If you're a writer, forget about text "editors" and word "processors." Think of eWriter as the simplest writer's tool, a 21st century eTypewriter. That's why you don't see any gaudy toolbars or slickly nested menus. It's just a typewriter with a mouse. Of course, it's newer than the Selectric just as the Selectric was newer than the old Underwood Stand-up.

You can just start typing in it and everything will work about as you expect. But to begin seeing what shortcuts you have for your use, study the Edit and Format menus. And look at the Help topics that detail use. You can use tabs both to travel over text and to insert spaces. You can change tab intervals and a word-wrap column "on the fly," to format your text as you write. But it's the small things that get the typing out of your way as you write. You push a line with the cursor going to it or staying put. You can end a line, go to a new one, and match or not match an indent.

The best way to think about all these actions and shortcuts is as "punctuation" marks or actions. You are punctuating your writing for a reader when you word-wrap a line, or hyphenate an ending word, just as you are when you mark off a phrase's end with a comma. In "grammar school" you learned about punctuation as marks, but not as actions. Natural writers are those who see the marks only as trail "blazes" -- marking the actions that structure the on-going writing. Everything in eWriter is there to aid your punctuating, your marking off of where you're going and why, your writing.

Getting started: html'd writing

We've lifted off into cyberspace with our eTypewriter and it's become a "stretch" typewriter or a "distributed" one. The "paper roller" is a cyberworm-hole. Roll the paper into eWriter and out of a (web) browser. You type a plain text "engine" (manuscript) page and the browser screens or prints an "interface" (word processor) page. You type eLetters or even web "scrolls."

To do this eWriting, you take on an entire new system of punctuation or "tagset." You know it as HTML, a "markup language." Now, you can not only punctuate text on your immediate "sheet of paper," but on a remote one. Your sheet is an engine, driving the making of another one. You use the Return key to break a line in the text you see as you type. But that line break won't show up in the browser. To break a line out there, you skip the Return key and type Ctrl+K. (Or, you click Line Break on the HTML menu.) In a way, you're seeing two sheets unfolding (as page or scroll) as you write. It's a "doubled" writing.

You begin gently, using just the HTML menu. Then, you use the Keys menu to type in codes for characters the browser might react to that you want to keep in the text. Beyond that you have the Javascript and Meta menus for typing web scrolls (often called pages). An XML menu even fakes up effects that'll be possible when XML generated tagsets allow further really advanced punctuating of future forms of structured writing.

writing with "input box" punctuation

In a usual HTML "editor" or "authoring tool," you put in a link or anchor or image by calling up a dialog in which you fill out a form, really, giving attribute values. This is guaranteed to halt your typing (writing). In eWriter, tagging is punctuating. Instead of a dialog to shape up a link, for instance, I use a series of input boxes, so you can type in attribute values about like you type in the three periods that make an ellipsis. you just keep up the linear flow of your typing and end up right back in your sentence as you do after typing an ellipsis.

And eWriter uses "input box" punctuation when a choice can be given in condensed form. Type Ctrl+H (for a "heading") and you get an input box calling for a number from 1 to 6. Type Ctrl+V for hard spaces and you get an input box asking how many.'

When you get to the pseudo-XML (at the top of the XML menu) with HTML emulation of XML tricks, and take "@Addr to Mailto," you can type the address once and get a mailto-link and the address as a clickable because the one typing is into an input box rather than directly into the text. I call it "input box punctuation" -- and you'll get used to it in a hurry.

writing with the "format pad"

You learned to write with your first tagset or system of punctuation in grammar school. The tags are the now familiar comma, semicolon, colon, period, and the rest. These are all "blaze" marks for marking your trail. That is, you never cast any mark out ahead of you. Today, you'd say there are no end tags. In another sense, there are only end tags. A comma ends a phrase, but hints at the nature of your going on. It's just a "blaze" mark. Now, that you're HTMLing your text flow, you do cast some marks out ahead of you, at least knowing you'll have to type them in at some point. And, in eWriter, you may set up both marks and write between them.'

It's a bit like typing the capital letter to start a sentence and having the typewriter put the ending period in front of your cursor so you see it there as you type out all that leads to it. In fact, I have keys that allow you to type parentheses, quotes, and other ordinary marks in just that way -- so you don't forget you're in a parenthetical comment or a quotation.'

I've put the main "blocking out" HTML tagging on what I call the Format Pad. I use the Number Pad but with the CTRL key held down. There is even a pattern. The HTML Help topic gives the pattern and even a (mnemonic) picture. All the tagging is punctuating, but I pull out these items for special keying on this "pad" to make your sense of the relations among these tags intuitive, part of your "experiential learnings" that you draw on by reflex as you type.

Getting started: Advanced writing

You've some experience writing your document when it's pretty much typing out a flow of text with images and other items embedded in it and with some layout added in with familiar and HTML punctuation. Now, it's time to think about organizing more complex writing projects and writing structured documents.

eWriter has tools to help. First, there's a "loaded revolver cylinder" boilerplate technology. Eight live boilerplates are available to you while editing. If you go to Tools/Boilerplate, you see all eight at once. Click on one to get the entry box to set or change it. You have two buttons to import or export full sets of eight.

When you click on Tools/boilerplates, bplates.set is placed in the top editor if you've exported a set once to create the file or created one by hand. You import a set from the file to be the live set. Sample sets are in bplates.htm, which is part of the eManual. You augment the menu-item/hot-key quick typing with these sets.

Another tool you'll hand-craft yourself is the crib-sheet. This is a file you pull into an editor which holds more complex little mini-templates, grouped by when and where you use them, with comments to guide you.

You're familiar with the use of templates that supply frameworks and often content for documents with similar patterns. You can write and save templates in .tpt files stored in eWriter's directory. You can open these as ordinary files to work on them or copy them into other documents through the clipboard. But File/Template shows you your collection and opens a file as New File rather than as the .tpt file to protect it from a save after changes.,

writing boilerplate sets (in file)

Once you have exported a set of boilerplates to save them, you have a bplates.set file. And if you click Tools/Boilerplate Sets, you get that file in a top editor ready for importing sets for current use. Instead of accumulating eight boilerplates to export, you can write sets in the file. It is a Windows "ini" file. Here is the format to use for a set. In importing or exporting you will use the name inside the brackets without the brackets.'

[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">

This may seem more like coding than writing, but remember that you are typing ahead some "framework" punctuation that you will "write into." You do the same thing when you write an HTML document, first typing the HTML block, then the HEAD block, then the TITLE tags, the bar TITLE, drop down under the and type the BODY block, and only then start into text beyond the bar title. It's as if you were casting a net of punctuation out ahead of you to map an anticipated trail before blazing it as you write it.

writing crib sheets

When I first wrote about ewriters, these "duplex" typewriters, with medium-new web browsers as the rear end and a text editor as the front end, I explained that it was possible to use Notepad. I was not being cynical or even pushing PocketPad, my first (16-bit) ewriter. In those early eLetters and concept papers I even explained how to use Notepad or any other of the freely available text editors.'

Tags are punctuation marks, and you can't stop to type in, say, BLOCKQUOTE, obviously. Text editors, by and large, haven't boilerplate capabilities. But, with two instances of Notepad open and tiled and a Clipboard handy, a bit of mouse handling makes it fairly easy. One editor holds a crib sheet. On this scroll, you have even attribute stuffed tags or small ("mini") templates. Select one, copy, paste, place your cursor, and return to flowing text out through your fingers. This is even good discipline in training organizational skills and a great way to learn your HTML tags and their use.'

A crib sheet in one of eWriter's editors, or multiple sheets in several, complete with notes and all, is a great way to extend what's available on menus or comfortable in single line boilerplate. Particularly if you fret at menu templates set so even NN 2 and IE 3 c'n screen and print what you've typed.

writing templates (frameworks)

Mozart is thought to have "held" an entire symphony in his head as he wrote it down one part, one instrument, one note or symbol at a time. Hearing it "all at once." We don't hear multiple streams of soundings, or a single stream, "all at once," even in imagination. But the description is of something that we do hear and write.

The inventive story-teller senses where his story is going, where it will end up. The composer creates a "whole" composition. And, on a small scale, the writer, typing away, uses "blaze" punctuation to mark his going, but also uses "framework" punctuation to "set up the terrain" for his going. You are going to start a note that might grow into an eLetter or even a web scroll. So, you hit Ctrl+NumPad7 and you get and on separate lines and the cursor on an empty line between them. It's a framework, then, an end point set. And much of the punctuation you will use in the note will be small frames within which you write.'

Writing templates just scales this up. You can make a template from something you've written. But writing a template means writing with a sense of creating a framework, filling parts of it with "reusable" content, marking places for fresh content and giving hints, directional markers. It's your sense of the whole composition that carries you, a knowing of where, from the beginning, you will end up so as to complete a composition . When you have the "composition" (or its framework) written, save it in a .tpt file in eWriter's directory. Now, you have a large chunk of "framework" punctuation to write into.

writing bookmark notes

Bookmarks in editors are usually just anchor points placed in text and a hot key for getting there. A thinking writer needs to do a bit more thinking than hitting of hot keys. In eWriter, you have a Go to Line dialog (on Search menu) and it remembers lines gone to, but only during the current session. The several lines listed are your "hot clicks."

But you need some reference material if you've more than, say, two in a back and forth movement. Bookmark Notes is a place where you can keep a note on what is at that line (your work terms) and even a search phrase in case file changes affect the line number seriously. If you select the line number in the notes and hit the button, you go to the line. Hit the button without a selection and you get the Go to Line box with its session history. These notes are kept across sessions. ( Write moderately short lines for storage convenience in ewriter.ini.

writing metadata

Metadata -- sounds a bit like something rather technical and perhaps even mysterious. Actually, it means "data about data." For a writer, that means "writing about (other) writing." Practically, that can break down into two sorts of writing about writing. First it can be information that will be used in cataloging and management systems or "peripheral" information useful to evaluators and users of the original material. Or it can be new writing that "wraps" the original, guiding readers of the writing being written about into and through that "resource" material.

The Meta menu is mainly for writing the peripheral and cataloging material useful for search and management, though some items of information, such as "description," allow a writer some latitude -- if the users will. Metadata for Virtual Encyclopedia will require that lattitude because entries will be for "thoughtful" users. So you'll have a chance to write insightful metadata.'

In HTML writing, the HEAD block, seen only in the manuscript copy, contains metadata. It begins with the TITLE (for the browser bar and search engines), and with each version of HTML new tags for the head are introduced. One of the earliest tags, and still the most flexible, is the META tag. The tag is named inside with the NAME="..." attribute. The system using the information will determine that. You do your writing in the CONTENT="..." attribute. The menu contains a general tag so you fill in NAME and CONTENT in two input boxes and the tag is typed out for you. Below are many tags with NAME filled in. These will print and put your cursor in the quotes for CONTENT. Just under the general tag are tools for creating and changing up to five tags that the writer will use regularly.

writing beyond HTML

The HTML tagset, or any tagset, is best thought of by the writer as a punctuation system, a tool for making "blaze" marks to assist a reader in "parsing" the flow and understanding what is written. The tags are semantically richer than, say, a comma or period, but the price is that they are tied down more and the writer can't bounce off context quite as easily as with our first tagset, those marks studied in "grammar" school. Browser and other program vendors add to the available punctuation by adding extensions, tags their programs can read and obey. HTML goes through versions, from 2.0 to 3.2 to 4.0 currently. XML is coming, a "lite"-plus of SGML which defined the HTML tagset. With XML, int?net using groups can define a tagset (an ML).

In eWriter, you have two "beyond HTML" tools, both based on XML which will be used, perhaps widely used, very soon. Both start on ewriter's XML menu. The first, the group just below The Changer on the menu, is a group of HTML "emulations" of XML-tagset tricks. These are described in the WinHelp topic "eXtending Markup" and in two of the concept papers in the eManual: XML and Magic XML.

The other tool is prep for actual XML-tagset use. It begins on the XML menu. The bottom section of the menu is, in fact, commonly used typings you'll want from a menu. The real tool, however, is the Tagset menu. This is an "empty" menu with tools for putting in the tags that will be the menu items, the most often used in the tagset. Boilerplate, crib sheets, and templates augment this set as with HTML. The WinHelp topics are "eXtensible Markup" and "Tagset". In eManual, click Tagset.

Both menus are rich with clickable labels (with the ellipsis before the colon) to guide the writer in setting up the tagset for quick typing while writing.

Getting started: conceptualizing

We're reading and writing in an altered world. We still think in terms of cut pages and talk about "web pages" and worry about multiple columns and placing items as if on pages. But we read and write "scrolls." Unlike the scroll you might pull from a bin in the ancient Alexandrian Library, the scroll is not of a fixed width. Grab the right edge and pull the "column width" into a comfortable line length given the type size and screen resolution. Write text in eWriter knowing that a reader can do this -- if that reader is free of old habits and able to move that right edge.

This thinking about scrolls and pages for screening and printing is only the first tip-toeing into a very gradual new conceptualizing of the reality in which you write an "engine" manuscript that will drive the production of "interface" scrolls and pages. Loosen your familiar ways of thinking and imagining, and "make sense" of everthing differently. Help birthe new realities -- as you type.

writing "personal copies

Readers (and writers) will change as a result of reading web scrolls. One change is that "doubled" reading will become natural to them. This starts with hitting the View Source button and making a copy. At first, it will be people who are interested in the HTML publishing. Then, it will be to make a more readable copy, getting rid of wallpaper or even dark bgcolor that swallows text, changing typesize or font and spacing.

In the future, though, readers will accumulate personal libraries like those readers have of physical books. The physical books become personal copies not because they are owned, but because they're full of marginalia, underlining, pasted in notes, and the rest of what makes the book or paper a study tool and studied publication.

A personal virtual library will have far richer personal copies. All the marginalia, highlighting, note insertions, and live links in place of cross references, can be there, along with whatever comments the original author may have left for a "doubling" reader.

Note: Unlike the paper book, this personal copy has a digital existence. You need an extensive commented explanation at the top of the file AND an uncommented copy at the top of the BODY section. Then, treat "handing around" as a no, no. This is in your personal library, in your den. But, ...you can do your study out loud, or in revisitable form. Think about the implications of this to how "study" itself is conceptualized. In another's personal library, you can not only read, say, a paper he's kept, but, along side that, something of his "reading" of that paper, his "study" of it.

writing eBooks

The eManual accessed from this help menu is an eBook, of course. An eBook is "bound" in a web browser and by links. This particular format uses a master page with frames. When you've done a little reading of web materials, keeping some of them on your computer hard disk, you'll have a different sense of, say, a "book." A book isn't a file or even a collection of files. It's more a place than a thing. On the hard disk, it is likely a directory in which many of the materials bound in are located. And, what with linked in materials, the place goes out beyond that directory to include, potentially, the whole web.

In eWriter's eManual, the "framework" or "book shell" is ew_read.htm. It's the frameset and a function to load a file that is in the "reading" frame into its own Full window (w/o toolbars) for easier reading. That function will be called from ew_toc.htm, the table of contents file that appears on the left. The ew_top.htm file holds a title page of sorts. And the ew_intro.htm file is an introduction or preface or foreword initially in the reading frame.

View any of these in the browser using View Source, of course. Or bring all of them into eWriter and save the Desktop so you can bring them all back quickly. Study them, add other materials you want in eManual to the ew_toc using Stack of Buttons from the XML menu, and then try gathering .htm files into an eBook of your own design. Beyond that lies writing .htm papers or chapters to complete the writing of an eBook.

Getting started: XML'd writing

eWriter is an HTMLWriter in the sense that it is set up for typing in HTML tags as easily as more common punctuation. Growing "in eWriter's belly" is an XMLWriter.

On the XML menu, below The Changer, are two sections of menu items, each with a clickable label that gets information. The top section has HTML "emulations" of tricks that will be commonplace in XML apps. The second section is true XML framework punctuation. It's mostly DTD writing items, but sometimes used in the course of writing documents. The real work menu is Tagset. A clickable label explains that the writer builds a tagset into the menu. Or prebuilt sets can be swapped into ewriter.ini once the format is known. A writer, then, uses this tagset much as the HTML menu is used. Of course, the writer must know the tagset, something of the DTD, and, to be readable, the associated style sheets. In eManual, read tagset.htm and in the Help topics look for eXtensible Markup and Tagset.

The developers of XML, which is used, actually, to define tagsets rather than being one, try to make HTML and XML defined tagsets "interoperable." You will, in most cases, be able to use some, maybe much, of the HTML assistance, and the Txt Keys menu is wholly useable for escaping keys an application might respond to but that you want in your text.

Read through "Getting started: advanced writing" again, this time applying the advice about boilerplate, crib sheets, and templates to your use of this XMLWriting eWriter.

writing XML links into documents

Any element can be a linking element, and the declaring of that is taken care of in the DTD. You write a link into a document as punctuation using Link Element on the Tagset menu. You can use Ctrl+NumPad#1 if The Changer is checked. A series of input dialogs come up. The first gets the Element name; the second gets the attribute list, and the third gets the "live" text.

Often, an element that serves as a linking element has been defined so that relatively few attributes are listed and those having short values. But sometimes this will not be true. eWriter will take a very long attribute list, but you might not put in the whole list and insert text, using boilerplate, in your text file. In any case, you will want to chop up the long line with the Enter key. Here is a sample* from a book on my desk:

HREF="http://www.webtype.com/zero/zero.html"
TITLE="link to zero" CONTENT-ROLE="emptiness"
CONTENT-TITLE="nothing at all" SHOW="REPLACE"
ACTUATE="USER" BEHAVIOR="here | zero"/>

Notice that this is an empty element. The end "/" must be on the end of your attribute list when this is the case. If it is there, no end tag will print. You can adjust either way in your text.

Note: Boilerplate is useful for keeping items like CONTENT-TITLE="" and the others that you will use each time you use the MYLINK element, but with different content each time. Short attribute names with little typing don't warrant this.

*From Simon St. Laurent's XML: A Primer.

writing document definitions & Styles

The items on the lower section of the XML menu are for the writer working with XML-defined tagsets and are mainly useful working with DTDs and "internal" DTD prologs at the top of documents. But to write DTDs in eWriter, you will need to make heavy use of boilerplate sets, crib sheets, and templates. Even writing documents, using a tagset, you will often fill out a tag by doing a short form in Link Element input boxes and using boilerplate or even a crib sheet to fill in attributes and their values in your text.

XSL for "style sheets" isn't a finished specification yet. CSS is used by some, DSSSL by the hardy. So, obviously I can't offer shortcuts. I think that, in any case, unless XSL, at least, uses tags, eWriter's quick typing won't help. If tags are used, then you can at least use ^S and ^X to start making content for boilerplate or crib sheet.

writing XML prologs

A prolog is a massive chunk of punctuation written in at the top of the document. And you use the Prolog menu item on the Tagset menu. If The Changer is checked, you can use Ctrl+NumPad#7. You must already understand what you will be typing in and why. I could not fit in a tutorial here even if I was qualified to write one. To type boilerplate into the input boxes, use Ctrl+Ins in the boilerplate change dialog and Shift+Insert in the input dialog.

The prolog will print the line and, then the line. You type in a STANDALONE value for the first, and have a great deal of control over the second. You supply the Document Type name and enter PUBLIC, SYSTEM, or [] in a third box. If you enter [], eWriter types out what it has and gives you an empty line between [ and ]> for your internal declarations. If you enter SYSTEM, you are asked for the locator. Give the locator in quotes. If you want to make internal declarations, add [] so you have "locator"[]. No space after the quote mark. If you entered PUBLIC, before the box for a locator comes up, one for the PUBLIC's identifier comes up. The identifier, too, goes into quotes. And it comes out looking something like this: "-//UpstartInc//DTD menu-report//EN". The first item is ISO for a standard, + for one okayed by a committee, and - for wild-eyed independents' work. The EN is for English.

writing tagsets

No, this is not a tutorial on writing DTDs. This is about "writing in" tagsets in the Tagset menu. This "tagset" is for use by writers who are writing with the tagset in eWriter. Presumably, external DTDs are already selected and even a standard prolog for this particular type of document is in a template or on a crib sheet and is more than just a framework. What will go on the Tagset menu (where 15 slots are available) are tags, with some preset or empty attributes in the start tag, to be used more than once or twice in a document. And where an attribute's setting might represent a choice, you can use two slots and have a ready-made tag for each.

<list type="ordered"></list>
<list type="unordered"></list>

Tags that will be used only once or twice in a document but which involve quite a bit of typing because of required attributes are best kept in boilerplate cylinders to be swapped

in and out. Complex sets of "nested" elements are best kept in crib sheets loaded into editors other than the one(s) you are working in. It makes sense to load a document type's crib sheets into the first n editors -- so that Alt+1, Alt+2, etc., always gets the same ones as you get to know what's where. The actual document you are working on can be behind them in one or more editors.

The focus in a textwriter (software typewriter) and in an htmlwriter is on a writer who is using widely known punctuation systems to "blaze" broadcast writing. The focus in an xmlwriter, however, is on a "community" of writer/readers who share a punctuation "jargon." The writer is managing "in group" meanings and working with what Jeff Duntemann called, in Visual Developer Magazine, "structures of meaning." The tagset that's at hand in the Tagset menu is a core tool.