the intense background mode upon exiting. To restore the nor- mal exit mode, enter MAGNIFY B If you have a VGA system, MAGNIFY can read the background mode that is set, so you do not have to tell it which mode to set upon exiting. If you would like to change the "hot key" used to activate MAGNIFY (normally Alt-M), enter MAGNIFY K<key> where <key> is the key to use. You can use any of the printable keys on the main keyboard except <, >, |, \, /, +, =, ;, :, or ". The shifted characters on the top key row are considered the same as their non-shifted counterparts. For example, Alt-) is the same as Alt-0. Here is an example of changing the hot key. To change it to Alt-1, you would enter MAGNIFY K1 You can use the D, I, B, or K commands when you run MAGNIFY for the first time to load it into memory, or any time after it is loaded. You can combine any two of the commands on the command line, separating them with a comma. For exam- ple, to set the hot key to Alt-0 and temporarily disable it, you can enter MAGNIFY K0,D You would later have to enter MAGNIFY by itself on the command line before you could activate it with Alt-0. If you forget these instructions, enter MAGNIFY ? and it will display a brief help mes- sage. Comments/Suggestions ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ If you have any comments or suggestions regarding these programs, send them to Patrick Swayne 155 Baker St. Coloma, MI 49038 ----------------end-of-author's-documentation--------------- Software Library Information: This disk copy provided as a service of Public (software) Library We are not the authors of this program, nor are we associated with the author in any way other than as a distributor of the program in accordance with the author's terms of distribution. Please direct shareware payments and specific questions about this program to the author of the program, whose name appears elsewhere in this documentation. 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