NewView ------- Copyright 2001 Aaron Lawrence (aaronl at consultant dot com) NewView is a replacement for View.exe, the original OS/2 help viewer. Major enhancements are: - New user interface (split window) - Select and copy direct from window - Easy to use global (all files) search - Remembers size & position - Most recently used files list - Smooth scrolling display - Current topic always highlighted in contents - Can go forward as well as back in history - Options for fonts, colours and more - Annotate help files - Bookmarks - Fully resizeable For a version history, see the file changes.txt Installation ------------ Unzip into a directory, which can be in the path if you want. NewView does not use any additional DLLs. The usual HELP and BOOKSHELF environment variables are used. If you want to use NewView in place of the original View.exe then you can either modify OS/2's file associations (tricky!) or more easily: 1. Go to C:\os2 2. Copy View.exe to OldView.exe This makes a backup. Do NOT rename View.exe or OS/2 will detect the change and make help files use OldView.exe! 3. Copy NewView.exe to View.exe. Now all your existing help file icons will load NewView. See NewView.INF help file for more information about using NewView. Known Problems -------------- A global search cannot be cancelled. Searching for certain words is not accurate; such as "File218". What's Still To Do ------------------ - Fonts specified in file - Printing - Internationalisation One could hypothise that it would be nice to replace the application help built into OS/2. At this stage I have no real idea how to do this; it's part of PM. License ------- As of V1.27.9, NewView is open source software under the GNU Public License (GPL), which means (see gpl.txt for details): This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA. Should you wish to encourage me to continue developing NewView, then you could use PayPal (www.paypal.com) or similar to send me a donation! For developers: NewView uses the utility units in ACLLibrary.zip and ACLComponents.zip, both available on Hobbes.nmsu.edu. You should also get the latest source for Sibyl libraries, for example SibylLibs3a.zip at Hobbes. I have not been using Sibyl Fixpack 4 because it causes other problems. Acknowledgements ---------------- John Bijnens (jbijnen@attglobal.net) A favourable review in OS/2 E-zine which encouraged me to continue! Cristiano Guadagnino (cristiano.guadagnino@usa.net or criguada@tin.it) Author of WarpHelp - hope I haven't annoyed you by doing my own thing, I wanted to see something happen. Cheers for the inspiration to get started! Peter Fitzsimmons (pfitz@ican.net) For the original INF bitmap decompression code (LZW) used in Inf2HTML. Thanks Peter! I managed to port it without fully understanding it... :-) Ulrich Moeller (ulrich.moeller@rz.hu-berlin.de) Author of Inf2HTML http://amor.rz.hu-berlin.de/~h0444vnd/inf2html.htm) Carl Hauser (chauser.parc@xerox.com) Original author of INF01.DOC, the description of the INF Binary format Marcus Groeber (marcusg@ph-cip.uni-koeln.de) Added additional information to INF2A.TXT Peter Childs (pjchilds@apanix.apana.org.au) Further updates to INF03.TXT Speedsoft (http://www.speedsoft-online.de) Makers of Sibyl, the awesome Delphi clone for OS/2, Linux and Win32 - Good luck guys Mat Kramer (mek@compuserve.com) Author of VyperHelp - thanks for some suggestions on rich text controls, plus a handy help authoring tool. Michael Kaply (mkaply@us.ibm.com) Original IPF project lead at IBM and Platform Owner - Mozilla for OS/2. Thanks heaps! Erik Hueslmann (wiskid@gmx.net) Author of Sibyl HelperThread components and maintainer of Sibyl mail list archive (http://sibylarchive.hypermart.net/) IBM... I think "Elwood" Composer of "Unknown Phuture" (unk.xm) - That song rocks... All those people who gave encouragement, testing, and suggestions. All your suggestions suck, but thanks for offering them ;-) - just kidding