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ORPHEUS An Integrated Authoring System For Hypertext Writers - User's Guide - Copyright 1992 Hyperion Softword Orpheus is two programs: the Orpheus Author (OH.EXE), a program for creating electronic books and online documentation; and the Orpheus Reader (OHREAD.EXE), a program for end-users, to be distributed with such works in their compiled form. Orpheus makes you a master of hypertext; it gives you the freedom to explore the multiple dimensions of your subject while bringing them within easy access of your readers; it gives you the flexibility to experiment, to revise and restructure at will; it gives you the power to compose spontaneously in an electronic galaxy, then to release the worlds you have created so that others may experience them. Orpheus is SHAREWARE. This means that you are welcome to evaluate the authoring program for up to 30 days. If you wish to use the system after that period you must pay the registration fee of $49. For more information see Appendix B, or print and fill out the REGISTER.DOC file and send it with your payment to: Hyperion Softword 535 Duvernay Sherbrooke, QC Canada J1L 1Y8 819-566-6296 (voice) 1 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: Thanks to all of my beta-testers, whose brief bug-reports and copious wish-lists have done so much to make Orpheus what it is. Special thanks to Daniel Coulombe, SYSOP of Synapse BBS (1-819-246-2344), for giving us the Orpheus conference (1022). Live long and prosper! This product uses the SPAWNO routines by Ralf Brown to minimize memory use while shelling to DOS and running other programs. TRADEMARKS: Desqview is a trademark of Quarterdeck Office Systems. Fastgraph is a trademark of Ted Gruber Software. CONVENTIONS FOLLOWED IN THIS MANUAL: Keystrokes are indicated by <> brackets; for example, <F1> means press and release the F1 key, <H> means press and release the "h" key. Combination keystrokes are hyphenated; for example, <Alt-F> means press and hold down the Alt key, then press the "f" key, then release both keys. The term "Orpheus" is generally used in reference to OH.EXE, the authoring program which is the heart of the Orpheus system. Occasionally it refers to the system as a whole, which includes OHREAD.EXE and both programs' help and utility files. 2 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- T A B L E O F C O N T E N T S --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Chapter 1 - Getting Started ......................................... 5 Quickstart ........................................................ 5 How To Use This Manual ............................................ 5 System Requirements ............................................... 6 Installation ...................................................... 6 Getting Help ...................................................... 6 Is Orpheus For You? ............................................... 7 Chapter 2 - The Orpheus Environment ................................. 10 Windows ........................................................... 10 Workspace ......................................................... 10 Statusbar ......................................................... 11 Using Menus ....................................................... 13 Using Help ........................................................ 14 Mouse Interface ................................................... 15 Chapter 3 - Tutorial : Making Hypertext ............................. 17 Setting Up ........................................................ 17 Making a Homecard ................................................. 18 First Links ....................................................... 18 Navigating Links .................................................. 20 Menued Hypertext .................................................. 22 Freeform Hypertext ................................................ 23 Moving Links ...................................................... 25 Behind the Scenes ................................................. 25 Chapter 4 - Tutorial : Modifying Hypertext .......................... 27 Crosslinks ........................................................ 27 Splitting: Below .................................................. 30 At Cursor .............................................. 32 Above .................................................. 32 Designating Home .................................................. 33 Resizing Linkwords ................................................ 34 Changing Link Types ............................................... 35 Unlinking ......................................................... 36 Recovering ........................................................ 37 Pruning & Grafting ................................................ 37 Chapter 5 - Tutorial : Using Graphics ............................... 38 Linking to a Graphic ............................................... 38 Capturing with SNAPSHOT ............................................ 40 Making a Hotspot ................................................... 42 Linking a Hotspot .................................................. 43 Navigating Graphics ................................................ 43 More About Hotspots ................................................ 44 3 Chapter 6 - Tutorial : Completing a Project ......................... 46 Sweating The Details ............................................... 46 Copyright ...................................................... 46 Cardlength ..................................................... 47 Full Title ..................................................... 47 Include Notes .................................................. 47 Checking "More" ................................................ 47 Checking Frame ................................................. 48 "Check Card" Command ........................................... 48 Checking Keynames .............................................. 48 Checking Linkwords ............................................. 49 Compiling Your Project ............................................. 49 Distributing Your Work ............................................. 50 The Orpheus Reader ................................................. 54 Cleaning Up ........................................................ 55 Chapter 7 - Shareware : Registering Orpheus ......................... 57 Licence ............................................................ 57 What You Get When You Register ..................................... 57 Publishers ......................................................... 58 A Note to Pioneers ................................................. 58 Sharing Orpheus .................................................... 58 One Last Word ...................................................... 59 Chapter 8 - Orpheus Utilities ....................................... 60 SNAPSHOT.EXE ....................................................... 60 REGIT.EXE .......................................................... 61 Appendix A - Using Desqview With Orpheus ............................ 64 Appendix B - Programming Command Reference .......................... 65 Graphics Commands .................................................. 65 Program Command .................................................... 65 Random Commands .................................................... 66 4 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- CHAPTER 1 - GETTING STARTED --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Topics in this chapter: Quickstart How To Use This Manual System Requirements Installation Getting Help Is Orpheus For You? Quickstart If you're the intrepid explorer type who never reads manuals, go ahead and fire up the authoring program (OH.EXE). Everything you need to know is in online Help, and Orpheus is supremely user-friendly. Browse the menus, browse Help, experiment, have fun. For an explanation of any menu item, click on it with the right mouse button or place the selection bar on it and press <F1>. For an introduction to the Orpheus philosophy check out "Is Orpheus For You?" at the end of this chapter. How To Use This Manual This manual is a supplement to the online Help in the main program in the Orpheus system, Orpheus Author (OH.EXE). Use it to find out what Orpheus is all about, to get set up, to take your first few steps on the path of hypertext authoring. Bear in mind however that the most detailed information on Orpheus is in the program itself, in online Help, which you can open at any time by pressing <F1>. This manual tells you only a fraction of what you will learn through the Help system. (The same is true of the Orpheus Reader (OHREAD.EXE), which has its own online Help.) To print out this manual, set your printer to 6 lines per inch, 10 characters per inch, and use the following command at the DOS prompt: COPY MANUAL.DOC PRN: If that doesn't work for you, check your DOS manual or just load this file into your favorite word processor and print it from there. Several chapters of this manual are intended to be read online, using a special window in Orpheus called FileView. To do this, start up the authoring program by giving the "OH" command at the DOS prompt. When the program finishes loading, press <Alt-V> to switch to the FileView window, and type in the name of this manual, "MANUAL.DOC". Then press <Enter>. Once the file is loaded, verify that you can switch back and forth between FileView and the current Edit window simply by pressing <Alt-V>. This 5 technique will be especially useful when you get into the tutorials (Chapters 3 to 6), where you will often import blocks of ordinary text from the FileView window into your cards of hypertext. System Requirements Orpheus Author (OH.EXE) requires 480K of RAM, DOS 3.2 or higher, and a hard disk. You do not need a graphics display card unless you wish to link graphics into your work. The Orpheus Reader (OHREAD.EXE) requires 256K of RAM and DOS 3.2 or higher; a hard disk is NOT required. A graphics display card is only needed to view whatever graphics (if any) may be included in a work. Both programs should run on any XT- or AT-compatible computer. Installation Orpheus should be installed in its own subdirectory on your hard disk. An example would be "C:\ORPHEUS", but the name of the subdirectory is up to you. If you received Orpheus from Hyperion Softword the installation program on your distribution disk (INSTALL.BAT) should handle this for you. If you received it from a shareware vendor you may need to uncompress one or more files; follow the instructions on the shareware disk. Orpheus requires that the DOS "Files" variable be set to at least 15. Look in your CONFIG.SYS file (in the root directory of your hard disk) for the line beginning "FILES=". Make sure that the number given is at least 15; if the number is greater than 15, that's fine. If you don't have a CONFIG.SYS file you will need to create one; consult your DOS manual, or type in the following lines at the DOS prompt (leaving out the comments at the right, which begin with ";"): c: ; If in another drive. cd\ ; copy con config.sys ; Tells DOS to create CONFIG.SYS file. FILES=15 ; Our setting. ^Z ; DON'T TYPE THIS! Instead, press ; the F6 key, which inserts "^Z", ; then press <Enter>. If you have changed or created your CONFIG.SYS file you must now reboot the computer for the new setting to take effect. Getting Help If you get stuck or need something explained, the FIRST thing to do is to explore online Help. In just about all situations, pressing <F1> 6 calls up context-sensitive Help with an explanation of exactly what you need to do or to know. Every item on every menu has a Help text which you can access by clicking on the item with the right mouse button, or by moving the selection bar to it and pressing <F1>. The main menu in Help gives access to every topic connected with the program. If you're still stuck, the SECOND thing to do is to read this manual, assuming that what you need is a general explanation of the Orpheus philosophy or a tutorial. If you're still stuck after that, or if you have encountered a bug or run into other difficulties, please DO contact me (Rod Willmot) at Hyperion Softword. I'll do everything I can to help. There are three ways to reach me: by voice, by mail, and by modem. (1) Call 1-819-566-6296, anytime between 11:00 a.m. and 11:00 p.m. EST. You'll get the best help if your computer is up and running. (2) Write to me at Hyperion Softword, 535 Duvernay, Sherbrooke, QC, Canada J1L 1Y8. (3) If you have a modem and use a system with Internet access (this may include commercial services such as Compuserve), you may be able to reach me at this Internet address: "rod.willmot@synapse.isis.org". If you use a BBS with access to public networks such as Nanet, Smartnet, or U'NI-Net, we should be able to find a meeting place, such as one of the many Shareware conferences or the Hypertext conference on Smartnet. Additional support will soon be available through a number of BBS's serving as distribution points for Orpheus. Is Orpheus For You? What do you, as a hypertext writer, care about most? Do you want your reader to connect with your work -- to find it attractive, easy to access, rewarding to use? Do you want to compose spontaneously in hypertext, to follow your inspiration without having to worry about filenames and codes? Do you want to transform conventional text into something really different -- a place where the reader can move at will, swiftly and easily finding whatever he needs? Do you see the computer screen as a whole new medium of communication, one that is as different from the printed page as are books from the spoken word? If any or all of the above are true, Orpheus is probably for you. The kind of person that Orpheus is NOT for is the person who is still living happily in the Age of Print and can't see beyond it, who uses his word processor as a glorified typewriter, who sees the computer screen as a shrunken viewport on a would-be page. When this person thinks of publishing he thinks of paper. When he thinks of hypertext he thinks of scattered files that he would like to link together, harum-scarum, like newspaper columns recycled into a book. In Orpheus, the unit of communication is the screen, not the file: instead of opening a file and scrolling through it from beginning to end, 7 the reader moves from screen to screen through your hypertext network. The unit of composition is the hypertext card, which in compiled form will be the size of the screen. (In the authoring phase each card is in fact a separate file, but Orpheus manages its files so transparently that you can really just think of them as cards, or even as places, rooms in a hypertext network.) This is an important point, so let's look into it more deeply. Most hypertext systems remain tied to the conventions of printed text, above all to the habit of linearity: the idea that a story should be told along a straight line from "beginning" to "end". Occasionally a certain linear extension is appropriate to at least part of a story or exposition. Usually however, linearity is a mere artifact of habit, a product of centuries of being conditioned by the material obligation to put one thing after another: spoken words, strung out on the thread of Time; calligraphy on a scroll, as treasured as little read; pages typed, retyped, and printed, sewn into their sole correct order in a heavy tome. Hypertext shatters that linearity, letting your words and ideas blossom into their natural multiple dimensions: instead of a string, a galaxy; instead of a scroll, a palace of countless interconnecting rooms and halls; instead of a tome of tedious chapters, a garden that unfolds in all directions. It comes down to this: other hypertext systems *expect* you to scroll; Orpheus eliminates scrolling from the equation. Here's where some writers get hot under the collar. Yes, it does take a little more work to write well for the screen, to express your ideas and information in chunks of a couple dozen lines. But think about your reader: with scrolling hypertext, he never knows if an important keyword is just offscreen; he loses track of where he's been, can't recall whether such- and-such a topic was in the current file (scrolled out of sight) or in another link. With non-scrolling hypertext, the reader sees at a glance what paths there are to take, can explore and return and explore again, swiftly and easily, without ever getting lost. Additionally, the visual orientation of non-scrolling hypertext encourages you, the author, to design more attractive, more readable screens. It also encourages you to express yourself more succinctly -- to notice the repetitions and verbosity, trim them, and put punch into your writing. Naturally, sometimes you do want several paragraphs to follow each other in a straight line, and as a matter of fact Orpheus lets you do that quite handily. Using the "More" link type (created through the Split command on the Link Menu), you can connect as many linear elements as you wish. The effect is like a simple <PgDn> -- you just flip down a screenful at a time instead of scrolling. (The Split command has other powerful features that you can read about in Chapter 4.) Is Orpheus for you? If you're wondering whether you'll be able to write in screen-sized chunks, bear in mind that Orpheus does everything possible to make hypertext easy. First, each card has a 50-line workspace, which (during the authoring phase) you *can* scroll. Second, Orpheus lets you get everything accomplished in OH.EXE's Integrated 8 Development Environment, or to do your writing with your favorite word processor. If you choose the latter, just save a copy of your text in non-document mode, and use this copy for importing into Orpheus through the FileView window (see Chapter 3). 9 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- CHAPTER 2 - THE ORPHEUS ENVIRONMENT --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Topics in this chapter: Windows Workspace Statusbar Using Menus Using Help Mouse Interface Orpheus Author is the first Integrated Development Environment for creating hypertext documents. Everything you need to compose, modify, and enhance your hypertext is right at your fingertips, with the sole exception of graphics -- which we leave to the programs that handle it best. Best of all, this environment lets you see your work exactly as your readers will see it when you compile and distribute it with the Orpheus Reader. Windows Orpheus provides four Edit windows, plus a fifth window called FileView for reading and importing external text files. The Edit windows are for writing hypertext and for navigating through your work in progress. Each Edit window has a 50-line workspace -- the number of lines in an uncompiled hypertext card. Normally the Edit windows are loaded with cards from different branches of your project; this lets you keep tabs on up to four different "growing points" of your work. Orpheus saves your window configuration when you quit the program; the next time you load that project, each Edit window will have the same contents as when you exited. For more on Windows in Orpheus, read online Help. Workspace When you start up Orpheus the first time, what you see is a mostly blank screen with the Orpheus Statusbar on the top line. Actually, you are looking at an empty hypertext card. Like an index card, a card in Orpheus has a certain height and width; it does not go on forever. If you press the <Down> arrow and keep your eye on the line counter (towards the right of the Statusbar), you'll notice that the cursor goes as far as line 50. This is your workspace in every card in Orpheus: 50 lines, the width of the screen. However, although your *workspace* is 50 lines per card, the eventual length of your cards in *compiled* form will be either 24 or 25 lines, depending on whether or not you want your finished work to be presented 10 with a Titlebar. Why so few? Orpheus takes a screen-oriented approach to hypertext: instead of stringing together long text files and forcing the reader to scroll through them, Orpheus encourages you to develop true electronic documents in which the reader moves from screen to screen, always seeing at a glance what links are available for exploring new paths. From the moment you begin writing in Orpheus, think about what you want your readers to see: not just what you want to say to them, but the visual impressions you want them to have as they move through your work. Like a well-designed book, a carefully-prepared network of hypertext cards conveys information much more effectively, and is certainly more pleasant to read, than the kind of hypertext that keeps you scrolling through long-winded text files. Use the lower half of your workspace for the "overflow" as you develop your text. If the overflow turns into something that belongs on a card of its own, open the Link Menu and select "Split" to create a new card for it. Statusbar A variety of messages and symbols appear on the Statusbar to keep you informed of where you are and what you are doing; some of them can be used with the mouse to switch windows, toggle edit modes, or navigate hypertext. Through the Options Menu you can set the Statusbar to appear on either the top or bottom line of the screen. The following example includes a few things that are not always seen, and replaces certain special characters with ones that are sure to come out on your printer: Esc:Menu |1 2 3 4 V| Push Marking =Projname= More iwS ? [32] Read | < | U | > Reading from left to right, the first item reminds you of how to open the menu system. Note that you can open the menus even faster using the Alt key in combination with the first letter of the menu's name; for example, <Alt-L> opens the menu system and pulls down the Link Menu. The second item is the list of windows, "1 2 3 4 V". Windows 1 to 4 are Edit Windows, for writing hypertext; window V is the FileView window, for read-only access to external text files. The fast way to switch to any particular window is to use the Alt key in combination with the window name; for example, <Alt-2> switches to window 2, while <Alt-V> switches to FileView. Other window-related commands can be found on the Window Menu. The third item signals your current editing mode, "Push" for Pushright (new text pushes text at the cursor to the right), "Over" for Overwrite (new text overwrites text at the cursor). To switch from one mode to the other, open the Options Menu. 11 The fourth item is a message area which is normally blank. The sample above displays the "Marking" message that would appear if you were marking a block of text. When you mark a block in one window and then switch to another window, the message area says "Import" to remind you that using the Paste Command (from the Edit Menu) will import the marked block from the first window. The fifth item is the project title, which is also the name of your Homecard file -- the first card in a project and the only file you name yourself. (All other files in a project are named automatically by Orpheus.) When you are actually in the Homecard its name appears as a filename, capitalized and in quotation marks: "THISNAME"; in any other card you see it in the form of a project name, ≡Thisname≡. Orpheus limits this name to just 8 letters with no file extension. That's hardly enough for a communicative title, is it? Not to worry! On the Project Menu the Full Title command lets you enter a title of up to 32 characters; when your work is compiled, this title will appear in full on the Titlebar of the Orpheus Reader. The sixth item, "More", only appears when the card currently loaded in the active Edit Window contains a More link. A More link is a link to the "next" card -- it's a way of saying, "Select me to see what comes right after the last line on this card." When your work is compiled and displayed with the Orpheus Reader, a More link is indicated by the symbol "=More=" appearing in the lower right corner of the screen. In the Orpheus Author we just show it on the Statusbar. The seventh item is the "iws" cluster, of which any or all members may or may not be capitalized. I/i refers to AutoInsert; W/w refers to Wordwrap, and turns to an R if AutoReformat is turned on; finally, S/s refers to AutoSave mode. In each case, when the letter is capitalized the mode is ON; when lowercase, the mode is OFF. All can be toggled through commands on the Options Menu, or by clicking on them with the left mouse button. The eighth item, represented here by a "?", is a one-character symbol indicating the card-type of the card currently loaded in the active Edit Window. For example, a down arrow is used for the Homecard to indicate that everything else in the project is "below" it. These symbols are explained in the "Statusbar" section of Help. The ninth and tenth items on the Statusbar are shown in the example as "[32]". The square brackets signal temporary left and right margins; for example, pressing <Ctrl-[> sets a temporary left margin at the cursor position, resulting in a "[" appearing on the Statusbar. Pressing <Ctrl- [> again clears the temporary left margin. As for the numbers, they indicate which line the cursor is on, from 1 to 50. The eleventh item is either "Read" or "Edit" and indicates whether the current card has been changed since you last saved it to disk. "Read" indicates that it has not changed; "Edit" indicates that it has. 12 The remaining items are a trio of navigational buttons for use with the mouse, here represented by the characters "<", "U", and ">". For an explanation of their purpose see page 20 below, or read "Navigating Hypertext" in online Help. As mentioned earlier, Orpheus lets you choose between a cardlength of either 24 or 25 lines, as applied to the final appearance of your work in the Orpheus Reader. (Open the Project Menu to toggle the cardlength.) Since the standard screen has 25 lines, 24-line cards leave room for the Orpheus Reader's Titlebar, whereas 25-line cards do not. When the Reader first loads a compiled document that has 25-line cards, it posts a message telling the user how to pop up the Titlebar and open the menu system; then it devotes the entire screen to your cards (until the user presses <Esc> or the right mouse button). In Orpheus Author the Statusbar is ALWAYS displayed, no matter which cardlength you select. To view a 25-line card as it would appear in the Reader, open the Tools Menu and select Check Card, or press <Alt-C>. The card will be displayed as the end-user will see it, complete with =More= flag (if applicable), until you press a key or click the mouse. Using Menus Orpheus Author is a feature-rich program that new users may find a little complex. Fortunately, the menu system makes it easy to find your way around and quickly become an expert. The BEST way to learn Orpheus is to browse the menus while taking advantage of online Help. For an explanation of any menu item, place the selection bar on it and press <F1>, or simply click on it with the right mouse button. Once you've opened the menus a few times you'll know automatically that there are pulldown menus called File, Edit, Link, Window, and so forth. To open a specific menu in one step, use the Alt key together with the first letter of the menu's name; for example, <Alt-F> opens the File Menu. The only exception to this principle is when you are in the FileView window; FileView has a single pulldown menu which you can open only by pressing <Esc> or with the mouse equivalent. To change menus, use the left/right arrow keys; for example, if the File Menu is open, press the right arrow to open the Edit Menu. To select an item on a menu, move the selection bar to it (using the up/down arrow keys) and press <Enter>. Alternately, just press that item's hilited letter. Note that for almost all operations involving the arrow keys (such as moving the cursor or a selection bar), you can also use Control-key equivalents. A chart of Control-key combinations is given in online Help: open the main menu in Help, select "Keyboard", then select "CTRL Accelerators". Speaking of accelerators, one of the nicest things about Orpheus is that it lets you start off using the menus while giving you every opportunity to bypass them like an expert. Practically all accelerator keys are shown right on the menus, helping you quickly learn the 13 accelerators for commands you use often. For example, the first time you mark a block of text you'll probably hit <Esc> to open the menus, <E> to pull down the Edit Menu, then <M> to start marking. The next time, maybe you'll hit <Alt-E> to open the Edit Menu quickly, then <M> again. Eventually you'll just use <Ctrl-M> or one of the function keys, and then you'll be up to speed. Some menu items lead to submenus; for example, on the File Menu selecting "Print" leads to a submenu of print-related actions, including "Set Print Options", which leads to a further submenu. Many menu items allow you to set options or even enter text. Notice that some option-type items use square brackets [] while others use parentheses (). When square brackets are used it means that you can select that option in combination with other options; when parentheses are used it means that selecting one option turns off another option. For example, on the first Print submenu parentheses are used for the mutually exclusive options of printing to the printer or to a disk file. On the second Print submenu square brackets are used for the various dimensions you may want to set, such as margins. With a submenu open, press <Esc> to back up to the previous menu level. With no submenu open, <Esc> closes the menu system. See also "Using the Mouse" in Help. Using Help As mentioned above, Help is available on any menu item. It is also available in any dialog -- indeed, any situation whatever -- by pressing <F1> or (in dialogs) even just <H>. You can also return to the previous help-topic by pressing <Alt-F1>. For example, suppose you want to draw a diagram using the Boxdraw feature, and aren't quite sure of which keys to use. Open the Tools Menu and select Boxdraw, then press <F1> for help. When you've learned enough to begin drawing, press <Esc> to close Help. Now at any time while drawing you can press <Alt-F1> and Help will return with the precise instructions you were last looking at. Many Help topics include hypertext links connected to other topics. The presence of such a link is indicated by a hilited word or phrase, or one that already has the selection bar on it. To move the selection bar to the next linkword, press <Space> or <Tab>. To move the selection bar to the previous linkword, press <Backspace> or <Shift-Tab>. To jump to the selected link, press <Enter>. For topics that extend beyond the Help window, use the up/down arrows to scroll a line at a time, or PgUp/PgDn to page through the topic. Press <Home> or <End> to jump to the beginning or end of a topic. Finally, note that although the Orpheus Reader is much simpler and easier to use than Orpheus Author, it uses the same Help system -- but of course with different texts. This ensures an exceptionally user-friendly package for the people who will be reading the products of your labour. 14 Mouse Interface When you begin an Orpheus session the mouse pointer is set on the far left of the Statusbar. When you start typing, it disappears; when you move the mouse, it reappears, as it does automatically whenever you open a menu or dialog. CURSOR CONTROL While editing, click the left button anywhere in the text area to place the cursor there. WINDOWS Click the left button on one of the symbols from the "1 2 3 4 V" cluster on the Statusbar. Numbers 1 to 4 are for the Edit windows, while V is for the FileView window. MENUS Click the right button to open the menu system. Click the left button on a menu item to select it; click on the selected item to activate it -- like pressing <Enter>. For context-sensitive Help, click the *right* button on any menu item. To close the current menu, click either button outside the borders of the menu. DIALOGS Most dialogs include command buttons enclosed in angle brackets, such as < Help > or < Cancel >. Click the left button on any such command to perform it. Many dialogs also include commands on their window border; for example, the Help window displays " Help Exit Back " on its border; you can click on any border command just as you would a command in angle brackets. Click the right button to close a dialog, or click on "Exit". LISTS AND SCROLLABLE TEXT To scroll text in the Help window, or to see the rest of a file list, click or hold down the left button on either the top or bottom border of the window. NAVIGATING HYPERTEXT Click the left button on a linkword to set the cursor there, then click again to jump through the link. If the card has a More link, click on the "More" prompt on the Statusbar to jump to the linked card. Return from jumps by clicking on the command buttons on the far right of the Statusbar: on "<" to jump to the Homecard, on "U" to retrace your steps in all directions, and on ">" to jump to the parent of the current card. FILEVIEW The FileView window adds a command bar at the bottom of the screen, mainly for the convenience of mouse users. From left to right: click the left button on "Close" to end the FileView session, closing the file and releasing memory; click on "Top" to jump to the top of the current file; click on "End" to jump to the end of it; click on the "^" symbol to scroll up a page; click on the "v" symbol to scroll down a page; click or hold down the button on the Up or Down arrows to scroll a line at a time; 15 and finally, click on "Return" to switch back to the previous Edit window, leaving FileView open. BLOCK OPERATIONS IN FILEVIEW To mark a block: with the mouse pointer on the line beginning a block, press and hold down the left mouse button; move the pointer to the line ending the block; then release the button. Click on "Unmark" to unmark the block. (For more information, open the menu in FileView and select "Mark a Block". This opens Help to this topic.) EDIT MODES You can toggle edit modes by clicking on the associated prompt or symbol on the Statusbar. For example, to switch from Pushright to Overwrite mode, click on "Push" on the Statusbar. Three other modes -- AutoInsert, Wordwrap/ AutoReformat, and AutoSave -- are indicated in the "IWS" cluster to the right of the title area. SEARCH/REPLACE When doing a "Replace All (Confirm Each)" operation, click the left button on the found text to replace it, or anywhere else to skip that instance. Click the right button to cancel the operation. BOXDRAW Drawing with the mouse is a matter of picking up a character using the right button, and drawing with it using the left button. For more information, open the Tools Menu and click the right button on "BoxDraw" to open Help, then select "Drawing With the Mouse". 16 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- CHAPTER 3 - TUTORIAL : MAKING HYPERTEXT --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Topics in this chapter: Setting Up Making a Homecard First Links Navigating Links Menued Hypertext Freeform Hypertext Moving Links Behind the Scenes The next few chapters lead you step by step through the process of creating a complete hypertext project. Along the way we'll touch on most of the features offered in Orpheus. Setting Up In this chapter we'll start up a project and make some demonstration hypertext cards. We'll assume that you have installed Orpheus as described in Chapter 1, in a directory of its own on your hard drive, and that now you are in that directory looking at the DOS prompt. To start, type the command below at the DOS prompt, then press <Enter>: OH ASTROKEY When Orpheus loads, notice that the Statusbar says "ASTROKEY", the name of your first project. Before going any further, let's load this tutorial in the FileView window to save yourself some typing later on. There are two ways of doing this -- either with the keyboard or with the mouse. KEYBOARD METHOD Notice the "1 2 3 4 V" cluster on the Statusbar. The 1 is hilited because you're in Edit window 1. The quick way to switch from window to window (quicker than using the Window Menu) is to hold down the Alt key and press the appropriate number -- or V. V is for FileView, so that's what we'll do: press <Alt-V> to open the FileView window. Since the window is currently empty Orpheus automatically displays the "File to View" dialog. Type in the name of this file, MANUAL.DOC, then press <Enter>. Once the manual is loaded you can page down to this chapter with the <PgDn> key. MOUSE METHOD Notice the "1 2 3 4 V" cluster on the Statusbar. The 1 is hilited because you're in Edit window 1. Move the mouse pointer to the V and click on it with the left mouse button. This opens the FileView window, 17 which is currently empty. In the "File to View" dialog, click on the "F8:Directory" command, and look for this file (MANUAL.DOC) when the directory is displayed. Click twice on the filename to load it. Now you can page down to this chapter by clicking on the large down arrow on the command-bar at the bottom of the screen. The FileView window gives you read-only access to external text files like this one. Read-only means that you can copy blocks of text FROM a file in FileView, but you can't do anything TO it. In other words, you can safely experiment as much as you want in Orpheus without damaging anything loaded in FileView. Now let's get to work. To return from FileView to the previous Edit window, press <Alt-V> again or click on the "Return" command at the bottom of the screen. From now on you can switch back and forth between any Edit window and this tutorial with a quick <Alt-V> or mouse-click. Making a Homecard Leaving the cursor at the top left of the screen, type in the following: The Key to Astrology by Felicity Starlight Copyright 1999 Millenium Silicon Let's make it look like a proper title screen. Move the cursor up to the first line and press <F9> to center it. Press <F9> twice more to center the other lines. Now press <Home> and move the cursor to the first line; press <Enter> 7 times, then go on to insert 5 blank lines between the title and the byline, then 7 blank lines between the byline and the copyright. Or whatever pleases your eye. Open the File Menu and select "Save" (or just press <F2>). At this point the file named ASTROKEY has been saved to disk in your working directory. Though it's still just an ordinary text file, in the next step it will become the Homecard of your first Orpheus project. Later on you will exit Orpheus, and when you come back next day to continue your work, all you'll have to do is give the same command you started with, "OH ASTROKEY", to load the entire project. First Links Your first link will be to a biographical note on the author. What you want is for the author's name to be hilited and linked to a new text card containing her biography. To do this, place the cursor on the word "Felicity" and press <Alt-L> to open the Link Menu. (You can also open the menu system by pressing <Esc> and then the first letter of a menu title, but it's faster to use the Alt-key method.) As you can see, there are several different link types available, but we won't get into that 18 now; you can read about them in online Help by moving the selection bar to a given item and pressing <F1>. If you're reading this in the FileView window, you may want to read the next two paragraphs in their entirety before carrying out the actions they describe. That is, if you're nervous about linking. Actually the process is very easy, and you can get context-sensitive Help at any step along the way by pressing <F1>. The first time we do this I'll just refer to the keyboard method; when we do the second link I'll add the mouse method. Okay, you've left the cursor on "Felicity", you've pressed <Alt-L> to open the Link Menu, and the selection bar is on "Door". Since Doors are the standard link type in Orpheus, that's what we'll use. Press <Enter> to begin the link process. Notice that "Felicity" is instantly hilited, and a dialog box appears saying "Resize with Left/Right arrow keys". Since you want her whole name in the linkword, press <E> for "Expanding". Now press the <Right> arrow key several times, keeping watch on the hilite as it expands to the right to include the author's last name. When "Felicity Starlight" is fully hilited, press <Enter>. At this point you notice some disk activity as Orpheus performs a little magic for you in the background. (More about that later.) Next, a dialog box appears saying "Jump now to the child card?" Notice that up on the Statusbar, window #1 is hilited, while in the dialog box, window #2 is hilited. This means that you are currently in window 1, and Orpheus is suggesting window 2 to hold the new card you're going to work on. You can select any Edit window if you wish, but at this stage it makes sense to accept the default choice. Press <Enter> to do so. What you see next is much like what you saw when you started up the program with the "OH ASTROKEY" command. But look at the Statusbar. Window #2 is hilited, showing your current location, and instead of "ASTROKEY" the title is given as "=Astrokey=". You are now, in fact, looking at a blank hypertext card linked to your Homecard, and the latter is now much more than a simple text file: it's the gateway to a genuine hypertext document. Let's fill in the blank and give your author an identity. You can make something up, or type in the paragraph below, or better yet import it from FileView (assuming, as always, that you've loaded this tutorial in the FileView window). Here's how to import the paragraph below; I'll give the keyboard method this time, and next time we do an import I'll give the mouse method. KEYBOARD METHOD - IMPORTING Press <Alt-V> to switch to the FileView window if you're not there already. Scroll down till you can see the whole paragraph, say in the middle of the screen. We need to move the cursor down to the first line of it, and to do that we hold down the <Shift> key and press the <Down> arrow. With the cursor on the first line of the paragraph, press <Enter>. This starts the marking process. Now move the cursor to the last line of 19 the paragraph, and press <Enter> again. The text is now marked and ready to go. (Note that in the Edit windows you'll use different techniques for marking blocks of text; this is explained in Help and on the Edit Menu.) Felicity Starlight was born under a full moon in Pisces. She has lived in Tibet, Nepal, India, and Hoboken (NJ), where she now makes her home. Her three Ph.D.'s are in Astral Healing, Light Nutrition, and Chakra Finance, all from the University of Baja (CA). During her stay in India she studied Uranian Medecine under the great Rajneesh Putasokinit, who came to fame when he cured the headaches of 6 million Hindus by dropping one Tylenol in the Ganges and quickly fishing it out again. Her eye-witness account of this exploit is recounted in her best-seller, "Sheesh, Rajneesh!" Felicity believes that the United States will continue to decline until the people elect a president named Vicki. She summers in an astral cottage 20 feet above Camp David. After you have marked this text, press <Alt-V> to return to the previous Edit window. The last step is to paste it into your hypertext card. Move the cursor down a few lines from the top, then open the Edit Menu and select "Paste". (As shown by the accelerator keys on the menu, you could also just press <F3> or <Ctrl-P>, depending on how you like to work, or you could use the mouse method I'll describe further on.) Right now you may be feeling inspired by my thumb-nail sketch of Ms. Starlight, so if you would like to add some juicy tidbits, go right ahead. Open a Door link on one of those impressive degrees, particularly if you wish you one just like it. Eventually you'll find your way back here, no problem... Navigating Links Time for a brief note on navigation. If you really have created some hypertext just now, you should be able to jump from one card to another. For a full explanation of navigational methods, open Help to the main menu and select "Navigating Hypertext". The following is an excerpt: MOUSE METHOD Click on a linkword to select it, click on it again to jump to the linked card. If the link is to a graphic, click with the right button to view the graphic instead of jumping to the data card. Returning: use the button commands on the right of the Statusbar, < │ U │ >. Click on < to jump to the Homecard, click on U to retrace your last 50 steps in all directions, click on > to jump to the parent of the current card. 20 KEYBOARD METHOD Navigate using the keys of the Number Keypad. On standard keyboards (84 keys, or 101 on XT-class machines) NumLock must be ON or else <Shift> held down. On enhanced keyboards the state of NumLock is ignored: Navigate mode is always ON, so use the middle keypad for scrolling and cursor moves. Cursor to next linkword <Down> Cursor to previous linkword <Up> Jump through linkword at cursor <PgDn> Jump through "More" link <Right> Jump to Init card <Alt-I> Backtrack to parent link <PgUp> Return to the beginning <Home> Retrace exact steps <Left> (In contrast to this, navigation in the Orpheus Reader is MUCH more straightforward, for the simple reason that there is so much less to do; i.e. instead of reading and writing and making all sorts of changes, you are just reading. However, navigation in the Orpheus Author *is* remarkably easy once you get used to it -- just be sure to read online Help.) The main points to remember here are: navigate with the number keypad unless you use the mouse; turn on NumLock if your system requires it; to jump through a linkword, place the cursor on it and press <PgDn>, or click on it twice with the mouse. And to return, press <PgUp>, or click on the > symbol at the far right of the Statusbar. Now let's practice a simple jump. Since Felicity's bio is in the first child card, its parent is actually the Homecard. Click on the > symbol on the Statusbar, or press <PgUp> or <Shift-PgUp> on the number keypad. There's your Homecard. Since the cursor is already on our first linkword, "Felicity Starlight", you can jump through it by clicking on it once or by pressing <PgDn>. Do that now to return to the bio card. As we continue making this first hypertext document, we'll load up all four Edit windows with our new cards as we create them. Assuming that you're following this by switching back and forth between FileView and the Edit windows, you may notice that when you return from FileView the "2" is hilited in the "1 2 3 4 V" cluster. This means that you're in window 2: when you navigated up to the Homecard and back down to the child card, you stayed in window 2. Meanwhile, a copy of the Homecard has remained in window 1. Press <Alt-1> to switch from window 2 to window 1; OR, using the mouse, click on "1" in the "1 2 3 4 V" cluster, with the left button. We're going to make another link, and this time I'll lead you through the procedure using the mouse method. If you don't have a mouse you may wish to review what we did earlier, but it's pretty easy. MOUSE METHOD - IMPORTING Click on the word "Astrology" to set the cursor there. Now click the *right* mouse button to open the menu system, or click the left button on 21 the "Esc:Menu" command on the Statusbar. To open the Link Menu, click on the "Link" title. Once again we want to make a Door Link, and since that's already selected you just have to click on it once. As before, the Resize dialog appears, and again we're going to expand the linkword. Click on the "Expanding" command, then move the mouse cursor away from all commands in the dialog. Start clicking the *left* button to expand the hilite to the left. When it includes the full title, click on the "Enter" command in the dialog. Finally, the Jump dialog appears. This time we want the new card to go into window 3, so click on "< 3 >" in the dialog. Menued Hypertext The contents of our new card will be a menu of the Signs of the Zodiac. This will let the reader choose a sign he's interested in and explore it. Again we're going to import our text from this tutorial, so click on "V" on the Statusbar to switch to the FileView window, then click on the scroll buttons until the entire section below is in view. Here's what you're going to do: move the mouse pointer to the title, "Signs of the Zodiac", then press and hold down the left mouse button. Move the mouse pointer to the last line of the block (the line with Pisces) then release the mouse button. The paragraph is marked. Finally, click on the "Return" command at the bottom right to return to your card in the Edit window. SIGNS OF THE ZODIAC Aries : The Ram ................March 21 to April 19 Taurus : The Bull ..............April 19 to May 20 Gemini : The Twins .............May 20 to June 21 Cancer : The Crab ..............June 21 to July 22 Leo : The Lion .................July 22 to August 22 Virgo : The Virgin .............August 22 to September 23 Libra : The Scales .............September 23 to October 23 Scorpio : The Scorpion .........October 23 to November 22 Sagittarius : The Bowman .......November 22 to December 21 Capricorn : The Goat ...........December 21 to January 20 Aquarius : The Water Carrier ...January 20 to February 19 Pisces : The Fishes ............February 19 to March 21 Back in the Edit window, your new blank card awaits. Move the mouse pointer about 6 lines down from the top and click the left button once to set the cursor; now click again, directly on the cursor, to paste in the block. You have just learned how to import text from FileView with a few quick clicks of the mouse. (Since blocks in FileView are marked as whole lines, and pasted in the same way, it didn't matter whether you clicked at the left margin or in the middle of the screen.) So far you have the Homecard in window 1, the card linked to "Felicity" in window 2, and the card linked to "Astrology" in window 3. Just one more link to go and then we'll do something a little fancier. 22 Move the cursor to "Aries", open the Link Menu again, and make another Door Link as you have learned to do already. At the Jump dialog, tell Orpheus to place the new card in window 4. Then switch to the FileView window, mark the text below using either the keyboard or the mouse, and lastly return to your waiting card and paste in the block. Mark everything between these lines: ------------------------------------- ARIES THE RAM Birth Stone - Diamond Birth Flower - Daisy or Sweet Pea Harmonious Colors - Red and Pink Ruling Planet - Mars Best Marriages - Gemini, Leo, Libra, Sagittarius, sometimes with own sign: Aries Advantages of Aries Requirements of this Sign What to Avoid or Cultivate Variations of the Aries Sign The Early Period The Late Period Action is the word for Aries. Just as Aries heads the signs of the Zodiac, so does the letter "A" head the alphabet. And that "A" sounds a further note, standing for other significant Aries attributes, like aggressive, adaptable, alert, ambitious, argumentative... ------------------------------------- If you were really making an electronic book out of this, you probably wouldn't have filled in the data on the Aries sign. Instead, you would have worked out a format that would be identical on all 12 sign cards. Then you would have made the remaining 11, copying over to each of them the basic material from this one. Next you would have filled in the data, such as each one's birth stone and so on. With all that done you would gone on to make links on the various subtopics, like "Advantages of Aries" and "What to Avoid or Cultivate". Then you would have expanded on the interpretation beginning at the bottom of the text, probably using the "Split" command on the Link Menu to create a More Link (a technique discussed in the next chapter). As you can see, there are plenty of directions in which this document can grow. Freeform Hypertext You'll recall that before we imported the list of astrological signs I referred to it as Menued Hypertext. There is also a menu-like area in the text on Aries, the six topics below "Best Marriages". The rest of the text is open for linking wherever you want, which would give it a freeform quality. Freeform Hypertext isn't really a particular kind of hypertext, it's just my name for text in which linkwords appear in the middle of normal sentences and paragraphs, wherever they are needed, wherever they happen to grow. (Menued hypertext has a planned, artificial quality; freeform hypertext has a natural, organic quality.) 23 At the same time as we write some freeform hypertext, we'll demonstrate the creative freedom you have when you work with Orpheus. Staying in window 4, navigate up to the Homecard, then down again to the Aries card. Go back up and consider the transition between the Homecard and the zodiac card. Something bothers you about it... There's no transition at all, it's too sudden. Then, as an expert astrologer, it dawns on you that you've left out a very important subject: the influence of the planets! What you need is an introductory card that would provide a smoother entry into the work, while letting the reader choose between "signs of the zodiac" and "influence of the planets". Leave window 4 loaded with the Aries card, then switch to window 2 and navigate to the card with our zodiac menu. First we're going to insert our introductory material, then we'll move the menu to a new card. Switch to FileView and mark the next three paragraphs, everything between the dashed lines: ---------------------- From time immemorial, the stars have held significance for observant men and women, guiding the navigator, marking the hours of night and the passage of seasons. Orion the Hunter, Cygnus the Swan, Perseus the King, such constellations have roused the imagination of many a keen mind. But in the lore and tradition of Astrology, twelve constellations bear vaster meaning than any other. Arranged like a belt across the sky, completely girdling the Earth, these are the Signs of the Zodiac. Month by month the Sun moves from one to another, giving us our birth-signs and the keys to our lives. In this electronic book you will learn how the Twelve Types of Humanity correspond to the Twelve Signs, how your birth-sign gives you a realm of possibilities to exploit for good or ill. (NOTE TO MYSELF: gotta mention free will, other influences, make the paragraph lead to the Influence of the Planets.) (NOTE TO MYSELF: The third paragraph should mention Famous People. Get that list together! Maybe later I'll crosslink from each sign's card to the Famous People born under it.) ---------------------- Looks like we ran out of steam after the first paragraph. No matter, Orpheus lets you sketch out your ideas, even make links on them, then come back later to flesh them out with effective prose. With these three paragraphs marked, return to the previous Edit window (the one containing the zodiac menu), and paste the block *above* the current contents. (I.e., place the cursor on a blank line above "SIGNS OF THE ZODIAC", and do the paste there.) This pushes our zodiac menu mostly offscreen, where it would be abandoned if we were to compile our book right now. But this is okay; we're about to move it to a new card of its own. 24 Moving Links Still in Edit window 2, where we've pasted our three introductory paragraphs, place the cursor on the word "Zodiac" near the end of the first paragraph. Open the Link Menu and create a Door Link here; instead of extending the linkword to include "Signs of the Zodiac", just leave it at "Zodiac". (Later we'll use this for practice with another Orpheus feature.) At the Jump dialog, select window 3 for the new card. Then switch back to window 2, leaving the new card empty for a moment. The next step is to mark our menu block in window 2, and move it over to window 3. "Wait a minute," you think; "wouldn't it be easier just to import it fresh from the tutorial?" Remember, you've made a link on "Aries" in the menu, and you want that link to be moved too! Here's how to do it: in window 2, scroll down until the menu, with its title, is all onscreen. (You can scroll by moving the cursor or by pressing <PgDn> on the middle keypad, or by pressing <Ctrl-Z>. To learn about such things in online Help, select "Using the Keyboard" from the main menu in Help, then select "Moving the Cursor".) With the zodiac menu onscreen we want to mark it. There are several ways of marking text in the Edit windows, as you can see by opening the Edit window. What counts in the end is what you do once the text is marked: for example, <F3> and <F6> and <Ctrl-M> can all be used for marking a block, but once it is marked, <F3> copies it, while <F6> moves it. Let's just use <F6> in this case. Move the cursor to the line with the title, then to the left of the screen. Press <F6>, then move the cursor to the end of the last line of the zodiac menu, and press <F6> again. With the block marked, switch to window 3, which should contain the new blank card we just created. Press <Enter> a few times to bring the cursor down a little, then press <F6> once again to move the block from window 2, deleting it from the card in that window and pasting it into the card in window 3. Notice that the link on Aries was also moved. To confirm what you've done, navigate up, then navigate back down and jump through the "Aries" link, then return. Originally, the zodiac card was a child of the Homecard. Now the introductory card is that child, the zodiac card is a grandchild, and the Aries card is a great-grandchild. Hypertext breeds faster than rabbits. Behind the Scenes In this chapter we've made a few links, imported some text, even modified the structure of our growing hypertext network. We've begun a real hypertext document that could grow into a true electronic book. By now you may be curious about what has gone on behind the scenes, i.e. what Orpheus has been doing with the cards you've created. Let's find out by looking at the directory. 25 If you're reading this in FileView, continue reading this paragraph and the next one to learn what you're going to do. If you're not in FileView, switch to it now. Press <Esc> to open the FileView Menu, then press <Enter> to select "Open", and finally press <F8> to view the directory listing. Along with the Orpheus files you installed earlier, you'll notice the "ASTROKEY" file, which is your homecard. You'll also notice a new subdirectory called "ASTROKE_". (Subdirectories are indicated by a down arrow.) The ASTROKE_ directory was created by Orpheus to hold all of the cards in the Astrokey project, everything in it except the Homecard, which remains in the working directory. Place the selection bar on the ASTROKE_ subdirectory and press <Enter>. As you'll see, ASTROKE_ contains nothing but another subdirectory called "D1". Actually the first level of card storage is always just a directory full of subdirectories, because in a large project you could have hundreds or thousands of cards, and in the interests of speed, Orpheus limits its "D" directories to a hundred cards each. Now place the selection bar on the D1 subdirectory and press <Enter> again. At last you see something you recognize! Each filename bears the signature of the linkword you selected when you created a new card. Orpheus doesn't actually need that to track your files -- it only uses the 3-character extension -- but in some situations it could be helpful for you to have some hint of what's in a file. We'll discuss such a situation at the end of the next chapter. In the meantime though, I'd like to emphasize that you DON'T have to think about or even understand these files and directories; Orpheus manages them automatically. Above all, NEVER rename or move around any of these cardfiles from the DOS prompt, since a mistake could fragment your project. To exit the directory dialog and return to FileView, press <Esc> twice. Next, leave the FileView window so we can exit Orpheus. This will let you see how Orpheus remembers what you were doing, the next time you load your project. We'll continue exploring Orpheus while developing "The Key to Astrology" a little further. To exit Orpheus, open the File Menu and press <X>. 26 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- CHAPTER 4 - TUTORIAL : MODIFYING HYPERTEXT --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Topics in this chapter: Crosslinks Splitting: Below Splitting: At Cursor Splitting: Above Designating Home Resizing Linkwords Changing Link Types Unlinking Recovering Pruning & Grafting In this chapter we'll continue work on "The Key to Astrology", expanding it a little and learning how to make modifications. Let's assume that at the end of the previous chapter you exited Orpheus, and that now it's another day and you're in the Orpheus directory, ready to load the project. At the DOS prompt, give the same command that you did when we started: "OH ASTROKEY". This time, Orpheus discovers the project file it created for you when you quit work, ASTROKEY.PRJ. For every hypertext document you work on, Orpheus makes a project file to track your project- related preferences as well as your window configuration. As you'll notice, Orpheus loads all four Edit windows with the cards they contained when you quit. If you were in window 3 at the time, you will automatically find yourself in window 3 again. This makes it easy to pick up work exactly where you left it. The one thing Orpheus doesn't restore is the contents of the FileView window, so you'll have to load up MANUAL.DOC as you did before. But here's a fast way to get down to this chapter: after you have loaded the file in FileView, press <Esc> to open the FileView Menu, then press <S> to open the Search Dialog. Type in the words "Chapter 5", press <Enter>, then press <D> or <Grey+>. The first mention of Chapter 5 is in the Table of Contents, so you'll have to press <Grey+> again to reach the beginning of this chapter. Press <Spacebar> to clear the found-text hilite. Crosslinks The next feature we'll explore is the ability to make a Crosslink between two existing hypertext cards. In the previous chapter you may have noticed that every card has a child-to-parent relationship with the card it "came from" (except of course the Homecard). In Orpheus, all links except Crosslinks are based on the same essential parent-child 27 relationship, much as leaves are connected to twigs, twigs to branches, branches to boughs, etc. A Crosslink can join any part of the network (the hypertext tree) to any other part, even on widely separated branches. Let's set this up with a text that gives us a reason to Crosslink. Switch to window 2; you should be at the introductory paragraph we created, the one that now has a linkword on "Signs of the Zodiac" connected to the menu of signs. If not, navigate to it. Now place the cursor on the word "Influence" in the second paragraph. Open the Link Menu and make another Door Link, and when the Jump dialog appears, select window 3. Then return to FileView and mark the following (between the dashed lines): -------------------------- INFLUENCE OF THE PLANETS The Sun ........governs Leo The Moon .......governs Cancer Mercury ........governs Gemini and Virgo Venus ..........governs Taurus and Libra Mars ...........governs Aries and Scorpio Jupiter ........governs Sagittarius and Pisces Saturn .........governs Capricorn and Aquarius Much as the Signs of the Zodiac may be likened to a roadmap, the Planets may be regarded as routes that can be marked upon that roadmap. The routes are not fixed in concrete. Individuals can choose for themselves. Thus a person born under Virgo would do well to apply his Mercurian quickness to things that conform to the Virgo nature. He should see that his Planetary powers are used to help his career, not hinder it. The same applies to all the other Planets in relation to the signs they govern. -------------------------- With the block above marked, return to the Edit window (#3) with its empty card. Position the cursor two or three lines down, and press <F3> or click on the cursor to paste the block in place. Next, switch to window 4 to see if the Aries card is still there; if not, navigate to it. Now switch back to window 3. We're going to make a One-Way Crosslink between these two cards. This means that in one card a new linkword will be connected to the second card, but in the second card there will NOT be a linkword connected to the first. With a Two-Way Crosslink however, both cards are given new linkwords connecting each card to the other. Open the Link Menu, select "Crosslink", then select "One-Way Crosslink". When Orpheus asks which window contains the other card, select window 4. (Orpheus will have guessed 4 already, so you can either press <4> or press <Enter> to confirm the guess.) Next Orpheus asks you to select a linkword to anchor the Crosslink; move the cursor to the word 28 "Aries" (on the line across from Mars), and press <Enter>. Press <Enter> again at the Resize dialog, to accept the default linkword. When the procedure is complete you'll notice that the linkword on "Aries", in our Planets card, is a different color from the other linkwords you've created. This is because the different link types are identified by their color. (You can change the colors to whatever you like by opening the Options Menu and selecting "Colors".) To confirm the Crosslink, navigate through "Aries" and observe that it does indeed take you to the Aries card. However, if you navigate up from the Aries card (either by clicking on the > symbol at the right of the Statusbar, or by pressing <PgUp> on the number keypad), you'll find that instead of returning to the Planets card you've jumped to Aries's parent, the zodiac menu! How can you return from a One-Way Crosslink? Look at the trio of command-symbols at the right of the Statusbar: the one in the middle is a U-turn symbol, which I call the Retrace button. Its keyboard equivalent is the <Left> arrow on the number keypad (add <Shift> if it just moves the cursor, or turn on NumLock). Each Edit window maintains a separate 50-step record of your moves in that window; to retrace your last 50 steps in any and all directions, this is what you use. (Retracing is a little simpler in the Orpheus Reader, mainly because there is less to learn and more incentive to navigate exclusively with the mouse. However, the idea of having to return from Crosslinks in a different way than we return from all other links does add a measure of complexity that some of you may question. How much complexity depends on how many Crosslinks a given author happens to use. Life would be simple without freedom, and Crosslinks are like the freedom to make new friends without having to go through their parents. Yet without the linkages of family and relatives there is no life, nor hypertext.) Now let's add some new material so we can take another look at making Crosslinks, this time using the Two-Way type. You should still be in window 3. To return to the Planets card if you have not done so already, click on the U-turn symbol or press <Left> or <Shift-Left> on the number keypad. Place the cursor on the word "Mars", open the Link Menu and make another Door Link (NOT a Crosslink). Do not expand the linkword. At the Jump dialog, select 3 to create the new card in this window instead of another. Then return to FileView and mark the text below: 29 --------------------- MARS In modern times, Mars has loomed to prominence because it is the planet that can best be viewed from Earth, giving rise to hopeful theories that life may exist there, or that it may one day be habitable. But the astrologers of yore regarded Mars purely as a celestial influence on human affairs, attributing to it the aggressive, pugnacious qualities of the God of War, whose name it bears. Thus Mars is reputed to activate the Signs of the Zodiac that it governs, namely Aries and Scorpio. This is appropriate enough, because both of those Signs show strong, aggressive tendencies. The Aries nature (March 21-April 19) is incessantly active and frequently combative. The Scorpio nature (October 23-November 23), when aroused, becomes the most pugnacious Sign in the Zodiac. But Mars, in each instance, is more to blame than the Sign itself. --------------------- Having marked the block above, return to the Edit window with your empty card, and paste it into position. Before continuing, switch briefly to window 4 to confirm that it holds the Aries card, then return to window 3. Open the Link Menu, select "Crosslink", then select "Two-Way Crosslink". Orpheus will guess that window 4 holds the other card to be crosslinked, so press <Enter> to confirm it. For each card, Orpheus will now ask you to select a linkword to anchor the Crosslink. In the Mars card, select the word "Aries" in either the second or third paragraph. When Orpheus switches you to the Aries card, select "Mars" on the line opposite "Ruling Planet". When the process is complete, navigate back and forth through the two linkwords, all in the same window, to confirm that you have indeed made a Two-Way Crosslink. Splitting: Below A particularly useful type of link available in Orpheus does not appear on any menu: called the More Link, it is created by selecting "Split" from the Link Menu. Making a More Link is like taking two sheets of paper and taping the bottom of one to the top of the other. In effect, a sequence of cards connected with More Links would be exactly the same as a long, scrollable text file of the kind so common in other hypertext systems. The only difference is that in Orpheus you move through the sequence a screenful at a time, rather than line by line. In uncompiled hypertext as you see it in Orpheus Author, the presence of a More Link is signalled by a flag on the Statusbar. The flag is the word "More" appearing to the right of the title. To jump through the 30 link you can either click on the flag or press <Right> or <Shift-Right> on the number keypad. (When your work is compiled and viewed with the Orpheus Reader, More Links come across much more naturally. The presence of a More is shown by the flag "=More=" in the lower right corner of the screen, where it conveys pretty obviously what it means. In the Reader, you select linkwords using a selection bar instead of the cursor, and the More flag is treated like any other linkword.) The most common use for split linking, i.e. for More Links, will be to incorporate an extended linear text into your hypertext document. Though hypertext is most effective when it really *is* hypertext, sometimes you're working with material that does not break up easily into chunks that can be accessed individually by topic. Let's work with an example. Take a look at the text below, and notice that it is a simple extension of the block we just pasted into our card on Mars. Before doing anything with this text, switch back to the Edit window with the Mars card in it. Open the Link Menu and select "Split", then select "Below This Card". The idea is that we want the Mars card to have a More Link, so that the additional text will really seem to be below the Mars card, as if we had taped it to the bottom. At the Jump dialog, select any window you want. After jumping to the new, empty card, switch back to FileView, mark the text below, return to your Edit window, and paste it into position. -------------------- There are other Signs in which Mars shows itself as a definite governing force. One of these is the late stage of Pisces, from March 12 through to March 21. Here the Martian power is cumulative, gaining full sway with the arrival of Aries. In fact, once the placid, deep-flowing Pisces nature is really stirred to action, Mars becomes dominant, supplanting the high-minded Jupiterian influence with Martian tactics. Something of the Martian influence may carry into the Sign of Taurus, but only briefly. Though the Taurus nature never seeks conflict, when stirred emotionally it becomes not only powerful but often irresistible. Properly controlled, well-applied, the Martian influence adds spirit where most needed. Often Mars becomes dominant in the mid-belt of Capricorn (January 1-10), giving energy to that too-abiding and overly self-conscious nature. -------------------- To verify that you now have a More Link, navigate back up to the parent card and notice the "More" flag on the Statusbar. Now navigate back down through the link, either by clicking on the flag or by pressing <Right> or <Shift-Right> on the number keypad. 31 Splitting: At Cursor Imagine being able to wave a magic wand over a crowded page of text, and poof, have it become two pages with the text divided between them. This is what the next Split command does, again by creating a More Link. Mark the paragraph below and paste it into the card we've been working on, just *above* the paragraph beginning "Properly controlled". ------------------- The Martian influence displays itself not so much through outbursts of mere rage, but in a hard, metallic manner, running from cool, calculating love of battle to ruthless tactics or outright cruelty. ------------------- The idea here is that you've remembered something else you want to say. In fact, you've also remembered that you want to say more about Mars and Capricorn. You decide that the last paragraph -- the one beginning "Properly controlled" -- would work better at the top of a new card, leaving room to expand on what you've just written. Here's what to do: in the Edit window, place the cursor on the line beginning "Properly controlled", or on a blank line just above it. Now open the Link Menu, select "Split", then select "Split at Cursor". Follow the procedure to completion, selecting any window you wish when the Jump dialog appears. As you'll see, all text from the line at the cursor on down is automatically moved from the original card onto the new card. Navigate back up to observe the links. Splitting: Above In the two preceding exercises we added a More Link to a card, which I compared to taping a sheet of paper onto the bottom of another. Now suppose we already have two or more sheets of paper taped together, and it occurs to you that you'd like to insert a new sheet of paper *between* two sheets. Orpheus lets you do that too. In fact, if our cards in the exercises above had already had More Links, the new cards would have been inserted BETWEEN those cards and the existing More Links, which would then have been attached to the new cards. (Try it and see.) Now, suppose you have two cards linked by a linkword, such as a Door, and you want to insert a blank card between them. Can that be done? Of course! Just navigate to the child card and follow the procedure below. In any Edit window, navigate up to the Homecard and back down to the introductory card. Earlier we decided that it was too abrupt to go directly from the Homecard to the menu of Signs of the Zodiac. Now let's decide that things are still too abrupt; you want to create a sensation of passing through a series of portals before reaching the inner sanctum. Here's what to do: in the card with the introductory paragraphs, open the Link Menu and select "Split", then select "Above this card". Follow the procedure to completion, jumping to the new card in any Edit window. 32 In the new blank card, press <Enter> a few times to move the cursor about half-way down the screen. Now type "Know thyself!" and press <F9> to center it. Finally, navigate back up to the Homecard and then down again, through the new card to the introduction and the Zodiac menu. That's more interesting, isn't it? (Okay, it's corny...) Remember, in a compiled document viewed with the Orpheus Reader, the More flag would appear in the bottom right corner of the screen and would work just like a linkword. In this tutorial we've been using more or less completed texts to develop hypertext on the fly. A different way of proceeding would be to write a few key words in each card, sketching the overall structure of the document -- its skeleton -- before writing anything in detail. When it came time to put flesh on it, we would still be completely free to modify the skeleton wherever we chose. In Orpheus, we *expect* our work to change organically as we write it, to grow as we ourselves do. Designating Home If you have experimented on your own or read online Help concerning Hypertext Navigation, you know already that from any card in your document you can jump instantly to the Homecard by pressing <Home> or <Shift-Home> on the number keypad. Using the mouse, you can also jump Home by clicking on the "<" symbol on the Statusbar. The changes we've made at the beginning of the work have made the Homecard a little problematic. To see what I mean, jump Home now, then navigate down through the sequence leading to the Aries card. Jump Home again, and when you come to the Zodiac menu, imagine that instead of selecting "Aries" you could select all the other signs. Imagine further that each card devoted to a sign has plenty of child links, and that some of those have further child links. If the book were complete and you were reading it thoroughly, you would often find yourself deep in the depths of it and wanting to return in one jump to the top. Say you finished reading everything on Aries and wanted to learn about Scorpio. Why should you have to see the title card again, the "Know thyself" card again, and the introduction again? Why not just jump to the Zodiac menu? Orpheus lets you do that too; specifically, it lets you as an author set up your work so that when it gets to your readers, this feature will be built in. I call this "designating Home". To try it out, navigate to the card with the menu of Signs of the Zodiac, then open the Project Menu. Select "Designated Home". A dialog appears asking, "Use card in current window as Designated Home?". Press <Enter> to accept the default Yes answer. Now navigate down as far as you can, then jump Home using either the keyboard or the mouse; this time the jump takes you to the menu card, not to the Homecard. Most electronic books have a mechanical quality because their authors were not given the creative freedom they needed. The ability to designate Home lets you combine the aesthetics of "front matter" cards 33 with the usefulness of a menu. This may seem trivial in a shallow book like our unfinished astrology primer, but in a serious work with many levels of descent a designated Home can make the difference between readers who get fed up and readers who stay excited by your material. Before we go on, it might have occurred to you that the Zodiac menu is NOT the best place to designate Home. What if the reader wanted to read up on the Planets, or on the signs of famous people? Navigate up to the introductory card -- the one with the linkword on "Signs of the Zodiac" in the first paragraph -- and again open the Project Menu. Notice that in the Designated Home field it says "Yes", meaning that Yes there is a Designated Home card in your project; if you were currently in that card it would say "Here". To change it, select "Designated Home" again, and again press <Enter> to accept the default Yes answer; this makes the introductory card the new Designated Home. (If instead you answered "No" to the dialog, you would get the further option to do without a Designated Home entirely.) Resizing Linkwords With the first couple of linkwords we made, in the Homecard, I showed you how to expand the linkword to include more than a single word. We did this during the process of making the link. Once you get turned onto Orpheus you will often find that the flow of ideas comes so quickly that you just want to make your links in their default form so you can get on with your writing. Orpheus is *made* for creativity, so feel free to work at top speed when the juices are flowing, then touch up the details when things slow down. There are probably one or two linkwords that could benefit from resizing, unless you were ambitious and expanded them right away. In the introductory card (our new Designated Home), the linkword on "Planets" would look better if it included "Influence of the Planets". In the Zodiac menu, the linkword on "Aries" could be expanded to "Aries : The Ram". Place the cursor on a linkword you wish to resize. Open the Link Menu and select "Resize a Linkword". Proceed as you did with the other linkwords, expanding or shrinking it as the case may be. Whenever you change the size of a linkword, be extra careful if the background color of that link type is the same as ordinary text. For example, suppose normal text is white on grey, while the link type you're working on is red on grey. Now if you resize the linkword to the left and aren't careful, you might unintentionally go one space too far without knowing it. Since the background colors are identical, the extra space would look like an ordinary grey space of normal text. However, if a reader were to view your work using different colors -- say, with the linkword in white on blue -- then the space would show up in blue. As you can imagine, without an equivalent space on the other side of the linkword the effect would be sloppy. This is one good reason to configure your 34 colors so as to make linkwords as visible as possible; this has no effect on what the reader will see, since the Orpheus Reader also gives the user complete control over his own color configuration. Changing Link Types By now you are familiar with three types of hypertext link: Doors, Crosslinks, and (through the Split command) More Links. Be sure to read online Help for more thorough discussion of the types and their uses. Of the two link types we have not yet discussed, Note and Graphic Links, we'll use the first right now to demonstrate changing link types. Graphics will be explored in depth in the next chapter. Note Links are functionally identical to Door Links, with two important differences. First, the very fact of calling something a Note tells the reader that you are offering something different from the material in your normal links. Perhaps it is background information, such as historical or bibliographical data: something not crucial to the main argument, but perhaps of use to someone interested in a particular area of your work. Alternately, you could tell your reader at the outset that wherever he or she comes across a Note Link, this is *important* information. It's entirely up to you to decide what the purpose of Note links will be, or whether to use them at all. The second way in which Note Links are different, and this adds a new dimension of functionality, is that if you do use them, you can choose whether or not to include them in the compiled version of your work. Open the Project Menu and notice the "Include Notes" field. Currently it says "Yes", the default setting. This means that when your work is compiled, any Note Links you've made will be included in the finished document for viewing with the Orpheus Reader. To toggle the option OFF, place the selection bar on "Include Notes" and press <Enter>. Now when you compile, any Note Links will simply be ignored; the linkwords will come out as ordinary text, and the cards connected to them in the uncompiled version will simply not be there. By turning Include Notes OFF, you can use Note Links as a writing aid, a place to store notes to yourself or materials that you may or may not use. Of course, the lower part of each card's workspace can also be used for this purpose, but then it's less visible and easier to forget. Now let's change a Door to a Note just to see how it's done. Navigate up to the Homecard -- the real Homecard, not Designated Home -- and place the cursor on "Felicity". Whenever you want to do anything to a link that has a linkword (as opposed to a More Link, which does not), place the cursor on the linkword before starting. Now open the Link Menu and select "Change Link Type", then select "Linkword at Cursor" to indicate the link you want to change. The next dialog offers you a choice of link types; select "Note" in this case. If you want, you can change it back again later. 35 Unlinking Among the many ways Orpheus lets you revise your work, one of the most essential is the ability to remove a card, or even a whole branch of cards, from your hypertext network. In Orpheus this is called unlinking, and it comes in two flavors, both of which begin with removing the link data from the card with the offending linkword or More. What happens next depends on whether you choose to "Orphan" the linked card or to "Delete" it. An orphaned card remains on your hard disk, with a slight change to its filename so that Orpheus can recover it for you in case you change your mind. A deleted card is really deleted, and even if you retrieve it with an Undelete program there is no easy way to relink it to your network. As a safety feature, Orpheus does not let you delete a card that has child links of its own; such a card can only be orphaned. Let's try this out, and in the next section we'll use the Recover command. Navigate up to the introductory card, the one we designated Home. Place the cursor anywhere on the "Influence of the Planets" linkword. Open the Link Menu and select "Unlink", then select "Linkword at Cursor". When Orpheus asks you to decide the fate of the linked card, select "Orphan". As you'll see, the linkword returns to being ordinary text, and to all appearances everything that was linked to it no longer exists. There remains, however, one small problem: in the Aries card we made a Crosslink to the Mars card; since the Mars card is a child of the card we just orphaned, the Mars card has disappeared too. Actually, you CAN still get to the Mars card via the Crosslink, but this is obviously something we don't want to do, particularly if the work is going to be compiled. Remember, the card you orphan may be the beginning of an entire branch; in unlinking that card you unlink the whole branch. This is something to keep in mind if you do a lot of Crosslinking, and if you do ANY unlinking. Not to worry: the same Unlink command can also be used on Crosslinks, WITHOUT any consequences for the attached cards. To test this, navigate to the Aries card and place the cursor on "Mars". Open the Link Menu and select "Unlink", followed by "Linkword at Cursor". Since this is a Two-Way Crosslink, Orpheus will ask if you wish to unlink the counterpart Crosslink in the other card. (Despite the fact that the card is in an orphaned branch, Orpheus can still find it.) Answer "Yes", and the linkwords of both Crosslinks will return to ordinary text. 36 Recovering As mentioned above, orphaned cards may disappear from sight, but as long as they aren't deleted you can still get them back. Before setting out to recover an orphan, navigate to the card where you intend to relink it. (You don't *have* to do this, though it certainly makes sense; if you do a lot of unlinking, sometimes you may use the Recover feature just to browse through the orphans without relinking anything.) Navigate to the Designated Home if you're not there already -- the card where we unlinked from "Influence of the Planets". Now open the Link Menu and select "Recover". The dialog that appears shows a list of directories and a list of orphans in the selected directory. Since this project is pretty small just one directory appears, "D1". And since we've only orphaned one card, just one filename appears, something like PLANETS{.003. (The "{" in the filename marks it as an orphan. Note that child cards of the orphan, if any, are NOT marked as orphans, yet remain invisible to your project until you relink their parent.) The selection bar is already on the file you want back, so press < L > to Link it. If there were several orphans and you weren't sure which one you were looking for, you could also press < V > to View the card first. After you give the Link command, Orpheus lets you choose the link type, which should again be a Door. Then it asks you to place the cursor on the anchor for the linkword and press <Enter>. The rest of the procedure is the same as with the other linkwords you've made. Pruning & Grafting Normally you would want to relink an orphan to its original linkword in its original parent card; however, nothing obliges you to do so. As a matter of fact, relinking to a different card, maybe even one in a completely different part of your work, is an effective method of pruning and grafting: cutting a twig off one branch of the tree and grafting it onto another. We saw another method of doing this in the previous chapter, the section entitled "Moving Links". When the link you want to move is embedded in text that you also want to move, simply mark the block of text and use <F6> to move it to the other card. Orpheus automatically detects the presence of the linkword, and updates the affected card or cards accordingly. Use whichever technique you prefer: a text-block move, or Unlink/ Recover. When the link happens to be a More, you COULD convert it first to a Door link and then move the block containing the linkword; however, it would probably be simpler to Unlink the More, then Recover it in the destination card, which allows you to choose its new link type. The one thing to remember about Pruning & Grafting is that when you want to move a card, you go to the card with the LINK, be it a linkword or a More -- not to the card you wish to move. 37 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- CHAPTER 5 - TUTORIAL : USING GRAPHICS --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Topics in this chapter: Linking to a Graphic Capturing with SNAPSHOT Making a Hotspot Linking a Hotspot Navigating Graphics More About Hotspots Orpheus makes it easy to incorporate graphics in your hypertext, optionally embedding "hotspots" in them for linking to other graphics or text cards. The following restrictions apply: (1) only full-screen graphics should be used; (2) currently only two graphic file formats are supported -- PCX and SPR -- the latter generated by the SNAPSHOT program included with the registered version of Orpheus. Support for other formats (such as GIF) will come in early 1992. Working with graphics is a little more complicated than working with text, but not overly difficult. In this tutorial we'll go step by step through the procedure of linking to a graphic, followed by embedding a hotspot in the graphic and linking it to something else. To complete the tutorial you must have a graphics display card. If you have an EGA or VGA color display, you will be able to use the sample PCX file distributed with the program; if not, you will need either a paint program in which to create a graphic, or a program that will display an existing graphic on your system. Before we go on, let me emphasize that *everything* we'll touch on below receives extensive discussion in online Help, complete with tables and detailed examples to show you the way. Open Help to the main menu, select "Using Graphics", then browse the various subtopics or go directly to the one you need. If using a paint program or graphics viewer, you may also wish to consult the documentation for that program. Linking to a Graphic As with the previous chapters, we'll continue using our "Key to Astrology" project for demonstration purposes. Navigate to the card listing the planets and the signs they govern. Place the cursor on "Scorpio", then open the Link Menu and select "Graphic". Follow the procedure through to completion, jumping to the child card in whichever window you wish. You'll notice that instead of the new card being empty, it contains the following lines: 38 ; <F1> Help on graphics ; FILEPATH= RESOLUTION= MODE= ; The lines beginning with ";" are called "comment lines": they are lines that Orpheus will ignore when interpreting your graphic data. You can insert comment lines to make notes to yourself, or (more usefully) to "disable" a data line without having to delete it. Such commented-out data lines can be reactivated by removing the initial semicolon. What you are looking at is the data card for a Graphic Link. It will contain everything Orpheus needs to know about the graphic file you wish to connect to the linkword you just made, including any hotspots you may embed in the graphic. Notice that the node-type indicator on the Statusbar (to the right of the "iws" cluster) is a smiling face: the sign of the data card for a graphic. When you press <F1> while in a data card, Orpheus opens Help directly to the topic on graphics. The next few paragraphs assume that you have an EGA or VGA display capable of showing 16 colors or shades of grey. We're going to use the file named SCORPIO.PCX, which should be in the working directory with the rest of your Orpheus files. If you have a CGA or other graphics-capable display, and have PCX files from another program, you should be able to use them instead. (If you neither have any PCX files nor EGA/VGA, but do have graphics that you can display using another program, continue reading for your information. In the next section we'll capture a graphic using Snapshot, and you'll be able to use that instead of SCORPIO.PCX.) Move the cursor to the end of the FILEPATH line and type "scorpio.pcx". If using a different file, type in the entire filepath including the drive and directory where Orpheus should look for the file. Now move the cursor to the end of the RESOLUTION line and type "320x200". Again, if using a different file you may need to consult your paint or viewing program to find out what resolution to use. Finally, move the cursor to the end of the MODE line and type "13". (This last step is *only* necessary with PCX files. Once you know the resolution in which a graphic was created, you can deduce the mode from the number of colors and/or your video hardware; for a chart of such combinations open online Help to "Using Graphics" and select "Modes and Resolutions".) When you are finished, your data card should look like this: ; <F1> Help on graphics ; FILEPATH=scorpio.pcx RESOLUTION=320x200 MODE=13 ; 39 At this point you are ready to check your work, i.e. to test whether you entered the right data and to verify that Orpheus can display the graphic on your system. Whenever you are in a data card, pressing <Alt-G> tells Orpheus that you wish to view the graphic for that card. Press <Alt-G> now to do so; after viewing the graphic, return to the data card by pressing <Esc>. Capturing with SNAPSHOT [Requires the registered version of Orpheus] This section is especially for people who were unable to use the SCORPIO.PCX file. However, even if you did use it you may wish to read the following for your information, since it could come in handy later. We'll assume either that you have a commercial paint program in which you have created graphics in a format other than PCX, or that you possess one or more graphics (such as GIF files) that you are able to display with a viewing program. SNAPSHOT.EXE is a utility developed by Ted Gruber Software as part of Fastgraph, the professional graphics library used in Orpheus. Hyperion Softword is licensed to distribute Snapshot with those of its products that use the Fastgraph library. Registered users of Orpheus can use Snapshot to capture graphics for their hypertext works. Snapshot is a TSR; this means that once you load it, it remains in the background even after returning control to DOS so that you can run other programs. Later, if you press the Snapshot hotkeys while in a graphics program, Snapshot comes alive long enough to capture the graphics screen to a disk file in the SPR format. Snapshot then returns control to the graphics program, allowing you to view and capture other images if you wish. (Note that once loaded, Snapshot remains in memory until you reboot your computer. If you use the MARK/RELEASE or similar utilities you can give a MARK command before loading Snapshot, then a RELEASE command when you no longer need it. If you use Desqview and your windows are large enough, load Snapshot in the window where you will load the graphics program, then simply close the window when done.) The first step, if you are reading this in the FileView window, is to exit Orpheus completely. (Do NOT use the "DOS Shell" command to go to DOS temporarily; no matter how much memory Orpheus releases, you must never load a TSR while in a Shell.) At the DOS prompt, give the SNAPSHOT command and press <Enter>. If it loads successfully, Snapshot will identify itself and remind you to press <Alt-Left Shift> to activate it. Now you are at the DOS prompt again, so you can load your paint program or graphics viewer. While doing so, note the screen resolution the program will be using; some paint programs let you choose the resolution from a menu, while others let you set the resolution on the command line or in a startup batch file. Consult the appropriate manual if you aren't sure. 40 With the graphics program running, load an image that you would like to capture. If you are using a paint program, part of the screen may be taken up by menu lines and toolbars; select the command that temporarily removes these to let you see your entire graphic taking up the full screen. Once your graphic is displayed in full-screen form, press the Snapshot hotkeys: that is, press and hold down the <Alt> key, add the <Left Shift> key, then release both keys. If Snapshot successfully captures the screen it will announce this with three quick tones of medium pitch. If it is not successful it will give a single low-pitched tone; this also happens if you press the hotkeys while in text mode. Since Snapshot remains in memory until you reboot or otherwise remove it, you can go on to view and capture other graphics if you wish, all without reloading Snapshot from the DOS prompt. But let's assume for now that you only wanted to capture the one image, and have exited your graphics program. The next task is to locate the capture file and bring it into Orpheus. After exiting the graphics program give the following command at the DOS prompt: "DIR SNAPSHOT.*" <Enter>. If you captured only one image there will be only one file: SNAPSHOT.000. If you captured two, the second will be named SNAPSHOT.001. Snapshot will save up to a thousand images in the current directory, numbering them from 000 to 999. When saving a new image it uses the lowest available number, so if you save 10 images and then delete the first, the next image will be numbered 000. If you plan on saving more than one image, make a list of them as you go along, with a brief description of what each one shows. The next step is to rename your SNAPSHOT.nnn file, both for your own convenience and so that Orpheus will recognize it. The first part of the name (up to 8 letters) should refer to the contents of the image, to help you remember what it shows. The second part of the name, the three-letter extension after the dot, *MUST* be "SPR"; this tells Orpheus that the file is an image in Fastgraph's Standard Pixel Run format. For example, suppose your image is a painting of Aquarius, and that you saved it into SNAPSHOT.000. To rename it, you would give the following command at the DOS prompt: "RENAME SNAPSHOT.000 AQUARIUS.SPR" <Enter>. The last step is to start up Orpheus again, navigate to the data card for your graphic, and then insert the relevant data as described in the previous section: the filepath for AQUARIUS.SPR, and the screen resolution used by the program with which you displayed it. Note that you do NOT need to give the videomode as you would for a PCX file. With SPR files Orpheus checks the specified resolution and automatically chooses the best videomode available on the user's system. (Thus, if using an SPR file you can delete or comment out the MODE= line, since Orpheus will ignore it anyway.) 41 Making a Hotspot In this section we'll assume that you have opened a Graphic link on "Scorpio", inserted the necessary information in the data card, and successfully viewed SCORPIO.PCX using the <Alt-G> command. If you are using an SPR file linked to something else, just tweak the instructions that follow to suit your particular case. We are now going to make a hotspot in the linked graphic, then link that hotspot to a normal text card (it could also be linked to another graphic). When your work is compiled and viewed with the Orpheus Reader, the user will be able to navigate into and out of graphics links as easily as with text cards. The only difference is that hotspots in graphics are not immediately apparent the way linkwords are. Instead, the user discovers the hotspots by moving the mouse pointer over the screen; wherever the pointer changes shape it is over a hotspot, which the user can jump through with a simple click of the mouse. (There is also a keyboard technique for doing this.) Return to the data card if you are not there already. Press <Alt-G> to display the graphic. Now press <H> to tell Orpheus that you want to make a hotspot; notice that Orpheus beeps twice to acknowledge the request. Assuming that you are working with SCORPIO.PCX, place the mouse pointer on the red star; if using a different image, select any object that you would like to turn into a hotspot. To begin drawing the hotspot, press and hold down the left mouse button, moving the mouse pointer over the area to define. You can also just click the left button to define a single spot. If you accidentally draw on an area where you hadn't intended, use the right mouse button to erase -- again, either by clicking or by holding it down while moving the pointer. Press <Enter> to finish the hotspot, or <Esc> to clear. When you finish drawing a hotspot, Orpheus returns you to the data card, where you will find that it has inserted two new lines of data, something like this: HOTSPOT=1x)2x)3x*■ LINKWORD= The string of characters following "HOTSPOT=" may be different, depending on how you drew the hotspot. In a particularly large or complex hotspot it could extend onto another line. Though it may look like gibberish, it encodes the hotspot's exact shape and location; do not try to edit it! To test your hotspot, press <Alt-G> again in order to display the graphic, then move the mouse pointer around the screen. When the pointer is over the area you defined as a hotspot, it should change shape; when you move the pointer away from that area it should return to the normal pointer shape. Press <Esc> to return to the data card, or click the left button over the hotspot, or the right button anywhere. 42 Linking a Hotspot Though the hotspot is defined, it remains incomplete until you add something for it to link to. You don't have to complete the link right away; in fact, when your work is compiled any hotspots WITHOUT links are simply left out, much as Note Links are left out when the Exclude Notes option is selected. To complete the hotspot, move the cursor to the end of the LINKWORD= line, and type in a few words describing the hotspot and what it shall link to. (If you need a second line, place a ";" in front of it.) Even if you don't wish to make the link right away, always enter some kind of description to remind you of your intentions. The final step is to place the cursor on any word in the description (but somewhere on the LINKWORD= line), then open the Link Menu and select the desired link type. For our hotspot on the red star in Scorpio, the following would do: LINKWORD=Antares, bright red star in Scorpio Place the cursor on "Antares" and make a Door link on it. For purposes of demonstration, follow the procedure through and jump to the child card in any window you wish. Then type or paste in the following: The brightest star in Scorpio is Antares. How fitting that it shares the same blood-red color as the planet Mars! You could easily have chosen to link your hotspot to another Graphic Link instead of a Door. Just as a text card can contain any combination of link types, a graphic image can contain hotspots linked to any combination of text cards and other graphics. The only restriction is that a graphic cannot have a More link, since there would be no way to display it; and, of course, no matter which link type you select, a hotspot is a hotspot is a hotspot: there is no way for the reader to tell whether a given hotspot leads to a graphic or a text card, let alone whether the text card is linked by a Door or Note, etc. Navigating Graphics In compiled documents viewed with the Orpheus Reader, navigation is always swift and intuitive, whether in text cards or in graphics. The only difference is that in text cards, linkwords are immediately apparent by virtue of their color, whereas in graphics, hotspots are located by moving the pointer over them. (For this reason graphics are more easily explored with a mouse than with the keyboard; however, a mouse is not required.) To find out whether a graphic has any hotspots at all, the user need only slip the pointer up to the top of the screen: this makes the Reader's Titlebar appear, where a button area shows a down arrow if there are hotspots, a blank if there are none. 43 Unlike the Reader, in Orpheus Author you will need access to your data cards more than to the graphics themselves, so the Author is not set up to let you navigate directly through graphic images. That is, a normal jump through a Graphic linkword takes you to the data card, NOT to the graphic, and if you click on a hotspot in a graphic you will NOT jump through the link as you would in the Reader, but will return to the graphic's data card (with the cursor on the LINKWORD= line for that hotspot). More About Hotspots As you may have noticed when making your hotspot, the color for drawing the hotspot (done with the left button) is white, while the color for erasing (done with the right button) is black. In some video modes, especially with PCX files, these colors may be different. More important, with some images these colors may be useless to you; for example, it would hard to draw a complex hotspot in white on a mostly white graphic. Whenever a particular graphic presents this kind of problem, return to the data card and insert the following data lines: DRAW= ERASE= Then press <F1> to open Help to the graphics topic, and select "Colors for DRAW/ERASE". This topic explains the new commands and gives you a table of color values to choose from. For example: DRAW=2 ERASE=14 With these values you would draw your hotspot in blue, and erase it in yellow. Note that like other data lines, these commands have effect only within that particular data card and its graphic. NOTE: If you do a lot of drawing and erasing on a hotspot, the original image underneath may become too obscured for you to be sure of what you're doing. When this happens, press <Esc> to restore the original image. This also cancels your current work on the hotspot, so you'll have to press <H> if you wish to start over again. Does a hotspot have to be a simple shape? Does it matter if you leave a hole in it? Actually, a hotspot can be any shape you desire, and can even consist of multiple unconnected shapes scattered around the graphic image. Between pressing <H> to begin the process, and pressing <Enter> to end it, every location on which you "draw" is considered part of the same hotspot, even if you draw on several different locations around the screen. If you leave a hole in a large hotspot you can even make a second hotspot inside the hole (provided you finish the first one by pressing <Enter>, of course). If you change your mind about a hotspot after its HOTSPOT= and LINKWORD= lines have been added to the data card, there is only one thing you can do: delete the data. This applies whether you want to remove the 44 hotspot or only change it: you *must* delete the original HOTSPOT= line together with its data, then start afresh. (Note that if you have made a link on its LINKWORD= line and wish to keep it, you can leave that line alone, then move it down later to follow the new HOTSPOT line=.) The number of hotspots you can make in a graphic is limited by the 50- line workspace in its data card. Unlike text cards, when data cards are compiled Orpheus checks everything in the workspace, not just the top 24 or 25 lines. Normally there is room for about 20 hotspots, assuming that each requires at least one line for the hotspot data and one for the linkword data. If space is tight you can make a little room by deleting all comment lines. 45 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- CHAPTER 6 - TUTORIAL : COMPLETING A PROJECT --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Topics in this chapter: Sweating The Details Copyright Cardlength Full Title Include Notes Checking "More" Checking Frame "Check Card" Command Checking Keynames Checking Linkwords Compiling Your Project Distributing Your Work The Orpheus Reader Cleaning Up Though there remain many aspects of Orpheus that we haven't yet touched on, it's time to look at how you can get an end product from your labour: something that (if you are a registered user of Orpheus) you can distribute to other people. Note that you can compile your work as often as you want while actually writing it, if only to see what it looks like in the Reader. The compilation process is non-destructive: your working version remains untouched, and the compiled version is kept separate. Sweating the Details : Copyright As you may have noticed, the first text we imported into our "Keys to Astrology" project bore the copyright for an imaginary electronic publisher. I often hear young writers in the print world, even programmers, asking how to copyright their work. The fact is, the best and most valid method is simply to post a copyright notice in your work itself. In printed books, this usually goes on the reverse of the title page together with other information. In electronic books, you should put the copyright either on the title screen or one following shortly thereafter. All it takes is the word "Copyright", the year, and your name or that of a publisher. "But don't you have to register it somewhere? Don't you have to get some kind of certificate that SAYS you have copyright?" Absolutely not! Just post the notice, and you have legal copyright as long as you haven't plagiarized someone else's work. That's the law. Even if you plan to give your work away or distribute it as shareware, I **STRONGLY** urge you to place a copyright notice early in your document. This does not prohibit your readers from helping to 46 disseminate your work if you wish them to do (as shareware or public domain hypertext). Nor does it conflict in any way with the copyright on the Orpheus Reader, which is held by Hyperion Softword. Cardlength If you read Chapter 2, "Workspace", or if you've been browsing through online Help, you know that when you compile your work for viewing with the Orpheus Reader, only the top 24 or 25 lines of each card are included in the compiled version. The default cardlength is 24 lines; this leaves space for the Reader's Titlebar, which displays a menu prompt, the full title of your work, and some command buttons for navigating with the mouse. If you select a cardlength of 25 lines, the Titlebar only appears when the user presses <Esc> or clicks the right mouse button; the rest of the time, the entire screen is given over to your work. To verify your cardlength setting, open the Project Menu. Selecting "Cardlength" toggles the value between 24 and 25. This has essentially no effect on the appearance of your work in the Orpheus Author, except when you use the Check Card command discussed below. Full Title Filenames in DOS are so short that it can be hard to make them informative. At first glance you might think Orpheus makes it even harder, since the name of your Homecard is limited to a maximum of 8 characters. The Project Menu offers a solution: select "Full Title" and enter up to 32 characters. For our demonstration project, you would type in "The Keys to Astrology". This title will be displayed on the Titlebar when your work is viewed with the Orpheus Reader. Include Notes If you use Note Links in your work, open the Project Menu and check whether "Include Notes" is set to "Yes" or "No". The default setting is "Yes". The only reason to change it to "No" would be if your Notes are exclusively directed to yourself and are not intended to go into the finished version of your work. Bear in mind, however, that when you use this option not only is the Note linkword compiled as ordinary text, the linked card and any cards *descending* from it are simply left out, even if the descendant cards come from Door or other non-Note links in your original Note card. Checking "More" If you use More Links, remember that in the Orpheus Reader the More flag appears in the lower right corner and takes up 6 characters: =More=. In contrast, Orpheus Author displays the flag on the Statusbar, which 47 could lull you into a false sense of security. What if you've written text into what will be the lower right corner of a card, and there's a More link? Keep this in mind when using the Split command or when adding text to a card that has a More Link. Checking Frame If you select the Frame option on the Project Menu, telling the Orpheus Reader to display all text cards within a frame, you should check your cards to see whether any text or linedraw characters appear in the top or bottom lines, and against the left and right edges of the screen. You CAN leave text there if you wish, "embedding" it in the frame as discussed in online Help. This can be a highly desirable effect if it's what you want to do; just make sure that anything in the frame area is there because you want it there. "Check Card" Command The Check Card command (on the Tools Menu) displays your card as the end-user will see it in the Orpheus Reader. If the card has a More Link the =More= flag is displayed in the lower right corner. If your cardlength setting is 24 a simulation of the Reader's Titlebar replaces the Statusbar; if the cardlength is 25 the Statusbar is hidden. Pressing any key restores the normal display. Checking Keynames One of the special features of the Orpheus Reader is that you can call up a map of the current document and navigate right on it. As you move the selection bar from node to node, a keyname for each location is displayed at the bottom of the screen. Normally the keynames are derived from the linkwords. For example, in our "Keys to Astrology" demo we made a linkword on "Felicity Starlight"; this led to a card containing the biography of the author. If you navigate to that card in Orpheus Author and then open the Project Menu, you will see that its keyname is indeed "Felicity Starlight". This is what your reader will see when he or she selects that node on the map in the Orpheus Reader. But wouldn't it be more informative for the keyname to be "Biography of the author"? To change a card's keyname, navigate to it and open the Project Menu, then select "Keyname". As with the Full Title, you can type in up to 32 characters. If you think an informative map could enhance your finished document, you might get into the habit of editing the keyname as the very first thing you do upon entering a new blank card. You don't have to keep opening the Project Menu; just hit <Alt-K> and type it in. This could be especially helpful with cards descending from More Links (created with the "Split" command); their default keyname is simply "More". 48 Checking Linkwords As I mentioned in Chapter 4, "Resizing Linkwords", if the background color for a linkword is the same as that of ordinary text, and if you decide to resize the linkword, it's easy to go too far on one side or the other so that the linkword includes an extra space. If your end-user sets up his colors in the Orpheus Reader so that the backgrounds are different, the space would be all too apparent -- and your electronic masterpiece would suddenly look rather sloppy. (This is NOT a problem if you never expand your linkwords, since Orpheus never includes extra spaces when it selects the default linkword.) All right, we're talking perfectionism here. But if you're serious about putting your work before the general public, you want it to be as sharp, effective and professional-looking as you can make it. My advice is to configure your colors in Orpheus Author so that all linkwords are set on a background distinct from that of ordinary text. If you don't want to do that during your normal work, do it at least once before compiling the final version so that you can check the whole thing and verify that everything looks right. Compiling Your Project At any stage during your work on a document, you can compile it to see how it works in the Orpheus Reader. The process is identical whether you are finished or not. (Compare this to publishing in print: before spending a bundle at the printer's, your final manuscript had *better* be perfect!) To compile a project, load it in the Orpheus Author the way you would for a normal working session. We'll assume that you're using "The Keys to Astrology" for this. Open the Project Menu and select "Compile Project". (It doesn't matter which card you're in.) Orpheus asks "Are you sure?". Press <Enter> to say Yes. Now Orpheus asks if you have verified your project options. Assuming that you have checked everything as described earlier in this chapter, press <Enter> to answer Yes again. Now Orpheus gets busy, as you can tell from the activity on your hard disk. Just sit back and watch -- that's all you have to do. In step 1, Orpheus displays a message saying that it is "Building the compilation list". This is a list of all of the cards that will go into the compiled version of your work. Orpheus starts from the Homecard and works its way down, verifying all the links and adding each card it encounters to the list; if it comes to a Note Link and the Include Notes option has been turned off, Orpheus ignores that link. In step 2, Orpheus posts a message saying that it is "Mapping". Actually the mapmaking takes place in several stages, but most of the work is done right after step 1. There are two products of the mapping process: a series of temporary files that will go to make the compressed map in the compiled work (and will then be deleted), and a plain text 49 file that you can look at with any file viewer. In this case it would be called ASTROKEY.MAP. In step 3, Orpheus displays a window in which you can monitor its progress as it creates your finished work. For our demo project this will go by in a matter of seconds. In step 4, if all has gone well, Orpheus says "Compiled successfully!" Press any key to continue. In step 5, Orpheus informs you that it has created a file containing a list of everything that should go into the distribution package when you send your work out into the world. This file is named after the Homecard and has a .DOC extension, so for our demo project it would be called ASTROKEY.DOC. Note that this file is for *your* use and should not be included in the distribution package. (By "distribution package" I mean whatever you use to distribute your work, such as a floppy diskette or a ZIP file. This is discussed in the next section.) Let's look at the DOC file. Switch to the FileView window and load up "ASTROKEY.DOC" or whatever name was given in the last message. There are three groups of files: your compiled hypertext, your graphics if any, and the Orpheus Reader. The first group always consists of at least two files, of which the first ends with an .HTX extension, while the remainder are numbered. In this case the list will show ASTROKEY.HTX and ASTROKE_.1. The second group (which will be missing if your work does not use any graphics) gives the filepath for each graphic, exactly as you gave it in the data card. Remember that this is for your use only, to remind you exactly where the graphics are located on YOUR system. In the compiled version only the filenames are recorded, so if you attempt to view your work in the Reader and your graphics are in another directory, the Reader won't be able to find them. The last group of files consists of the executable and help for the Orpheus Reader: OHREAD.EXE and OHREAD.HLP. Distributing Your Work If you are a registered user of Orpheus, meaning that you have paid the registration fee of $49 to Hyperion Softword, you have the right to distribute your work in compiled form together with the Orpheus Reader. This right is unrestricted: you may distribute as many copies as you wish, and you may do so in any way you wish, including selling it, giving it away, or putting it out as shareware with whatever registration fee you choose to specify. If you are NOT a registered user of Orpheus, you may of course examine the program during an evaluation period of 30 days; however, this evaluation must NOT extend to distributing your work in ANY form. That is, you are welcome to compile your work and check it out with the Orpheus Reader on your own computer; this is the best way for you to find out if Orpheus is really the top-notch electronic publishing system you 50 need. But you may not sell, give away, or otherwise distribute such work without first registering with Hyperion Softword. (For more on this, with details on pricing and how to order, see page 57, "Appendix B: Shareware - Registering Orpheus".) There are two parts to distributing your finished work. The first is putting together a package. The second is getting it out into the world. Look back over the better pieces of software you've encountered: the good ones always have a certain neatness about them, something that satisfies the veteran while reassuring the novice. It should all hold together, it should be well documented, and it should be as easy as possible to start up and to use. As suggested in the .DOC file created after compilation, your software package should always include a README file. You can prepare this using your favourite word processor, but remember to save it to disk in non-document mode, i.e. as a plain ascii text file. The README file should include the following: (1) a brief explanation of what the work is and how to start it; (2) a "packing-list" giving the name (and optionally the size) of every file that the user should find in the package; (3) a copyright notice identical to the one posted near the beginning of your document; (4) if you are distributing the work as shareware or freeware, a statement to that effect, with (for shareware) the registration fee; (5) optionally, your name and address if you want your readers to be able to contact you -- important with shareware! (6) if your book includes graphics, a statement of the minimum display configuration required for the user to view your work without missing anything. If you just use a few graphics and they don't have any hotspots, this isn't so important. But suppose you had a 256-color graphic right after the title screen, and the only way to get to the rest of the work was through the hotspots in that graphic. It would be important to say right up front, "This book requires a VGA color display." Along with a README file, many software developers include a GO.BAT file, especially when the software is distributed on disk. When a novice user sees the instructions "Type GO <Enter>" right on the label, he knows exactly what to do. Your GO.BAT file would simply contain the command to start up the Orpheus Reader with your document. In the case of our "Keys to Astrology" project, this command would be "OHREAD ASTROKEY.HTX". In other words, if the user types "GO" <Enter> at the DOS prompt, this starts up GO.BAT, which in turn passes to DOS whatever commands you placed in it. If you're not familiar with batch files (files with a .BAT extension), read about them in your DOS manual. If you're a power user, you know that 51 you can make a batch file do some pretty fancy things. For example, with the addition of a public-domain utility like REPLY.COM (also called ANSWER.COM, etc.) you can write a batch file that accepts user input and branches accordingly. Your GO.BAT could let the user either view the README file first or immediately start the program. Is this beginning to sound too complicated? Relax... You don't have to have a GO.BAT. All the user needs to do is type "OHREAD" <Enter> at the DOS prompt, and the Orpheus Reader will take it from there. When you pass the Reader the name of a book complete with .HTX extension, it loads the document immediately; otherwise, it searches the current drive/ directory for HTX files, then displays a simple dialog box to let the user choose from what it finds. It does the same thing if you give it the wrong type of filename, so even the novice would have trouble getting into trouble. There are many ways to put your work out into the world, some of them easier than others -- but all of them cheaper than print media. Perhaps you are a consultant and you are creating an electronic book for your clients; perhaps you are creating an electronic manual for use in the company you work for; perhaps you are an educator and you are creating an electronic textbook for your students. In such cases your user-base is right at hand; you can copy your work to one or more floppy disks, complete with README and so on, and sell it or give it away as you see fit. If user-response is enthusiastic you may see an opportunity for more ambitious distribution through a major publisher. Why not? If your work is useful and exciting for a number of people in one company, or in one department of one university, think of how great the market could be on a country-wide scale. Even if you don't have a ready-made user-base, there are two highly effective and inexpensive ways in which you can broadcast your work, potentially throughout the world. I use the term "broadcast" for good reason. With both methods, you are ensured that thousands or even millions of people will at least be made aware of the existence of your work: they will see its title and a brief description of it. Of those thousands or millions, some hundreds or thousands will choose to acquire a copy of your work and spend some time with it. And of those, if you specify a registration fee, some portion of users may send you a check. When you ask for a registration fee you are distributing your work as shareware; when you don't, you're distributing it as freeware or are "putting it in the public domain". Always state up front what you're doing and what you expect from the user in return, if anything. For an electronic book, a reasonable shareware fee would be $5 or $10. (Many authors and programmers give the user a choice, with a notice something like this: "Suggested registration: $5-10".) Bear in mind that with a *printed* book selling at $10 in the bookstores, you would be lucky to get back $1 for each copy sold -- the rest going to the printer, the publisher, the distributor, and the owner of the bookstore. Whether you go the shareware route or are happy to place your work in the public domain, you should *say so* both in the README file and on the title screen of your work or shortly thereafter. 52 The first "broadcast" method is to send your work on disk to shareware distributors. You can always find ads for these companies in computer magazines, and they are always looking for new software to add to their catalogs. Shareware distributors operate by selling shareware and public domain software on disk; the charge per disk is minimal (usually $4 or $5), and covers only the distributor's costs -- none of it comes back to you. The advantage is that you get free advertising in the distributor's catalog. Of the people who purchase your work in this way, some may be appreciative enough to send you a registration check if you suggest a reasonable fee. Before that can happen of course you need to convince the distributor that your submission will interest his customers. Prepare your submission disk carefully, making sure that there are no missing files; you should definitely include a README file as well as a GO.BAT file. Then write an intelligent cover letter in which you describe the work, tell why it is unique and whom it should interest, state whether it is shareware or freeware, and mention any hardware requirements if graphics are used. The idea is not only to get the distributor interested, but to make it as easy as possible for him to put your disk in his repertoire and make an attractive catalog blurb. (The best distributors will in fact try out your work thoroughly, but if you supply the blurb they'll be happy to use it. Just be concise, accurate, and informative.) The second broadcast method is to go electronic and post your work on the public BBS's and commercial services like CompuServe. The advantage of this method is that after you *upload* your work to a BBS, other users can *download* it. Except when there are long-distance charges (or when there are hourly fees for a commercial service), nobody pays anything up front. A vast number of people learn of the existence of your work and can easily examine it without having to buy a disk from a distributor. Best of all, you need only "seed" your work in a few strategic locations (major BBS's or commercial services) for it to disseminate rapidly to hundreds or thousands of BBS's around the world. The reason? BBS-users love to share their discoveries, and often a user who has found your work on one BBS will upload it to another in order to get extra "download credits" on the second BBS. Some of the better BBS's actively seek new software to interest their users, routinely checking the listings on other BBS's for new titles. The only difference between distribution on disk and distribution by telephone (the BBS method) is that in the latter case you must upload your work in the form of one or more compressed files. The commonest compression format uses the .ZIP extension and is created by the PKZIP program from PKWare. (If you plan on using any such compression program for profit, be sure to read the documentation to see if you should pay a registration fee.) Other compression formats include LZH, ARC, ZOO, and so on. The same principles apply to this method as the others: make a coherent package of your work, with at least a README file, and when you post it on a BBS, enter an informative desciption. Should you worry about viruses infecting your work -- particularly if you go the BBS route? On the contrary... Most viruses are spread NOT 53 over the telephone but on infected diskettes -- diskettes containing pirated commercial software. Reputable BBS's protect themselves and their subscribers by scanning all uploads for infection before making them available for downloading; they also keep track of who uploads what. Though new viruses appear quite frequently, most honest users will never encounter a virus or other computer nasty. The people who are truly at risk of virus infection are the few who patronize pirate BBS's -- and the many who pass around pirated software. (Next time a well-intentioned friend offers you a copy of that $200 word processor or that $80 game, ask yourself: how many times has it already been copied? How many badly- maintained computers have those disks passed through? How many people had their hands on that software before somebody gave it to your friend?) To sum up, the chances of the Orpheus Reader picking up a virus are remote. When that sort of thing does happen with shareware, a scanner somewhere will catch it and remove the offending copy; another user will then replace it with a clean copy. That's the way it works -- this is a community. As for some misguided soul trying to mess up your writing, there is a fair measure of security in the fact that you're distributing your work in compiled form -- with the text effectively encoded. The Orpheus Reader Once you have composed and compiled your work in Orpheus Author (OH.EXE), the most important part of the Orpheus system becomes, of course, the Orpheus Reader (OHREAD.EXE). This is the interface between you and the public, the decisive factor that could persuade the waiting world that your electronic book is better than anything that can be found in print. You have a right to expect the Orpheus Reader to be as exciting, user-friendly, and bullet-proof as the best software on the market. I don't claim that it has quite reached that stage, but you and I share a need to see it get there. A failing in the Reader is more serious than one in the Author, because it puts *you* in a bad light in the eyes of your customers. In your own best interests, take the Reader for a serious test-drive. See if you can crash it. See if there's any feature that is difficult or unsatisfying to use, or if there's a feature it ought to have that it doesn't. Drop me a line with your comments and suggestions. Should the Reader have a manual? You tell me. In my opinion your work will come across more effectively if the interface to it does not *need* a manual -- if we can push the user right into it and let him discover for himself how quickly he feels comfortable. That's what electronic publishing is all about. It's NOT about printed manuals, it's about keeping everything immediately available through the screen, through online Help. It's about teaching people that they can find their own way, the very essence of hypertext. As you'll notice when you test the Orpheus Reader, the first time you start it up with a document a special screen pops up, "Presenting the 54 Orpheus Reader". This gives a brief overview of the program and how to use it; above all, it points the user toward the menu and toward online Help. The next time you start the program this screen will not appear, but it remains available from the menu. (The Reader detects a first-time user by the absence of a configuration file; this is one reason why you should NEVER include your own OHREAD.CFG file in the distribution package.) Features in the Orpheus Reader: load a new document from a dialog box or the command line; view a map of a document and navigate on it interactively; user-entered notes are automatically attached to their associated cards; navigate from notes to cards; set up to 10 bookmarks with user-entered descriptions; context-sensitive hypertext Help on all features; the best color-configuration dialog anywhere; complete mouse support; DOS shell; print a card at a time (with accelerator key) to a disk file or to the printer; view and navigate through graphics. As mentioned in earlier chapters, the Reader automatically detects whether a document uses 24-line or 25-line cards. In the latter case, since the Titlebar is hidden, the Reader posts a brief message telling the user how to call up the Titlebar and menu system (press <Esc> or click the right mouse button). A similar problem is encountered when a work includes graphics; currently, regardless of the cardlength setting, graphics are shown full-screen as one would expect, and the Titlebar only appears if the mouse pointer is moved to the top of the screen. The Titlebar is important for mouse users, since it includes the three navigational buttons for Home, Retrace, and PgUp. It also displays a flag (a down arrow to the left of the title) if the graphic contains any hotspots. (In graphics modes, the Titlebar only displays the title if there's room for it; in some videomodes there may not be enough room a long title.) Since the Titlebar gives the work a more user-friendly feel, would you as an author like to be able to specify that your graphic screens should ALWAYS display the Titlebar? Cleaning Up Eventually, after finishing a project and getting it out into the world, you will want to remove the original version from your hard disk. My advice is to save it first onto floppy diskettes, just in case you want to revise it one day. (You CANNOT revise the compiled version of an Orpheus document.) An effective method would be to use a compression utility such as PKZIP to create one ZIP file for each storage directory, with an additional ZIP file to hold the Homecard and its LST and PRJ files. Read about "Files and Directories" in online Help to learn how Orpheus sets up the subdirectories for a project; with a little care you can direct PKZIP to conserve the subdirectory structure along with your hypertext cards. Alternately, you could use a backup utility to do the same thing. When you are *really* ready to remove a project from your hard disk, first load the project in Orpheus Author, then open the Project Menu and select "Erase Project". Orpheus will get you to confirm your choice 55 (twice!) before doing anything. It will then delete all files in that project's storage directories, remove those directories, then delete the Homecard and various subsidiary files like the LST and PRJ files (for that project only). It will NOT touch your compiled files, nor will it touch any files in other projects' directories. Of course you could do all this yourself from the DOS prompt or with a file manager, but Orpheus does it faster. A worthy test victim for "Erase Project" will be the tutorial project you've worked on in the previous chapters. But don't erase it just yet if you want to continue trying things out on it as you read the following chapters. 56 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- CHAPTER 7 - SHAREWARE : REGISTERING ORPHEUS --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Topics in this chapter: Licence What You Get When You Register Publishers A Note to Pioneers Sharing Orpheus One Last Word Orpheus is distributed as SHAREWARE. This means that you are welcome to evaluate the system for up to 30 days. If you wish to use it after that period, you must pay the registration fee of $49. To enable you to make a thorough evaluation of the power of Orpheus, this package includes the Orpheus Reader (OHREAD.EXE) and the ability to compile your work to see what it would look like to the end user. However, you may not in any way distribute such work with the Orpheus Reader until you have registered the software and received your licence from Hyperion Softword. Licence Registered users of Orpheus receive an unlimited licence to sell, give away, or in any other manner distribute their compiled works, royalty- free, with as many copies of the Orpheus Reader as they require. Terms are detailed in the Software Licence Agreement that accompanies the registered version. What else do you get when you register? Read on! What You Get When You Register First of all, you get a registration number that Orpheus will build right into your compiled works (in encoded form). This is your ultimate proof that those works are *yours*. It will also serve as a "password", barring entry to anyone but you should you ever need to decompile your work. And you get some utilities: SNAPSHOT.EXE ...... captures *any* graphic screen so that you can link it into your hypertext REGIT.EXE ......... when you get updates from BBS's, tells the new Orpheus you're a registered user Some other neat utilities are on the drawingboard. 57 To register this copy of Orpheus, complete the registration form in the REGISTER.DOC file and send payment of $49 to: Rod Willmot Hyperion Softword 535 Duvernay Sherbooke, QC Canada J1L 1Y8 819-566-6296 (voice) Publishers If you are an electronic publisher or wish to set up as one, i.e. if you want to publish electronic books created not only by yourself but by other authors, tell me your plans when you register (or any time after). It won't cost you a thing. Instead, I'll *give* you one or more specially labelled copies of the shareware version of Orpheus, which you may freely reproduce and give out to your authors -- just so long as you tell them it's shareware. Encourage your authors to register Orpheus. Tell them to mention the serial number on their special copies when they do register. Whenever I receive a registration from one of your authors, I will advertise his or her work (the work *you* published) in the next release of Orpheus. That will mean worldwide exposure for both the author and for you. A Note to Pioneers Orpheus is about enabling creativity. *Your* creative daring may lead you to conceive of innovations in hypertext that I haven't thought of. If you have a project in mind that Orpheus seems right for, but that it cannot currently enable, your idea may be taken up for a future upgrade. I am also willing to discuss terms for custom programming. Sharing Orpheus Part of the shareware ethic is that you are welcome to help others learn about Orpheus in the same way you did. If you downloaded Orpheus from a BBS, you are welcome to upload it to others. Just be sure to upload the entire system exactly as you received it: complete, unmodified, and without your OH.CFG file (your personal configuration). The same cautions apply if you purchased Orpheus on disk from a shareware distributor. Finally, please note that if you are a registered user of Orpheus, your *registered* copy of the software must NEVER be treated as shareware, since it is in fact slightly (but significantly) different, and includes a number of utilities that are only available to registered users. If you want a shareware version to pass on to your friends, just let me know and I'll gladly send you a copy. 58 One Last Word Please: if you fall in love with Orpheus on Monday, and are certain that your electronic magnum opus will be ready for the public on Friday, please, get your registration in the mail on Tuesday morning. HTX files compiled with unregistered copies of OH.EXE are marked as such, and the Orpheus Reader will say so. It's just a simple message when the Reader loads your document, but you don't want your readers seeing that. 59 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- CHAPTER 8 - ORPHEUS UTILITIES ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Topics in this chapter: SNAPSHOT.EXE REGIT.EXE [The Orpheus Utilities are only available to registered users of Orpheus.] Just about everything you can do in Orpheus is built right into the program. However, there are times when it's handy or even necessary to have a small separate program to perform some special task. The Orpheus Utilities will be a small collection of programs that some people may never need -- in fact you can make FULL use of Orpheus without them -- but others will be glad they're there and will use some of them over and over. Currently the collection consists of just two programs, but others are on the drawingboard and I think they'll be appreciated. SNAPSHOT.EXE SNAPSHOT.EXE is a utility developed by Ted Gruber Software as a part of Fastgraph, the professional graphics library used in Orpheus. It is distributed under licence to registered users of Orpheus. The following instructions are paraphrased from the Fastgraph User's Guide; you can also find them in online Help, or follow the tutorial in Chapter 5. = SNAPSHOT is a terminate and stay resident program (TSR) to capture graphic images. It stores the images in Fastgraph's standard pixel run (SPR) format. To load SNAPSHOT, enter the command SNAPSHOT at the DOS prompt; if it loads successfully you'll see a copyright message and the instruction, "Press <alt>-<left shift> to activate." Let's suppose that you have created a full-screen graphic using a commercial paint program; save it to disk, then quit the program. Now load SNAPSHOT as described above, and start up the paint program again. (Along the way, be sure to make a note of the screen resolution your paint program is using.) Now retrieve your graphic and have your program display it so that it fills the entire screen. Press <Alt-Left Shift> to activate SNAPSHOT. Wait for the success signal (3 quick medium-pitched tones), then exit the program or continue if you wish to capture other graphics. SNAPSHOT remains in memory until you reboot, so you can activate it as often as you wish. 60 The procedure that I have just described will store the captured image in Fastgraph's SPR format, in a file named SNAPSHOT.nnn in the current directory. The "nnn" part of the filename will be a number from 000 to 999, so you can capture up to 1000 images into a single directory. Let's say that your graphic was of a California Condor. As the first image captured, the file will be named SNAPSHOT.000. In order to use this file in Orpheus, however, you **MUST** rename it to have an .SPR extension; for example, CONDOR.SPR would remind you of what it's in the graphic while telling Orpheus that it's an acceptable file. After you have captured and renamed a graphic, start up Orpheus and load or create the data card for a Graphic link. Enter the file's name (including the path if necessary) on the "FILEPATH=" line, then enter its resolution on the "RESOLUTION=" line. Press <Alt-G> to see if the image was correctly captured and if you have entered the correct path and resolution data. Some further notes about SNAPSHOT.EXE: when it saves a file to disk, SNAPSHOT looks for the first unused number from 000 to 999. Suppose you have captured a number of files, ending with SNAPSHOT.021, and that you delete numbers 000 and 005. The next image you capture will go into SNAPSHOT.000, and the next one after that will go into SNAPSHOT.005. You will find it helpful to rename your captured files quickly after each capture session. If SNAPSHOT is unable to capture an image, it gives an error signal (a single low-pitched tone). This will happen if you attempt to activate it while in text mode, or if there is not enough disk space or all 1000 file numbers are already in use. ==> IMPORTANT: Do not **ever** load SNAPSHOT or any other TSR program from within Orpheus's DOS shell. REGIT.EXE REGIT.EXE is a program that serves a purpose even when it doesn't do anything; its role is to help Orpheus recognize you as a registered user, and to protect your finished work from intruders. First, the active role: if you came to Orpheus through shareware, you may have finished and compiled an electronic book before receiving your registered copy. The shareware version of Orpheus is not in any way crippled or restricted, but it does leave its mark on anything you compile with it. The Orpheus Reader recognizes such books as having been made with an unregistered copy, and says so. But much more important than what the shareware version "puts into" a book is what it LEAVES OUT: your encrypted registration number, which of course doesn't exist until you register. When you compile a book using your registered copy of Orpheus, it hides an encrypted copy of your registration number right inside the book. 61 This is the ultimate proof that *you* are the author of it -- but it is also something more. One of the programs that I plan to add to the Orpheus Utilities is a decompiler: a program that can take a compiled electronic book and unfold it into its original state as cards (the form it has when you work on it in OH.EXE). For example, suppose you create a book and send it out into the world, and as the months go by you move on to other things, until one day you decide to delete the original (uncompiled) version. Unknown to you the public has discovered your work, and suddenly the letters and checks start coming in. Everyone loves it, but as you yourself look at it again you realize that if you could only open it you could make it even better. This is when you want a decompiler! But wait: if *you* can decompile an Orpheus book, so can everyone else with a registered copy, right? Wrong! The decompile utility will check your registration number, compare it with the encrypted version in the book you want to open, and will ONLY proceed if the two match. Of course, I could have chosen a password system, but then you would have to remember where you wrote the password. With our system you can't go wrong: your registration number is on the label of your distribution disks, AND here in the user files at Hyperion Softword. Where does REGIT.EXE fit in here? If you have compiled a book with the shareware version and deleted the original, REGIT.EXE can update your compiled book, complete with encrypted registration. The result is exactly the same as if you had compiled it with the registered version. Step 1: begin by installing your registered copy of Orpheus in your usual Orpheus directory. Start up OH.EXE and press <Alt-H> to open the Help Menu, then <R> to select "Registration #". Type in the number given on the label of your distribution disks, and press <Enter>. Orpheus immediately writes a new copy of your personal configuration file (OH.CFG) to disk, complete with your registration number. Step 2: exit Orpheus and check whether your compiled book is in your Orpheus directory (along with REGIT.EXE and OH.CFG). If it is not, copy your book's HTX file into the Orpheus directory before continuing; REGIT.EXE only concerns itself with HTX files. Now give the "REGIT" command at the DOS prompt, and if all goes well you should see a report of the results: how many files found, how many updated, and how many were already registered. (If REGIT.EXE encounters an HTX file compiled with a registered copy of Orpheus, it leaves it alone.) Of course, the other way to update your work is simply to recompile it with your registered copy of OH.EXE. With an exceptionally long book you not want to do that. 62 Earlier I mentioned that REGIT.EXE also serves a purpose without having to do anything. Here's how: updates of Orpheus will regularly appear on BBS's around the continent, in the form of new shareware versions. Since these will often contain significant new features or improvements, you will probably want to acquire them. Go right ahead! Normally you will be able to install them right over your old Orpheus files, since your work in progress will still be compatible with the new version. (To be safe however, you should always check the README file before installing a new version of anything.) The presence of REGIT.EXE in your Orpheus directory will inform the new version that you are a registered user. If your OH.CFG file contains your registration number, the new version will recognize that too; if it does not, simply type it in as directed above, on the Help Menu. To make this very clear: once you are a registered user you can take advantage of shareware updates and compile all the books you want. To do this, you MUST have REGIT.EXE in your Orpheus directory, and your registration number MUST be showing on the Help Menu. 63 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- APPENDIX A - USING DESQVIEW WITH ORPHEUS --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Although Orpheus is not "Desqview-aware", it runs fine in a full-screen Desqview window. (Without Desqview it would have taken me three years to develop Orpheus instead of two.) If you are a Desqview-user, you may be interested in the following setup parameters for giving Orpheus its own window. On the main "Change a program" screen, use the following parameters: Memory size (in K): 512 Writes directly to screen: Y Displays graphics information: Y Virtualize text/graphics: N Uses serial ports: N Requires floppy diskette: N To set the following more specific parameters, press <F1> to open the advanced options screen. Use the following parameters: Text pages: 4 Graphics pages: 2 Uses its own colors: Y Uses math coprocessor: N Window position: Maximum height: 25 Maximum width: 80 Runs in background: N Other options can be left at their default values. For optimum performance you should set the following parameters: Keyboard conflict: 4 Protection level: 0 Note that if you do not EVER plan to use graphics in Orpheus, you can change "Displays graphics information" to "N", and "Graphics pages" to "0". If you are using a monochrome monitor (NOT one with 16 shades of grey etc.), you can change "Text pages" to 1. The same parameter settings can be used for both the Orpheus Author (OH.EXE) and the Orpheus Reader (OHREAD.EXE), although the Reader uses much less memory than does the authoring program. 64 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- APPENDIX B - PROGRAMMING COMMAND REFERENCE --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Command sets in this reference: Graphics Commands Program Commands Random Commands There are three kinds of cards in which the text you enter is meant to be interpreted as a command to the Orpheus Reader. (Some commands can also be interpreted, or "performed", within Orpheus Author.) These cards are: the data cards for Graphic links; Command cards (from Command links); and Init cards (from Init links). On all three, lines beginning with ";" are ignored by the interpreter; you can use them as comment lines or as a way of "commenting out" commands that you don't immediately want to delete. Context-sensitive help on programming Orpheus is available whenever you are in one of the three special card types, and is more complete than this brief summary. Graphics Commands Used in the data cards for Graphics links. FILEPATH= .......................... path\filename for graphic to display RESOLUTION= ............... screen resolution in pixelcolumns x pixelrows MODE= ........................... for pcx graphics, mode in which created DRAW= ............................... color to use when drawing a hotspot ERASE= .............................. color to use when erasing a hotspot HOTSPOT= ............... location data for a hotspot (entered by Orpheus) LINKWORD= ........................................ linkword for a hotspot Program Commands Used in Command cards. RUNBAT= .............. run a batch file, esp. if it contains DOS commands RUN= ...................................................... run a program 65 Random Commands Used in Command and Init cards; JUMP used in Command cards only. Random jumps cannot accidentally arrive at a non-displayable card (such as a Command or Init). RANDOM=ALL ................................. set selection from all cards RANDOM=EXCLUDE, ............... set selection from all but following list RANDOM=INCLUDE, .................. set selection only from following list RANDOM=JUMP ............... trigger a random jump (selection must be set) 66