About Tex-Edit…

Tex-Edit is a handy text editor that includes a built-in text reader!  I keep a copy in my Apple menu and an alias on the desktop (for drag-and-drop operations).  Tex-Edit is fast, easy-to-use and requires very little memory.  It is particularly adept at formatting text which is transmitted to and from a BBS.

Tex-Edit requires System version 6.0.3 or newer.  If you wish to hear Tex-Edit speak, you should place the latest Macintalk driver in your System folder.  (The program runs perfectly well without Macintalk.)  It has been tested on an SE/30, an LC and a Quadra.  I would greatly appreciate any bug reports or suggestions.

The ‘Turn Speech On’ command activates Macintalk (if it is installed).  Once speech has been activated, you may use the ‘Speech Settings…’ menu choice to modify the Macintalk speech characteristics.  None of the ‘reading’ commands are available until speech has been activated.

Select ‘Read Document’ to listen to Macintalk read the entire contents of the active window.  Select ‘Stop Reading’ to cancel the reading.

The ‘Pause’ command will interrupt Macintalk at the end of the sentence.  Select ‘Resume’ when you are ready to start listening again.

Select ‘Read Selection’ when you wish to listen to Macintalk read the text that is currently selected.

Standard ‘Find…’ and ‘Replace…’ commands are supported.  You can limit the search to whole words and also specify whether case is significant.

The ‘Strip LF’s’ command will remove all the linefeed characters from text.  (Linefeeds show up as little boxes at the beginning of each line.)  This allows you to easily edit text which was created on a non-Mac computer.

The ‘Modify…’ command allows you to make alterations to a selection (or the entire document if no text is selected).  Multiple modifications may be selected simultaneously.  The first checkbox allows you to remove non-Mac control characters (which usually show up as useless little boxes in the text).  The second checkbox lets you replace each tab character with a specified number of spaces.  It is also easy to convert typographer (‘smart’) quotes to standard quotes and vica versa.

There are several options for dealing with line endings.  Mac word processors use ‘paragraph format’ text.  (Line endings are determined by ‘word wrap’ and paragraphs are terminated by a CR.)  Most BBS and non-Mac systems prefer pre-set line lengths (e.g. 60 characters per line) with each line terminated by a CR or CR/LF.  These extra line-ending characters can be stripped from downloaded text or added to text in preparation for upload.

The ‘Preferences…’ command will present a list of (hopefully obvious) selections.  Please experiment if you are not sure what each choice does.  Your preferences are automatically saved in the Tex-Edit program file.

Features will be added as the author’s study of Inside Macintosh proceeds…  (Whew!)  Tex-Edit is limited to 32K text files and does not support true tab functions or embedded pictures.  Extended keyboard functions (‘Home’, ‘End’, etc.) and ‘Undo’ (for most functions) are supported.  Tex-Edit is fully System 7 compatible, 32 bit clean and ‘stationery-aware’.

                     •••  Warning!  •••
Macintalk may conflict with the Sound Manager.  This means that once Macintalk has been activated, any other sounds may cause the system to hang.  If this happens, Command-Option-Escape allows you to close Tex-Edit and return to the desktop (in System 7).  For some reason, I was unable to produce a crash on the LC or the Quadra.

I used the wonderful THINK Pascal™ compiler and would recommend it highly to any other novice programmer.  The source debugger is excellent.  I have scrounged up a THINK-compatible Macintalk library file and will be glad to share it with you.

If you would like copies of the Pascal source codes (heavily commented), just send a disk (preferably NOT blank) and a self addressed, stamped envelope to:

      Tom Bender
      5313 Beverly Drive
      San Angelo, Texas  76904

If you prefer, you can send feedback via modem:

      America Online:  TomBB
      GEnie:  TBBENDER

Tex-Edit 1.2 (as well as the source code) is freely released to the public domain.  This is not shareware.

Also try Eliza, Re-Pete and Azile, hopefully available on a BBS near you!