If you place an EPS file in a page layout program, be sure the source EPS document is on the disk when you print, or you won't get Postscript quality printout.
To avoid MultiFinder on bootup, hold down the Command key while booting.
I thought Mac owners didn't have to be told that serif fonts — the ones with little feet on the letters, like New York, Times and Palatino — are read more easily in blocks of text than sans serif (without feet) fonts like Helvetica, Geneva and Avant Garde.
Trust me! All the typography experts tell you that. Use the sans serif for headlines and punchy pieces of text. Use serif fonts for body text. Once you see a really gross example, like an entire MUG newsletter set in Helvetica, you will be a convert to serif body type.
Some applications can be made to take advantage of the larger Mac II screen by holding down the Command key while enlarging the window, but not Ashton-Tate's Full Paint. (Thanks, Random Access, University of Texas at Austin MUG.)
There is an undocumented feature in Canvas which makes Bezier curves. Hold down the Option key while selecting the polygon tool. Draw the polygon, then type Command/E and the polygon becomes a Bezier curve, which can be manipulated.
In the Canvas DA, the keyboard equivalent does not work, so go to the menu item Edit Polygon instead.
The SFScroll INIT by Andy Hertzfeld will leave your scroll tab right where you left it in dialog boxes like the Open... dialog box. This INIT is in the public domain.
If there is a lot of static electricity in the air — play safe and ground yourself on a piece of grounded metal before touching the ports or connectors on your Mac.
If you haven't upgraded your Suitcase to version 2.0 and it won't work with a Mac II, use FEdit or MacSnoopy and hunt for 225F205F2050 and change it to 6000008C2050.
To avoid font ID number conflicts, install ALL of your fonts in a huge single file. Now load several "disk size" (less than 800k) suitcases from this one file. If you stick to those fonts, you can now use these suitcases to move fonts all over the place, just as long as they don't go in a system or suitcase with fonts which have not been exposed to this process. If you introduce a new font to this group, you either have to do it all over again, or examine the new font to satisfy yourself there is no conflict.
Check your Mac II mouse before the warranty expires. If it doesn't give a definite "click" when pressed, you may have a defective mouse cover. True to form, Apple does not sell mouse covers, just the whole mouse. If you have a defective mouse cover, eventually your cursor will freeze and you won't be able to boot. (Thanks David Sachs, South Coast MUG of Goleta, CA, and sorry about your mouse.)
I recently read a front page article in a MUG newsletter describing a way to refill your own LaserWriter cartridges.
Don't! Not only don't, but don't have it refilled by anyone who does it as the article describes. They tell you to drill a hole and refill it through the hole.
No, no, no! To refill a cartridge safely, it should be disassembled, cleaned, adjusted and checked for wear or abnormalities. Be sure that your cartridge refiller does exactly that.
Oh, and the article says you can refill six times. Maybe. Sometimes. But three times is more like it. After that, most rechargers will tell you that you are on your own.
The 5.0 LaserWriter driver doesn't work well with 512k Macs. Use 4.0 until the 5.2 version shows up, which Hoyt Bayles of Apple says will solve everything. Well, maybe not everything, but almost everything. Hoyt also says the Command/Shift/4 print screen won't be supported in future Systems for a number of technical reasons, including MultiFinder complications. So learn to use Command/Shift/3 and print out the resulting bitmapped image.
Word 3.0 Hints
I am always wanting to use the Command symbol as I write. Here's a way to get the Command symbol, diamond, check mark and in Word 3.01.
Click in the lower left corner, in the block where the page number appears. The word Code appears there. Type the ASCII code for whichever symbol you want, hit Return, highlight the resulting character in your text and change it to Chicago.
The ASCII codes are 17 for the Command key, 18 for the check mark, 19 for the diamond and 20 for the symbol.
Of course in most LaserWriter fonts, Option/Shift/K gives you the .
Each of the dialog boxes in Word 3.01 can be moved to a preferred location on the screen. For instance, the Spelling dialog box can be grabbed by the title bar and hauled down to the lower part of the screen. The next time you access Spelling… the box will be right where you put it.
How many bugs left in Microsoft Word 3.01 (not 3.0, which we all beta tested)? David Sachs has a list of more than 120 bugs in Word 3.01. Among them are lots of spelling checker bugs. For a list, send a self-addressed, stamped envelope to David at P.O. Box 11626, St. Paul, MN 55111-0626. (Thanks to Intelligent Mac from SmartMAC MUG, the MUG for Mensans.) By the way, David is also collecting FullWrite Professional bugs, a chore we hope will not be as aggravating as collecting Word 3.0 bugs.
In both Word 3.01 and Pagemaker 2.0a, hold down Command/Option/t to set a default indent. Repeat as many times as you need indent space. (MacValley Voice, Burbank, CA MUG.)
HyperCard Hints
HyperBook Maker is out with a 1.1 upgrade which makes it compatible with HyperCard 1.1. Contact Ideaform, (515) 472-7256 to get the upgrade if you haven’t already received it.
If you want to change the text in a locked field, it takes a lot of clicking around. Here is a script to do it simply. Put this script in your Home stack and you will be able to use Option/click to unlock a field and Command/click to lock it again:
on mouseUp
if the optionKey is down then
get the name of the target
if it contains “field” then
if lockText of it then set the lockText of it to false
end if
else if the commandKey is down then
get the name of the target
if it contains “field” then
if lockText of it is¬
false then
hide msg
set the lockText of it¬
to True
end if
end if
else
pass mouseUp
exit mouseUp
end if
end mouseUp
Sound played off stacks located on floppies or non-SCSI hard disks sometimes sound scratchy. Here’s a on mouseUp script to smooth the sound out, where namesound here is the name of the sound to be played:
play “namesoundhere”
wait until the sound is “done”
-- Windoid #6
To type in the message box when it is open and you are currently typing in a field, type Command/M twice and you will be in the message box, ready to type. (Windoid #6.)
If you double click the A tool in a torn-off tools menu, you get access to the dialog box which lets you change fonts, sizes and styles for paint-style text. (Windoid #6.)
Would you like a field which alternately shows and hides? Here is a script which will do that, where "FieldName" is the name of the field to be shown/hidden:
on mouseUp
set visible of field "FieldName"¬
to not visible of field "FieldName"
end mouseUp
Here is how you write doMenu scripts. If there are two words or more in the menu item, or it ends in three dots (Open...), be sure to include the entire menu item within plain quote marks ("Menu Item...") For example:
doMenu "Stack Info..."
Also, remember that HyperCard is not case-sensitive. The, the and THE are all the same to HyperCard.
If you have a script which updates a time display, and you are typing somewhere, the time update script will move your cursor at each update. To temporarily disable this updating, place a double hyphen before the "on idle" line which performs the updates. This temporarily makes that script instruction a comment, which HyperCard will not use. Change it back at the end of the session.
Here is a handy script for use with HyperCard running under MultiFinder. It lets you go to the Finder in a flash:
on mouseUp
doMenu "finder"
end mouseUp
There, that wasn't hard, was it?
If you plan to use the message box as part of a script, show message is sometimes better to use than doMenu "Message" This is because doMenu "Message" is a toggle, so if the message box is already open, doMenu "Message" will close it, which might not be what you wanted.
If you have a stack which is protected, but not password protected, you can go to the scripting level by opening the message box and typing in set userLevel to 5. Then hit a Return.
Here's a two frame animation script from MACFUG NEWS from the University of Utah Faculty Users Group. Draw two similar but slight different pictures. Place them in adjacent HyperCard cards. Now the script:
on mouseUp
repeat for count = 1 to 10
push card -- remember this card
go next card
pop card -- back to remembered card
end repeat
end mouseUp
In HyperCard, the marquee doesn't necessarily mean a rectangle. Try this. Draw a rectangle around an image. Now type Command/S and the marquee shrinks into a lasso to precisely surround the image.
Have you ever hidden fields or buttons which you cannot find? Use this script to find them all.
on mouseUp
repeat with i = 1 to the number¬
of fields
-- or buttons, bkgnd buttons, etc.
show field i -- or button, bkgnd -- button, etc.
end repeat
end mouseUp
Keep this script handy somewhere, so you can Copy/Paste it when needed
Any field with locked text can have script actions which make it act like a button.
To copy a text field as a graphic in Hyper DA, hold down the Option key while executing the Copy command. (MacNexus from Sacramento (CA) MUG.)
For $3.00, Berkeley MUG will send you a HyperCard catalog stack listing their HyperCard offerings. (BMUG, 1442-A Walnut St. #62, Berkeley, CA 94709.)
Help, programmers. Does anyone out there know how to convert an snd HyperCard sound back into a SoundWave file where it can be resampled, combined and edited? Write me care of MACazine if you have a technique you would like to share.
And in case there is still a programmer out there wondering what to do next, HyperCard could use a DA or a script which would show you what sound (snd's) are available within a stack, listing them by the name which HyperCard's play command can recognize.
The Macintosh is famous for the warning dialog boxes which keep you from inadvertently throwing away a file. Here is how you can make HyperCard warn you when you are deleting buttons. Put this script in the Home stack:
on deleteButton
answer "Do you REALLY want to¬
delete that button?" with¬
"No, Copy it" or "Yes"
if it is "No, Copy it" then
doMenu "copy button"
doMenu "paste button"
end if
end delete button -- (WINDOID #6)
If you want a different font, size or style for a button name, replacing the default Chicago 12 plain, type in the message box:
set TextFont of card button¬
"name of button" to "name of font"
-- where "name of button" is the name of -- that button and "name of font" is
-- the name of the desired font.
Set textSize and a number instead of a font name will work -- so will set TextStyle and a style name.
HyperCard tells you in the Stack Information dialog box how many k of waste space are in the current stack. Here is a script which automatically compacts your stack as you leave it. Put this in the Home stack and it works on every stack:
on closeStack
if the freeSize of this stack¬
>= 15000 then
answer "This stack has " &¬
round (the freeSize of this ¬
stack/1024) & "k free,¬
Compact?" with "NO" or "OK"
if it is "OK" then¬
doMenu "compactStack"
end if
end closeStack -- (WINDOID #6)
Here is a way to print out a single field from a stack. Use TeachText to do the printing:
on mouseUp
open file "TempPrintJunk"
write field "name of your field"¬
to file "TempPrintJunk"
close file "TempPrintJunk"
print "TempPrintJunk" with "TeachText"
end mouseUp --(Mel Beckman in Mouse Times)
-- where TempPrintJunk is a holding place -- for your text
-- and "name of your field" is the
-- desired field name
If you want to print all the fields, adapt the script as follows:
