[Main Heading]

[This is a multiple-line subheading
in which you can give a brief account
of why the correspondence is relevant.]

I won't use the square brackets for this block of text which you will replace with your own or for the content of the buttons below as the marks would be confusing. The text block contains the context for the eletters that are are gathered. The buttons, by their labels, serve as the index. and each button pulls the letter it refers to into the browser for reading and perhaps printing.

I assume you have read explain.tpt and qwk_eltr.tpt so that you know about using File/Template to pull up the .tpt file as a New File which you then save as an .htm file which will become your new document. To read an unchanged template, simply keep the template's main name. To read this template, save it as eltr_ndx.htm. If you did an ordinary Open, you can do a Save AS. You should not do an ordinary Open with a tpt file, however, unless you plan to change the template itself.

You will see important differences from qwk_eltr.tpt. The tags are not "in the gutter" because that is a small extra bother to make the plain text form of the letter easier to read in the mailer. Your recipient may not have time to save the letter as an .htm and pull it into the browser. This index, however, is used only when you have collected a group of letters in the .htm files.

The most important difference is that this file has a HEAD section above the BODY section. And inside this is a Javascript script, a routine that gets a letter into a window for viewing whenever you press a button. Any HEAD section in an eletter would make reading in the mailer a little more difficult.

The quick eletter form has very abbreciated header and footer. In fact the two together use just three lines: 

       <HTML><BODY BGCOLOR=FFF8DC>
       <!--Save eletter as .htm file & load in browser-->

       <BR></BODY></HTML>

In PocketPad, you really do not need to use the .tpt file (or any of the .tpt files) for rapidly building frameworks as you fill them. This is due to PocketPad's implementation of a shifted world view. HTML tagging is a form of advanced punctuating of (very inclusive) text.

The three lines above are not on the HTML menu. In bplates.htm among the .htm documentation files in pcketpad.zip, you will see how to keep sets of boilerplates in bplates.set for loading into PocketPad when needed. One of the sample sets given there is this one:

       [HTML Extras]
       BPlate1=<FORM></FORM>
       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=

When setting out to write an eletter, Ctrl+3, Enter, Ctrl+5, Enter, Enter, Ctrl+4, UpArrow ...will put you in the framework you find in qwk_eltr.tpt. But whole template handling will be a main feature of 1.7, though I've released 1.6s that have the implementation but without full documentation. (It's growing as I go.)

Labeling the buttons: In a recent gather, I used the subject lines of the original letters on the buttons. These weren't always terrifically informative. But I was the sole author; there was a single recipient; the gather was going to that recipient quite soon after the writing had ended. In another case, the subject lines might be very good indicators of content. Another possibility might be authors' initials and dates. Another might be "improved" subject keys.

I stack the buttons neatly. In Internet Explorer the neatness shows. In Navigator, the labels are centered with spaces on both ends and the stack looks messy. In either case, though, the stacked buttons make a good, quick index/jump table.

Gene Fowler
August, 1997