You have eight "boilerplates" available in eWriter. Press Ctrl+1 through Ctrl+8 and the boilerplate will type itself into your text at the cursor. If it's empty, you get an Input dialog. If you want the dialog in order to change the boilerplate text, Ctrl+Shift+# will bring it up.

You can do all the things you always do with boilerplate or autotyping or batch typing. But I've worked out my "loaded revolver cylinder" technology so you will have unlimited boilerplates to augment the special typing done by most of the menu items (and hot keys) I've set up. All of these items and keyings are to speed your typing, but more importantly to clarify your articulating of your thinking in text.

For instance, Ctrl+( (opening parenthesis mark) gets both parentheses with the cursor between them, (|). And Ctrl+) will, like the Right Arrow, move the cursor outside the marks. This speeds typing a bit, I suppose, but it's mainly to insure that you don't forget that you are inserting a parenthetical remark into the main flow of your text and fail to come out. You will find many of these on the Edit menu.

I began putting HTML into PocketPad with 1.4 and eWriter from its beginning and have since added even some Javascript capability and, most recently, METAdata capability. I saw early signs of the HTML'ing of desktop as well as web computer use. Later signs are really strong. Microsoft, for instance, isn't going to continue developing WinHelp, but will phase into something new called HTMLHelp. Microsoft and Netscape are taking the "browser look" to the general "desktop" and, for Netscape, at least, that means not just in Windows environments.

I saw HTML tags not as a programmer's or publication designer's tool, but as a writer's tool, any writer's, any lit'rit human's tool. Used to clarify the thinking-into-text articulation. In fact, I saw that the HTML tags were punctuation marks. The programmer puts these marks into the back-stage area of your text, and you see the italic or bold print, the underlining or color change, "appear" when you hit a labeled key. You don't see the <I> or the </I> that signals the beginning or end of italic print as a comma signals a pause. The designer hides all that even farther and, in fact, takes over the building of the publication while you finction, primarily, as a client waiting for results to "appear."

You mark out pauses, in which not all mental activity in your reader stops, but some does, with a set of marks, the comma, semicolon and colon, the period, the dash or ellipsis, ...and the mark you used tells the reader something of what goes on and what doesn't. With italic or bold print, or colored print, or even shadowed print, ...you say something of the voice shifts that a listening reader should experience "from" the text. Using a word processor, you don't think much about that, you just shift the type. And the reader follows the type, seeing it as the "mark" though it's a "virtual" mark, in a sense.

But, with email, you write and read tags. Plain text won't go into italic. So, you use a brace of asterisks, *|*, and type in your italic print. If you read an HTML file in a text editor or a mailer's compose window, you read the pair of I-tags ...just as you read the asterisks. You get both signals, the I-tags signalling italic print, the italic print signalling the voice shift.

Write your text with HTML tags for a while and you'll discover something interesting. You are cultivating a finer sense of your "punctuating" as a signalling of voice shifts much like the various pausings you signal with the more familiar marks.

The items on the HTML menu (and elsewhere), will type out HTML tags and pairs of tags. They will place the cursor somewhere between tags or beyond them where you are likely to do some "next" typing, fitting in with your flow of typing. Sometimes, a sequence of Input dialogs will appear to take "pieces" that will be inserted in the complex punctuating. But this is not at all like what happens in a so-called HTML editor. Those dialogs are designed for programmers and designers. With a little "getting used to it" (and use of the on-line Help), you will get to where you can type HTML about as fast as non HTML text.

The Txt Keys menu has "replacement" items. If you read this file in a text editor rather than a browser, you will notice that when I want a tag readable in the text, instead of acted on by the browser, I replace the < with (ampersand)#60; by clicking on the item in Txt Keys.

On that menu you will see all the fancy quotes and apostrophes and such but you probably won't want to use them. I don't. It's all plenty pretty without that bother. Particularly if you use contractions a lot, though I've put the right single quote on Ctrl+N. What is important on this menu is the "space" (Ctrl+V). You get an Input dialog asking how many. The default is 5, a good indent. This gets you hard spaces. The browsers take a line ending (#13#10) as a single space. And multiple spaces reduce to one. Use this menu item or hot key to put in hard spaces that the browser will retain.

Click Tools / Boilerplate Sets and you get a panel with all the boilerplates listed. Click on one of those and you get the dialog to set (or reset) the boilerplate. At the bottom is an OK button for when you are finished and two other buttons. These are Import and Export. A loaded cylinder (eight boilerplates) is moved each time. Pressing the button gets an Input dialog. Give a name for the set or "cylinder." This will go between brackets in an "ini" file which in this instance is named bplates.set. Do not put brackets around the name when you give it. These will be inserted (or read) by eWriter.

The file is created the first time you export, but you could create it manually if you wanted to and you certainly can edit the cylinders in the file, save the file, and then import a set. In fact, you'll want the file in an editor while importing to see what you've got and to note the exact name you used. If you export a set do not, then, save the file in the editor as you'll lose what you just exported.

I see "punctuating" text in this coming age as going so far as to shotgun phrases into table cells. In fact, table cells are commas of a kind, and correspond to "pauses" in a reading that involves placing phrases in complex relations to other phrases. I see even the disappearing and appearing phrases in a collapsable "outline" as a result of punctuating speech.

But, I didn't put table-handling onto the HTML menu. In fact, I didn't put on some very ordinary things such as BLOCKQUOTE which is the indented text quoted at length (a paragraph or more). So, here you see a couple cylinders I've got loaded for my personal use.

Along with BLOCKQUOTE I have three "lines" I use for eletters. Ctrl+3 is at the top, Ctrl+4 at the bottom. CTrl+5 goes under the top line to tell the recipient how best to view and print the letter -- in a browser.

       [HTML Tables]
       BPlate1=<TABLE></TABLE>
       BPlate2=<th></th>
       BPlate3=<tr></tr>
       BPlate4=<td></td>
       BPlate5=cellpadding=
       BPlate6=cellspacing=
       BPlate7=align=
       BPlate8=bgcolor=

       [HTML Extras]
       BPlate1=
       BPlate2=<BLOCKQUOTE></BLOCKQUOTE>
       BPlate3=<HTML><HEAD></HEAD><BODY BGCOLOR=FFFFFF>
       BPlate4=<BR></BODY></HTML>
       BPlate5=<!--Save eletter as .htm file & load in browser-->
       BPlate6=<FONT COLOR=>
       BPlate7=</FONT>
       BPlate8=<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN">

       [FRAMES 1]
       BPlate1=<FRAMESET COLS="">
       BPlate2=<FRAMESET ROWS="">
       BPlate3=<FRAME SRC="">
       BPlate4=</FRAMESET>
       BPlate5=NORESIZE
       BPlate6=MARGINWIDTH=""
       BPlate7=MARGINHEIGHT=""
       BPlate8=NAME=""

       [FORMS 1]
       BPLATE1=METHOD=""
       BPLATE2=ACTION=""
       BPLATE3=
       BPLATE4=TYPE=""
       BPLATE5=NAME=""
       BPLATE6=VALUE=""
       BPLATE7=BUTTON
       BPLATE8=TEXT