[<<Previous Entry]
[^^Up^^]
[Next Entry>>]
[Menu]
[About The Guide]
Overview
About the Norton Guide Reading routines:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Expand library now sports a quite special feature: It provides
the Clipper programmer with the means to read Norton Guide Databases.
This feature offers the possibility to greatly enhance Clipper
Applications in regard to Static Data. Now, Norton Guides need
not be only guides, but can be used to Create an extensive Help
System, or some other source of information for your Applications.
One Norton Guide can be opened at one time, Opening such guide
does not require much memory. The only amount of memory required
is some information concerning the Norton Guide, and the Entry
currently loaded (generally around 5-6Kb). When calling the Functions
used to load data, the information is read from the Norton Guide.
I cannot give a Guarantee that the routines would work on every guide,
I have found out the lay-out of Norton Guides by trial and error, and
have found that every Norton Guide encountered to this day is
formatted as expected. However, to my knowledge, the lay-out is not
officially documented. However, I'm quite confident that these routines
should work on every possible Norton Guide that you may encounter or
make yourself. Just like the Norton Guide alike programs popping-up
these days. The routines also recognize Norton Guides generated by the
EH compiler from SofSolutions.
Note that NGopen() is to be called before any of the other NGxxx()
can be called. Also close the Guide with NGclose() when you're done.
The only exception to that are NGlook() and NGdir(), which return
Norton Guide information possibly required before opening the Guide,
they can be called whenever you want.
Using these routines might seem difficult at first, but I'm confident
that once having experimented a bit, all will become quite clear. Also
have a look at the Demo programs supplied, they quite clearly point out
typical usage of most of the functions. Currently all possible attributes
in the Norton Guide are ignored and not returned by the different functions,
this because it would be too much work to convert them to screen attributes.
All text returned is therefore plain text, without codes.
Note that these routines would of course ideally be part of a Norton Guide
Class, just like TBrowse or Get. Once we get a good and documented way of
creating those classes, I will put these routines as part of a Class. So
expect some changes in the future here.
Note also that the functions in this section all start with NG instead of
XP used mostly in this library. This is chosen to discriminate them from
the other functions, and make it possible for me, for instance, to make
a downstripped library containing only these routines. The source code to
these routines is available when ordering the "Complete" Library, and not
included in the "Enhanced" version, as customizing would generally not be
necessary.
This page created by ng2html v1.05, the Norton guide to HTML conversion utility.
Written by Dave Pearson