 Message Editing
 ---------------
   Once you have discovered you wish to participate in a discussion, you
will need to learn how to use the ^variantname message editing facilities.
After using <E>nter to begin entering a message, you will be faced with the
following:

   <some sort of blurb if you are not an expert>
   90Jan23 from Your Name   <<--- This is a "message header"

   and the cursor will be on the next line.  At this point you may start
typing your message in.  ^variantname does not perform word-wrap during
message entry; however, if your terminal program automatically wraps down
to the next line as you type, then you needn't worry about losing what you're
typing; ^variantname is not "line-oriented".  In fact, nearly all users
quickly learn not to pay attention to "lines," they just type away, paragraph
occasionally, and soon have a message.  If your terminal program will
wrap back up a line when you backspace past the beginning of a line, ^variantname
will be delighted to let you do that, making error correction far easier than
on BBSes which insist on performing word-wrap, which is why ^variantname has
never implemented word-wrap.

   If you want to paragraph your message, simply type a carriage return and
indent the starting line of the paragraph (but no other line of the paragraph).
If you want to skip a line between paragraphs to increase readability, touch
carriage return, space, carriage return and indent (or not -- ^variantname
will do block paragraphs).

   Once you are finished with the initial composition of the message, touch
carriage return twice.  You should see

    entry cmd:

   You now have an array of choices to pick from:

 <P>rint lets you preview your message.  The text will be formatted to your
screen width (and when, or if, you save it your message will be formatted
for other reader's screen widths).  This lets you find errors in your message
for later repair.

 <R>eplace string lets you change the contents of your message.  You will
be prompted for a string to replace and then the string to replace.  So suppose
you've noticed you've misspelled "muckraking" as "muckrking".  You'd answer
the first prompt with "muckrking" and the second with "muckraking".  There are
two tricks to be aware of with Replace: first, it searches BACKWARDS through
your message for the string to replace (and only replaces the one it finds),
and the search is case INSENSITIVE.

 <G>lobal Replace is just like <R>eplace except all instances of your target
string will be replaced by your replacement string.  Makes it easy to fix all
those "thier" misspellings.

 <A>bort will let you abort the message you've just composed.

 <C>ontinue will print the last couple of words of your message and let you
continue entering text just as if you had never stopped.

 <S>ave lets you save your message.

 <I>nsert Paragraph lets you insert a paragraph marker at a given spot, just
in case you forgot.  You will be prompted for a string, which will indicate
where you want the paragraph break to occur.

 <H>old message lets you place the message you're working on in a temporary
buffer so you can go back and review other users' messages, change rooms,
etc.  To access the message you hold, use .Enter Held at any room prompt.
(NOTE: you can only Hold one message at a time.)  This is an extremely
useful option in serious discussion rooms.

   Finally, if you are in a shared room (or Mail>), you may find the option
<N>et or <N>ormal message useful.  It acts as a toggle for your message,
changing its network status.  Sometimes you may not want to make you message
shareable between systems when ^nodetitle thinks it is; <N> will fix this.
Similarly, sometimes you may wish to make your message shareable when it
isn't already (you can tell by the presence/absence of "@^nodename" in your
message header).

 %EDITORS More information about other editors.
 %COMMANDS Back to the commands help menu.
 %HELPOPT Get a list of all help files in the system.
 %MAINHELP First level of help system.

