...eWriter is the "writing" end of a duplex eMail typing machine. The "reading" end is a (web) browser. Write your eLetter with HTML punctuation, send it, and the reader's customized browser does the "word processor look" for reading and printing.
Before I elaborate on the above, I should tell you that eWriter is the 32-bit son of the 16-bit PocketPad, the transition from 20th to 21st century text editors. For a wilder rap about what that means, assuming that you are on line, pull in pcketpad.htm for an enthusiastic first take on the potential of an ewriter. As far as that goes, you might have use for the 16-bit writer end of a distributed typewriter. It'll run in Windows 3.x, of course, and in Warp or on a Mac and possibly elsewhere. To get it, ...pcketpad.zip , ...which, like eWriter is more or less "freeware." I didn't think of using beta version numbers, then, but said in print that through 1.9x there's no registration or price. As I write this, it's 1.6d. This "d" is the first time the About dialog identifies it as an eWriter.
While I'm at it, assuming you reading a copy of this that didn't come in ewriter.zip or on a distribution disk, you might as well grab ewriter.zip , though I should tell you it's possible that you got a copy of this before it's been posted. Presumably, though, both files are posted together.
eWriter is a 32-bit Windows program, which means it c'n only function in Windows Ninety-something or in Windows NT. To a degree, that bothers my sense of this as "everyone's etypewriter," or at least the front end, a browser being the rear end. But I'm soothed by the fact that now I can toss out all that file paging technology I used to compensate for the fact that each editor opened in PocketPad could hold only 32K. I've had a file of 366,000+ bytes in eWriter. And other files in there with it.
As you'd expect with "everyone's etypewriter," there is no installation or setup program or requirement. Empty the zip file into a directory that'll be eWriter's, and use the program. eWriter will never fiddle with your registry or, for that matter, with win.ini. It will make its own ini file in its own directory. It will also make a file called bplates.set which is an ini file inside. This is for storing sets of boilerplates for a "loaded revolver cylinder" system of importing and exporting "sets of eight" (or is that "pieces of eight"?) to serve as live boilerplates.
There is a copy of this file, a WinHelp hlp file, and some tpt "template" files.
HTML tags as punctuation: The whole complex concept of eWriting rests on looking at something familiar (to those of us out here on the web) a little bit (or a great deal) differently.
HTML expands into "hypertext markup language." And a markup language, a system of marks or, in a computer, tags, suggests page layout and a typographer's marks. Marginalia used to indicate how plain text and named embedded materials will be arranged and displayed. A web "editor" isn't, properly speaking, an editor at all. It's a design tool. Mostly, it's a device that finds out the results you want, codes in the tags needed to get the browser to display what you want to see, and, then, shows you the results.
Even a writer will write his text and, then, fit it into a "page" (better called a "scroll," since pages are what you'll have to consider when you print it) or build a page around it using different tools than the original typewriter.
Just as I looked at what everybody called pages and saw that they were scrolls, I looked at those tags, starting with the ones that did the newer sort of punctuation used for expressive writing, such as the italics tag, ...and saw that, for the writer, not the typographer, tagging was punctuating.
Even on an old Underwood, I wrote my italics into the poem. And I wrote in a state of mild distress. You see, italics was a voice shift. And, though not a whisper, it was ...well, softer. And the underlining I had to use shouted. Unlike bold (which could be got by typing over the text), it wasn't even a shout that stayed in the voice. It was terrible. If only I'd thought to do something like email italics, a brace of asterisks used as tags.
As a poet, I also used white space. Blank areas within a line, varied and great indents, multiple skipped lines followed by patterned indents. A great "steppes" of a passage. It's no great leap to think of shotgunning phrases into a table, bordered or not. But why should such expressive punctuating of text be reserved for the poet? Well, a few decades later, and even then, it's not. Story writers always experimented. Ad writers saw gold (fools' or otherwise) in't. I suppose even the writers of reports might loosen up in the new millennium. So it's no great jump to seeing illustrations and other embedded materials as parts of a very inclusive text. And even tags such as Anchors and Images as not too different from commas, semicolons, ellipses, and the "bridging" italics and bold.
It makes a difference, of course, in how you implement, say, an Anchor. In an HTML "editor" you will likely be given a dialog in which you fill in all the parameters you want to use to determine the link, the text anchor, and the display of that anchor. In eWriter, you put all that in as you would the three periods that make up an ellipsis. I give you a sequence of Input dialogs that you fill in (or leave blank) and the Anchor is typed in for you. All this goes on AS you write! You do not stop writing and take up page design. Example? I'm writing this in eWriter and chugging along just as I do when writing letters. In fact, I'm writing this as I do eLetters. Look at it in a text editor. If that's not ewriter, use a non-proportional font for better seeing. I put most tags in a gutter that's eight spaces (my usual tab setting). With, say, Arial, that gutter is skinny and the tags overlap the text.
As a Windows text editor, apart from HTML, eWriter, like PocketPad before it, brings back some of the sensible, ordinariness of the DOS or UNIX world to ease the writer's woes. There is text-centered word-wrap and not that strange display word-wrap to a window edge that Microsoft thinks normal. You can set the column and the wrapping is done with CRLF (#13#10). Printers and other editors will get your lines. (Of course browsers will ignore those line breaks.)
Tabbing comes from that DOS / Unix "real" world, too. No #9 inserted in the text. Spaces inserted when an insertion is called for. What about #9 in an imported file? Well, I'm using an MS Control for eWriter's innards. The #9 will display according to the control's default. It looks okay. You can set your "tab interval" to whatever you wish. I've elaborate technology with message boxes to guide you in lining things up. But there's no guarantee about what any other display or printer will do. Unless it's a big job or unimportant, I'd erase #9 and put in an eWriter tab.
The main sensible tab structure I put in, though, is how the key responds. Tab and Shift+Tab "float" over your text. They are for traveling. After the last tab stop on a line, Tab gets you to the start of the next line. Of course, if a tab stop occurs at the end of the line, Tab puts in spaces. You have to be able to Tab at the forward edge of your typing.
Shift+Tab "floats" backward. After the first tab stop on a line, it skips the beginning and goes to the last tab stop on the line above.
If you want to insert spaces and not float, use Ctrl+Tab.
Word-wrap and tabs are the two big fixes. But they are not the only ones. And there are modifications and additions aplenty. The moral is: explore, explore, explore! And read, read, read. The messages that pop up that are, often, small tutorials. Look for Help buttons. Use Help (F1). If no editors are open (you're using only Tools), you get a different Help than if Editors are open. Oh, yeah, read that wild equivalent to this file, pcketpad.htm. In fact, pull in pcketpad.zip. There are half a dozen htm files in there that are "white papers" on tactics that are used in both ewriters.
No, ...one biggee ain't here. Spell-checking. There is an OCX spell-checker included in the Delphi 3 package I've used to create eWriter. But I don't want OCX, DLL, or other files packed along. And I don't want a Setup program ...particularly one that's going to write into your Registry. This is "everyone's ewriter," remember.
So, what about spell checking? I use many tricks, myself. A straight TXT can be pulled up into, say Word for windows. But an HTM will be saved back differently than you did it. (eWriter doesn't trigger Share problems while holding a copy.) So I find the best thing to do in any case with Winword is to note down the finds and corrections and then use my own Find.
You can also use the Copy Whole Text and go into anything on your system, like MS Fax Compose, that has spell checking, and back, or on directly into your mailer. (Your mailers, too, are available on the Tools menu.)
My sighting of pages as scrolls and tagging as punctuating ...are only small pieces of the huge revisioning of cyber-touched reality that is upon us.
I've a Meta menu in my editors that looks forward to the "expanding universe" of metadata. A simple HTML tag. A menu with a stack of customized versions. And a Help topic with some lists.
But all that fits into Jeff Duntemann's growing vision of a Virtual Encyclopedia of Absolutely Everything. The Encyclopedia is an intangible network of meta tags in the headers of scrolls waiting, invisibly, for the searcher's touch. What Jeff's glimpsed, though, is the whole system of contexts, or categories, that holds human knowledge out of a single mass into an arranged and further arrangeable (articulated) "system of referents" (as separated out of the older, blurry, "frame of reference").
Start out at www.coriolis.com and bore in through visual Developer Magazine to any of the pages with Virtual Encyclopedia or VE on them. The boring in will be a first encounter with nested contexts and a preparation for knowledge paths and locality paths and a slightly shifted way of viewing searches, what's searched, and what it means to "locate" a scroll. I think such a universe (of metadata) will appeal to people who'll also find appealing a genuine etypewriter in place of black box word processors that say leave the driving to us. People who like to drive, want a vehicle that lets them feel the road.
This is getting to be pretty long, and I think you're ready to tiptoe into bein' a cyberwriter...,
Gene Fowler
September, 1997