Archive Magazine 1996/ARCHIVE_96.iso/text/hints/volume_09/issue_08

Text File | 1996-04-02 | 14KB | 279 lines

Hints and Tips
9.8
ArcFax <Ö> Met Office Ö Users of David Pillingæs ArcFax system may be
finding it impossible to access the Met. Officeæs suite of MetFax
transmissions. These cover a vast number of products including satellite
pictures and plotted weather charts. The problem is that most automatic
Édial and receiveæ attempts are foxed by the first few seconds of the
MetFax broadcast which is a voice message saying öPlease press startò
(or something to that effect).
9.8
The solution is simple Ö dial the number (say 0336-400-400 for the index
page) from the handset, listen to the connection, and click on ÉReceiveæ
when instructed. David says that a string of commas after the dialling
code should work, as each comma introduces a short pause between the
Édialæ and the Éreceiveæ. However, I have not experimented enough yet to
know how many commas are needed.
9.8
Rodney Blackall, Battersea.
9.8
Artworks centring Ö In using ArtWorks to create a mini poster for a
friend of mine, I needed to centre several objects on the page. I used
the align command, but found that the objects were aligned around their
centres while still not being centred on the page.
9.8
I solved the problem by drawing a rectangle round the print margin
outline and then selecting all the objects and aligning them. The outer
rectangle could then be deleted, leaving the remainder correctly
positioned on the paper.
9.8
David Wild, Hemel Hempstead.
9.8
CD-ROMs Ö Now that CD-ROMs have become very cheap I have wandered round
such shops as GAME looking for sources of clipart and photographs for
use in DTP work. There is quite a lot of clipart available and, although
it does tend to have an American bias, much of it is quite usable in
Britain. Although you may need a Windows program on the PC card to use
the browse facilities, such programs as WMF->Draw will allow the files
to be transferred without difficulty.
9.8
For photographs, ChangeFSI will work on almost all of them. There are
many interesting photographs available but I donæt feel that they are,
generally, as useful as the clipart. This is, perhaps, because a
photograph is too realistic. A drawing of a shop assistant will
illustrate almost any article about shops, but a photograph tends to
attract questions about the particular subject.
9.8
Whilst looking at various collections of photographs in GAME, I bought a
cheap disc called ÉPhoto Gallery #2æ from Expert Systems. This claimed
to have ömore than 3,000 photographs... in full colourò and
öprofessional qualityò. According to Count, there were exactly 3,000,
but many of them were in black and white, and any professional producing
work like that would soon find himself looking for another job. The
quality of them was Évariableæ!
9.8
I wrote to the importers, with a detailed list of comments, and they
promised to pass on my comments to the firm in the United States. This
was well before Christmas but I have heard no more, and donæt suppose
that I will.
9.8
Clipart and photographs from Keysoft seem quite good and I have used a
number from the Corel Draw! 3 disc. I then bought Corelæs ÉGallery IIæ
clipart disc which has some useful pictures on it. Unfortunately, the
files on this disc are stored in ÉCMXæ format which, until the updated
version of ImageFS appears, needs the Windows program to get at it. On
just two occasions, I managed to get files out of it, but every other
time it has collapsed with a ÉStack faultæ when Iáhave tried to extract
any data although it displays the Éthumbnailsæ without any difficulty. I
wrote to Corel about the problem but have had no reply.
9.8
An interesting point about ÉClipartæ is that the phrase is often used
about work to which it doesnæt apply. The work of Christopher Jarman is
often given away by the magazines under this heading, but I feel that it
is misclassified. I have no complaints about the pictures, except that
they make me very envious, but to my mind, clipart is something that you
use for incidental illustration, while these are pictures to look at and
admire.
9.8
David Wild, Hemel Hempstead.
9.8
Email accessory Ö An essential (for me!) email accessory is a little
program called !PtrCopy, written by Ran Mokady in about 1991. What it
does is, when you press <alt> and <ctrl> at the same time, it looks at
the bit of screen under the mouse pointer and if it finds a letter in
system font, it puts that letter into the keyboard buffer. If the
pointer then slides over some more system font letters, it adds those
into the keyboard buffer too. Can you see the application?
9.8
Suppose I have an email on screen and someone says, öI suggest you email
Fred Czyzechoski <Czyzechoski @Pzyzorkzy.noyta.cccp>ò and you want to
type the email address into a ÉSend Emailæ window, youæll be jolly glad
you donæt have to type it!
9.8
Seriously, any time I have one bit of text in an email and I need to
type it somewhere else, <ctrl-alt> and slide the pointer does it
quickly, easily and accurately!
9.8
I managed to track Ran down and he kindly agreed that we could put the
application on the Archive monthly program disc.
9.8
Ed.
9.8
Email English Ö I take what Paul says about the standard of English in
emails and, in particular, correct spelling. One way is to use a word
processor of some description and then drop a text file into the email
window of the Internet application.
9.8
This is OK, but it is more effort Ö itæs much easier just to type a
reply using the text editor which the Internet software pulls up. I have
found something better Ö ÉSpellæ from David Pilling (ú10 through
Archive). When running, as it is now, it is clever enough to
continuously check anything typed into an icon or window and beep on
wrong words. It even has a Éforesightæ window to guess what I am about
to type.
9.8
Itæs just what I needed. I would recommend it to anyone. I will be
setting it up to load automatically when I run my Voyager internet
application.
9.8
(Great idea, Clive, thanks! Iæve tried it myself and find it works very
well indeed. Ed.)
9.8
Clive R Bell <[e-mail]>
9.8
Formatting v initialising Ö With any new hard disc (or removable
cartridge), you will first need to Éprepare it for useæ. This is
variously termed formatting, initialising, partitioning, and many other
things besides. Unfortunately, the terminology is used in contradictory
ways depending on who you talk to, and this causes a great deal of
confusion. Most manufacturers refer to the time-consuming low-level
process of marking the disc surface with tracks and sectors as
formatting. This is what you do with new floppy discs (which come
unformatted). However, the difference is that all hard discs and
removable cartridges are formatted in the factory, and do not need to be
formatted again, ever! It may even be a rather bad idea to reformat a
disc Ö I have had people claim that since they did this, their disc has
become very unreliable.
9.8
All that needs to be done to a new hard disc is to write onto it the map
and catalogue information which tell the RISC OS filing system what is
stored on the disc and where it is. To start with, there is no data on
the disc, of course, but that fact still has to be recorded in a form
that the filing system understands. This process of initialising the
disc to indicate that there is nothing on it, is most often called
initialising but, unfortunately, not everyone calls it that.
9.8
Unlike formatting, initialising is a more or less instantaneous process,
and that can be quite an alarming thing as Paul found out last month
when he initialised his main data disc! Fortunately for him,
initialising a disc does not actually remove data from the disc surface,
it merely tells the disc to forget that there is anything on it.
(öMerelyò, he says! Huh! Ed.) It is therefore possible to recover many
files from an accidentally blanked disc using a utility such as Disc
Rescue (ú33 through Archive).
9.8
Partitioning is a term used in association with SCSI discs, and is
closely related to initialising. You can designate different parts of a
SCSI disc to behave as if they were discs in their own right and, under
RISCáOS, they actually appear as separate drive icons. The process of
partitioning is the initialisation of each of these parts of the disc
and, theoretically, each partition can be initialised for use under a
different system (such as RISC OS, UNIX, DOS, etc). So, to initialise a
SCSI disc so that it shows as a single drive icon, you would still
partition it, but with only one RISC OS partition and no others.
9.8
The software that you use to do all this for IDE discs is !HForm. SCSI
interface cards, however, each come with their own very individual disc
management software Ö and this is where much of the confusion lies. Some
use the terms Éformatæ and Éinitialiseæ in completely the opposite
sense, or they mix and match other terms with these in such a random way
that they cease to have any meaning at all. The important thing, when
you attempt to Éprepare a disc for useæ, is that you read the SCSI
management instructions analytically to work out just how confused the
author was before you attempt to follow them.
9.8
(James has had to Éinterpretæ the makersæ instructions to confused
customers on a number of occasions Ö I think you can detect the note of
exasperation! Ed.)
9.8
James Taylor <[e-mail]>
9.8
Impression problems Ö If you have upgraded Publisher beyond 4.05
recently (or 5.05 if you have Plus) and started getting errors about
missing fonts, and such-like, at fairly regular intervals, youære not
alone! CC changed the software because of problems with RiscPCs of more
than 20Mb (or some such) but it seems to have introduced problems for
those of us with more modest amounts of memory!
9.8
The solution is to stop it using the dynamic memory areas. This will
slow it down a bit, I was told Ö although I havenæt really noticed any
speed decrease. Load the !Run file and add the following as the very
first instruction in the file:
9.8
Set Impression$NoDynamicAreas 1
9.8
Ed.
9.8
Printers 1.52 and Paint Ö If people are complaining that Printers 1.52
will not print sprites in colour from Paint (as I found on my A5000/
HP500C), there are two workarounds:
9.8
a) Drop the sprite in Draw and print it from there.
9.8
b) Put the following into an Obey file and run it before starting
Printers:
9.8
  Set Printers$DPLJfullQ Full
9.8
This gives you back the 256 colour option in the Printers control panel,
as well as the three dithering options, which was available in previous
releases of Printers. As Paint is not as clever as Draw about rendering
colour information (so I have read), it can only handle 256 colour
modes. If you now set Paint to a 256-colour mode, it will print in
colour.
9.8
John Jervis <[e-mail]>
9.8
Programming Errors Ö This is something Iáuse for programming, to help
with sorting out Basic programming errors. I put the following two
lines:
9.8
OSCLI öSet Alias$? Show Program_errorò
9.8
ON ERROR OSCLI(öSet Program_error ò+
9.8
REPORT$+ö at line ò+STR$(ERL)):END
9.8
at the start of my Basic Wimp program, and add:
9.8
OSCLI(öSet Program_error ò+REPORT$+
9.8
ö in line ò+STR$(ERL))
9.8
to my Basic error handling PROC.
9.8
If the program encounters an error, it stores the error report and line
number in a system variable. The variable has a nice meaningful name,
but typing all that out is too much bother, so a question mark is
defined as a system alias. All you need to do is to press <f12>, type a
<?> and <return>, and your error info is presented. I use Edit, by the
way. Of course, you could open a task window and enter ? there instead
of via <f12>.
9.8
This little tip saves me a lot of trouble, as I keep forgetting what
error occurred, or at which line.
9.8
Anton Mans <[e-mail]>
9.8
Pure printing colours Ö With a colour printer, colour can often be used
to enhance text, for example by emphasising headings. In these
conditions, the precise hue is usually not important, but arbitrary
choice of hues often results in disappointing results. The appearance
tends to be Édottyæ or muddy, because the hue is approximated by using a
mixture of different colours, and does not match the resolution and
crispness of black text.
9.8
To avoid this, use the CMYK palette option in your word processor, etc,
and select only saturated C, M or Y by dragging the colour sliders to
100% for the chosen hue and 0% for the others. The print will then
consist of dots all the same hue and will appear bright and crisp. You
are, of course, limited to four colours (including black).
9.8
Eric Ayers <[e-mail]>
9.8
Reading DOS format hard discs Ö An undocumented bonus feature of the
Alsystems Powertec SCSIá2 card is that, if you present it with a hard
disc in DOS format, it will recognise this and access it through DOSFS.
I only noticed this recently while setting up an internal 270Mb SyQuest
in a RiscPC due to go out to a customer. I like to make sure that all
the configuration, SCSI device settings, termination links etc are set
up correctly, and also that all the cartridges are initialised for use
under RISCáOS. At one stage, I put a cartridge in that was Épreformatted
for DOSæ and, to my surprise, a directory display appeared with several
SyQuest ReadMe files in it! It was possible to read and write to the
disc, but a phone call to Alsystems revealed that they are still working
on being able to initialise discs to DOS format.
9.8
James Taylor <[e-mail]>
9.8