DisplayDA is free, but it is also copyright 1988 by Bill Steinberg (me); all commercial rights are reserved. You may customize DisplayDA to display whatever you want, and you may GIVE it to anyone you like, just don't remove this text, or my copyright notices. You may NOT sell DisplayDA without my permission.
DisplayDA is a standard DA; you install it with Font/DA Mover. It works well with Suitcase™. You can have more than one DisplayDA installed at a time. I have three installed that show me different things that I need.
DisplayDA displays a scrolling list of any text you want, up to 32K worth. You can control where the window shows up, and what size it is. You can control what font is used, what size the font is, and whether the text word wraps or not. You can change the title in the window, the name of the DA in the Apple menu, and the colors of the window and scrollbar. On Macs with the extended adb keyboard, the home, end, page up, page down, up arrow, and down arrow keys do what you would expect them to. The return and enter keys page down the display on all macs, and the period key closes DisplayDA.
You probably received DisplayDA with it already set up to display something useful. I wrote it originally to show an Apple System Errors table I put together. The rest of this document is about customizing DisplayDA to show text of your own choosing. If you are not interested in customizing DisplayDA, you've read all you need to read; just click on the DisplayDA notice below again. This document will go away, and the original text will return. You can toggle between this document and the main document at any time, by clicking on the DisplayDA notice at the bottom.
You don't have to be a programmer to customize DisplayDA, but you will have to be able to edit resources (with ResEdit). I'm not going to teach you about resources and how to use ResEdit, but if you already know how, here's the information you'll need:
The 'WIND' resource: You can change the DA window title. You can also change the window size and position as follows: If the window top OR left is anything but 0, DisplayDA assumes all 4 window coordinates (top, left, bottom, and right) are correct as entered. DisplayDA won't try and size or position the window, except to size the bottom in a bit if necessary to make the window height an even multiple of the teLineHite. Ergo, if you want the window to show up in a specific place, you gotta change all 4 window coordinates to what you want. If you leave the topLeft window coordinates at 0,0, the DA will start helping you with the window positioning; When the topLeft is 0,0, the bottom and right coordinates are treated as height and width parameters, and the DA autocenters the window in your main screen. If you leave either the bottom or the right parameters 0 too, (or both) DisplayDA will autosize that dimension for you as well as autocentering it. For example, System Errors DA comes set with window coordinates of 0,0,0,470. This means the window will be autocentered in both the vertical and horizontal planes, (the initial topLeft is 0,0), it will be autosized vertically to just fit your main screen, (the next 0, which is the height parameter since the topLeft was 0,0), and the window will have a width of 470 pixels (the final, or width parameter).
The 'wctb' resource: You can change the window colors.
The 'cctb' resource: You can change the scrollbar colors.
The 'Info' resource: The Info resource holds two words and two booleans (each a byte). The first word in the resource is the font number to be used (default is monaco, font number 4). The second word is the font size to be used (default is 9pt). The final bytes are the boolean flags for word wrap. The default is 0 (false), in the first byte [word wrap off], and $FF (true) in the second byte [word wrap on]. The first boolean is for the main display, the one that comes up when you open DispayDA. The second is for the text you are reading now. If you put anything but 0 in either byte (= true), the text will word wrap in the window. Carriage returns in the text will force a new line regardless of the setting of the word wrap flag.
The 'DRVR' resource: You can change the resource NAME to have whatever name you want to show up in the Apple menu.
The 'TEXT' resource: This contains the text of what is displayed in the window. It is nothing more than plain text with carriage returns. (8-bit Macintosh text is fine; you can use all those weird characters if you like, like I did with the 'bullet' characters, which are option-8). Note that there are no length bytes preceding any of the text, nor are there any special terminating bytes. (IE The text is just text, not Pascal or C strings). Since text edit is used to display the text, carriage returns are significant, but tabs and other formatting characters are not, and you are limited to 32K of text.
CHANGES (To DisplayDA, not what it's displaying) LOG:
1.1 - First Public Release
1.2 - Fixed Bug in screen height routine
1.3 - Keyboard support, squarer corners in window, better customizing.
1.5 - Moved copyright notice out of menubar and into content, and made it the "button" to show this doc, which I moved into DisplayDA itself.
1.6 - Added period to close DA.
1.7 - Improved response to low memory when reading in the text.
Bill Steinberg - Wednesday, December 28, 1988 (my birthday)
