The Fred Fish Collection 1.5/ffcollection-1-5-1992-11.iso/ff_disks/200-299/ff285.lzh/'Liner/'Liner.doc

Text File | 1989-11-28 | 8KB | 141 lines

                                 'Liner
                              Version 1.32
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
'Liner V1.32 is copyright ©1988, 1989 by David Schreiber.  All rights
reserved.  YAFR V1.10 is also copyright ©1989 by David Schreiber.  All
rights reserved.

'Liner may be freely distributed as long as the following terms are observed:

   1.  'Liner is distributed without cost, except for the cost of media,
       copying, shipping, labels, and any applicable taxes.
   2.  All copyright messages in 'Liner, its source code, and its
       documentation are not changed.
   3.  If you use code from 'Liner in other programs, please note this
       along with 'Liner's copyright message in the documentation and/or
       source code.

I also request that if you distribuate 'Liner, you keep the source code
with the executable program.  Thanks.

     Once upon a time I tried writing a long outline with a word processor.
It was also the last time.  I wrote 'Liner so I could leave the mundane
parts of writing an outline to the computer.  In essence, what 'Liner does
is to let you type into an outline form, allowing you rearrange blocks of
text without having to renumber everything.  It does not have some of the
features of commercial outliners, such as showing only certain levels in the
outline, or having more than one line of text per number.  However, I
haven't felt limited by it and I don't think you will either.

     The program can be started from either Workbench or the CLI.  From
Workbench, double click on the icon.  From the CLI, type either:
     1>RUN 'LINER
or just:
     1>'LINER
Once you get in 'Liner, you are presented with a I., which is the first line
of your outline.  You can either load an old outline (see below) or start
typing a new one.  I've included a sample outline for you to practice on,
called Sample_Outline.

     Editing a document once you typed it in is fairly straightforward.  The
arrows keys work normally when used by themselves, and you can also position
the cursor by pointing with the pointer and pressing the left mouse button.
Shift-left-arrow and shift-right-arrow move the cursor to the beginning and
end of a line, respectively.  Shift-up-arrow moves up one screenful of text,
while shift-down-arrow moves down the same amount.  Control-up-arrow moves
to the top of the documents, and control-down-arrow moves to the end.  The
TAB key controls what level the current line of text is in.  For example,
type a line and press TAB.  The line moves in and the number or letter in
front of it changes.  For example:
    I.  This is a test
would turn into:
         A.  This is a test
Shift-TAB has the opposite effect.

     Performing operations on blocks of text requires that you highlight the
text you want to manipulate.  There are two forms of highlighting in 'Liner:
 character and line.  Character highlighting involves highlighting
characters on one line only.  To do it left to right, double click on the
first character you want to highlight, then double click on the character
after the last character you want to highlight.  To do it the other way,
just double click on the first and last character.  Once you have
highlighted your text, you can delete it (press the backspace or DEL keys),
replace it with other text (just start typing), cut, copy, and delete it
(see the Edit menu description below).

     Line highlighting is similar to character highlighting:  for both
directions double click on the first and last lines (note:  you can only
highlight one screen full of lines at a time).  There are several things you
can do with a highlighted block of lines:  you can shift the entire block of
text in and out with TAB and the SHIFT-TAB combination, you can delete a
block of lines by pressing the backspace key, and you can cut and paste
(again, see the Edit menu instructions below).

     'Liner uses three menus:  Project, Edit, and Prefs.  The Project menu
holds what you'd expect it to:  New, Open, Save, Save As, Print, About, and
Quit.  Functions that could result in a loss of data (New, Open, and Quit)
ask for confirmation before performing their function (Open and Quit will
not ask, however, if the outline hasn't been changed since it was last
saved;  New always asks, though (also note that you can tell if an outline
has been changed by looking at the title bar:  an asterisk will appear if
the file has been changed, and will dissappear when the outline is saved)).
The Print item is the only one that could be ambiguous:  it has two
sub-items that let you chose where you want the printout to go.  "To
printer" sends it, naturally, to the printer.  "To disk" saves it as an
ASCII file (please note, however, that 'Liner cannot read in ASCII files and
convert them into outlines).

     Next is the Edit menu, which is again fairly standard.  Cut, Copy,
Paste, and Erase do exactly what their names imply. However, their operation
depends slightly on what is being manipulated.  With text on just one line,
when it's cut, it's put in the Clipboard (pause, while the whole Amiga
community gasps in shock and surprise...yes, that's right, the Clipboard).
What this means is that 'Liner can share text with any other application
that supports the Clipboard, such as NotePad.  Of course, hardly anyone
supports the Clipboard, but the text had to go somewhere and the Clipboard
seemed the best place to put it.  Unfortunatly the clipboard is not used
when a number of lines is cut or copied.  When Paste is selected, what is
pasted is whatever was last cut, i.e. if a number of lines were cut, they'll
be pasted back in again, but if text on one line is cut or copied, whatever
is in the Clipboard will be pasted into the outline ('Liner defaults to text
and not line pastes on startup).

     The Prefs menu contains a few items that let you control various aspects
of 'Liner and your document.  "Double spacing" switches between, surprise,
single and double spacing (a check appears next to this item when double
spacing is selected;  note that the display won't show double spacing when
it's activated, but it'll print fine).  "Interlace" lets you choose between
a 24 and 48 line screen (using a 48 line screen is the best way around the
limitation on highlighting lines;  you can select 48 lines at a time in
interlaced mode).  Finally, Starting Level determines which symbols are used
on what level.  For example, on the default setting of "I.", the first level
uses Roman numerals, then capital letters, etc. all the way down to small
letters with parenthesis.  If you were to choose "1.", it would go 1. a. 1)
a) I. A. instead of I. A. 1. a. 1) a).  This is to let you do things like
lists or top-down designs where the information should be numbered with
Arabic numerals or start with some other symbol.

     Finally, as a last note, I should explain the file requestor that is
used by 'Liner.  It's called YAFR (for Yet Another File Requestor...ahem)
and was written by me partially as an excercise, partially because I wanted
a Charlie Heath style file requestor (i.e. one that didn't make you wait
until it had read all of the directory before letting you make a selection)
but couldn't figure out how to put the ARP one or any of the others into
'Liner.  It has a button for most any device out there (including the PIPE:
device that came with 1.3;  it knows not to try and get a directory from
that).  There is a button that lets you choose whether or not to display
.info files (I'll let you guess which one).  The default is not to show
them.  If you want to display only files with a certain extention, type it
into the Extension box (e.g.:  .lnr).  Note that YAFR won't automatically
append the extension to the filename.

     That's it!  If you have any questions, comments, etc.  I can be reached
at:
Usenet:    [e-mail] (during the school year)
US Mail:   Dave Schreiber
           1234 Collins Lane
           San Jose, CA   95129-4208 (during the summer, but
           mail that comes to that address will be forwarded
           to me if I'm at school).