Huh? -- A weird title? Well, I hope it's forward looking. We're all cyberseafarers upon wild cyberseas, now, and PocketPad's been in "cybernaut" training since 1.2. (It's currently 1.6.) It's Shareware, but as I've been saying in disknote (inside the ZIP file) and even the Help topics...there's no registration or payment through 1.9x. A day may come when there's a 2.0.
PocketPad's written in Delphi16 and will work well in Win 3.1 and Win 95. I assume it'll work in NT, too, and in anything (Mac, WARP, etc.) that claims to run Win 3.1 programs. Thanks to Borland's resident gentry, in Win 3.1 you get much that was meant to preview Win 95, like the right mouse button popup menus.
PocketPad 1.0 was a corrective. I set out to make what Notepad should have been (and still isn't). It's MDI, or a bunch of editors. Thanks to Delphi's builders, EACH editor has Notepad's 32K. In setting up the Multiline Edit, Delphi substitutes a Global memory handle for HInstance so that each Memo seems to be in a different instance of PocketPad. (Why am I telling you this? Well, you are getting this file from Coriolis' ftp server...so there's a chance you know exactly what I'm talking about.)
I threw in some tools, including a "pager" that will chunk a large file into any number of .pt? files and reassemble the original after you've gang-loaded and worked on the pieces. If you're doing .asm files, you can write the .pt? files first, following your PAGE commands for look and feel.
But my main correctives, had to do with weird standard ops. I put in genuine "text editor" tabs. And "real" wordwrap. The user can change the tab grid on the fly, and the Tab key causes the cursor to float over the text to next stop. You can skip through the text this way. Shift Tab causes a backward float. Ctrl+Tab, on the other hand, will cause spaces to be inserted up to that next point. Tab, of course, will do this at the start of an empty line.
Notepad, and almost anything else, will wrap text at the window's edge and, in fact, won't export any marks to indicate even that. This so-called "wordwrap" is about as useful, as the Texan says, as the tits on a boar hog! Uhmm. In PocketPad you set the wrap column. The default is 72. Why? Unix mail composers (i.e., in Pine) wrap on 72. I always reset my copy to 71...and when I was using Pine, this was to BEAT the wrapping there. Windows mailers use Windows wrapping, too, and unless you maximize...strange partial lines show up. You must toggle wordwrap on and off from the menu.
Most importantly, no #9 is inserted. Spaces only. And #13#10 line endings are put in. Ctrl+Hyphen produces faked hyphenation. You can use it when you have the feel of your line endings. It inserts a hyphen and a space, which the wordwrap will wrap to.
For the rest of this jam-packed "assist the typist AND the writer" feature bundle, ...study the menus and, with them, the Help topics. Once you have an editor open (and all the menus), F1 (pressed when no menu is open) goes past the Contents and to a jump table list of topics. Try things out...BUT READ FIRST...because a few things c'n be dangerous: Using auto-backup if working with .pt? files. And the menu items titled Dirty Spaces and Danger. These are written about on the Contents page (popups), so if you ALWAYS use F1 you'll never see them.
In 1.2, I put up the HTML and Txt Keys menus. I've since added JScript (my abbreviating of "Javascript," not an allegiance to MS's variant) and META menus. The latter is looking forward to Jeff Duntemann's vision of a Virtual Encyclopedia of Absolutely Everything that will "grow" in the cybersea. The "hand-holds" (if you want to grab it and pull it ashore) will be in some shaped META statements.
What I saw back in the days of working on 1.2 was Every human's eword processor, or, in view of how things are going, WORD (skip the e) processor. First, it's a "duplex" writing machine. The "i/o" has been split into the "i" and the "o". The "i" is a text editor, it's a keyboard and mouse, essentially, but of course it screens (so you can see what you're doing) and prints (so you can take your copy to the head or watercooler and read it on break). It's a typewriter, or, in this age, a "text editor." These are free or, in fancy versions, maybe cost a little. They're ubiquitous included in all sorts of packages. They follow from typewriters, offering the least resistence (steepness of the learning curve). They screen, print, and SEND...the plain text that email requires. Winword or whatever will export "plain text" but you've got to sweat what they will or won't export, and how they'll export it, AFTER learning to even USE Winword. And thinking about PDF? Hah! Even RTF, plain text, is useless. You've got to know Winword or another proprietary system...and furnish color tables, font tables, and...well, you get the idea.
The "o" that does the real screening and printing is, of course, a browser. Top of the line browsers run from free (Internet Explorer 3+) to $50 (Navigator 3+). These have Mac and Windows 3.1 versions as well as the 32 bit Windows 95. You can fiddle with fonts, colors, and all that...BUT YOU DON'T HAVE TO! The builders of the browsers and the recipients of your eletters c'n adjust the display for the reader's comfort. And that's why this "duplex" typewriter is Everyhuman's letter writer.
A text editor, or a word processor, is for writers, though most of the latter now have page publishing tools built in. So I've approached HTML and Javascript, etc., as "punctuation" not as a typographer's "markings" for shaping up a page. Think it doesn't matter when it comes to putting in tools? If you've used a web-page "editor," you'll notice the difference when you click on, say, Anchor on the menu or use the key on the "format pad." In the HTML Editor, you get a dialog and all the parameters as Edits. That will stop your writing. In PocketPad, you get a series of "inputQuery" catchers...and you write your way along the tag, ending up with your cursor where it ought to be for anything you add "outside" or at the end so you can go on....
In eletters.txt, I tell you how to use Notepad, f'rinstance, as your text editor...and it'll do if you use a little thinking. The tags involve a set of angle brackets, a slash for the end-tag, and a word, sometimes several words, inside. This punctuation isn't quite like typing in commas and periods. But with two Notepads, one with a sheet of tags you use, and the clipboard, you can go back over your letter where you've put in a mark that indicates you want a tag and plug them in. And there are other "tricks" to ease the typing.
I put in the HTMLing in "layers." Look on the Edit menu. You'll see that Ctrl+S and Ctrl+X give you start and stop tags with the cursor inside for adding your words. And there are boilerplates (eight of them) for keeping tags or tag words that aren't in tags on the menus. Click on BP (status bar) and you get a dialog where you can set the boilerplates (you can set them outside, too) AND where you can import and export sets, having bplates.set in view in the editor. I call this my "loaded revolver cyclinder" technology. (That's no sillier than other "technology" names around.)
Anyway, the HTML menu allows you to write your framework as you go, generating the template as you write within it...though you c'n also keep templates on hand. Txt Keys enables you to type, say, a tag so that it will show up in the browser instead of being caught and obeyed rather than screened or printed. For a tag, you don't replace all the symbols but only the initial left angle bracket. You'll get the nack. You can use the general symbol to put in pretty quotes or other things, but usually won't for letters. You want the letter, like this one, to be readable in the mailer, for an initial skim.
Want to test this? If you haven't already pulled in the .zip, and are seeing this in a browser, and are on line, ...well, CLICK HERE! and you c'n pull the zip from this letter.... Other goodies that I won't demo are, using the JScript menu, popup footnotes. Remember, these will screen interestingly...but won't print as footnotes, of course.
ENOUGH! You're ready to tiptoe into bein' a cyberwriter....
Gene Fowler
Berkeley, California
May 3, 1997