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CHANGES.101
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1990-03-28
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STeno Changes for 1.01
======================
Paragraph Reformatting
----------------------
Without a doubt the most-requested enhancement has been the ability to
reformat paragraphs. This has been added, and works similar to the way
Word Writer and 1ST Word handle reformatting, ie. just move the insertion
point to the first line of a paragraph and hit F10. There is even a
"Reformat to End" command which will reformat all of the text from the
insertion point to the end of the file.
The important point to note about reformatting is that the indent level is
based on the *second* line of the paragraph. Actually, the line after the
cursor is used to determine the indent level, so if you press F10 with the
cursor in the middle of a paragraph you'll find that the rest of the
paragraph is formatted according to the indent level of the line after the
one you started on. This allows you to easily have both indents and
outdents without having to resort to special types of tabs like Word Writer
('indent' vs. 'tab').
For reformatting purposes a 'paragraph' is considered to be a sequence of
non-blank lines. A line which contains only blanks or tabs is considered
to be a blank line.
The right margin is taken from the current word wrap column, so you can
vary your right margins simply by altering the wrap column as you reformat.
Fully justified text is not currently supported for 2 reasons.
1 Justified text *without* proportional typefaces or micro-spacing
between characters and words is, for most people, harder to read than
text which is "ragged right". This is due to the fact that extra
blanks are inserted between words in order to make a flush right
margin, which causes the inter-word spacing to vary within a single
line. Using a proportional typeface or a non- proportional typeface
with microspacing allows the padding to be distributed evenly between
all of the words and characters in the line, resulting in consistent
inter-word spacing and much more readable text. Just to prove my
point, check out the paragraph for reason #2. It didn't turn out all
that horrible, but imagine how much of a pain it would be to read if
all of its lines were as bad a the third one. Yeah, I know.... this is
basically my way of saying "nahhhh, I don't really want to bother doing
that".
2 STeno deals with pure-ASCII files, and there is no foolproof way
to handle justified paragraphs properly with pure-ASCII files.
The problem arises when you decide to reformat a justified
paragraph. If extra ASCII blank characters were used in order to
fill lines, then many words would have two or more blanks between
them and STeno wouldn't be able to tell which ones were the
'real' ones. Some editors solve this by reducing multiple blanks
to single blanks and then apply some typical formatting rules
putting two blanks after periods, question marks, etc. Of
course, if you didn't want to have two blanks after those
characters you'd have to go and manually fix things up again, and
any tables or other special alignment you used blanks for would
be pretty much wrecked.
The way around this of course is to use some special character rather
than an ASCII blank to represent the inserted spaces, but saving such a
character would produce a file that is not pure ASCII, and would
probably not be too readable from the desktop. Since STeno uses plain
old ASCII this is not an acceptable solution.
Printer Setup
-------------
There is a new "Printer Setup..." command under the File menu. Selecting
this brings up a new dialog which allows you to set several options which
control the way STeno prints:
o The Printer Initialization String is simply a sequence of characters
that STeno will send to the printer at the beginning of a "Print" or
"Print Selection" command. You can enter up to 35 characters on this
line; what you put, if anything, will depend on your printer. Most
printers use different escape sequences to select things like the font
type and pitch - check your printer manual to find out what you need to
use.
Since the dialog uses a standard GEM text entry field there are a
couple of things to point out. You can't enter a 'null' character
(ASCII value of 0) since that character is used by GEM (and STeno) to
terminate the string itself. Fortunately most printers will accept
either null or the '0' character interchangeably. The other quirk is
that the commercial at sign '@' cannot be used as the first character
in the string. If GEM sees '@' as the first character it automatically
considers the entire string to be empty. This was probably done as a
convenience for programmers when creating dialog boxes, but turns out
to be more of a hindrance than a help. You'll notice this in *any* GEM
dialog text fields that allow arbitrary text (you won't see it in
places that allow only digits or filename characters however), so it
has nothing to do with STeno.
o The Left Margin Offset field lets you specify how many blanks to add to
the beginning of each line sent to the printer.
o The Print Page Banner box determines whether or not STeno will print a
three line banner at the start of each page. The first line will
contain the file name, the current date, and the page number. Lines
two and three are left blank to separate the banner from the file data.
o The Send LF after CR box tells STeno to send either a carriage return /
linefeed pair after each line or just a carriage return. If your
printer is configured for automatic line feeds after carriage returns
then make sure this box is off (white).
o The Lines Per Page entry tells STeno the *total* number of lines
available on each page. Subtract 6 from this number to determine the
number of lines STeno will print the file data on. Three lines are
used at the start of the page for the banner and three are left at the
bottom of the page in order to skip over the page break. Naturally,
STeno won't let you set this number to less than 7.
Setting the Lines Per Page to 0 effectively sets up an infinitely
large page. You'll get the banner at the beginning of printing if it's
enabled, but you won't get any other blank lines inserted during
printing.
o The Use FF To Eject Page box tells STeno whether or not it should send
an ASCII form-feed character (value 12) to go to the next page or
simply enough blank lines to reach the Lines Per Page total. Virtually
all printers understand the form-feed character, and it usually gets
you to the next page much more quickly than a bunch of blank lines.
o Eject Last Page determines if STeno will stop after the last line has
been printed or advance the paper to the beginning of the next page.
The Accessory Title Changes!
----------------------------
The accessory title in the GEM "Desk" drop-down menu will now show "STeno:
<filename>", where <filename> is either "Untitled" or the name of the
current file. This is the same information that STeno uses for the window
title and is a really nice way to see what file you have loaded, especially
if you like to load multiple STenos.
Since GEM limits desk accessory titles to 20 characters, the extension
portion of the filename will not be shown if the title would exceed 20
characters. For example, " STeno: DESKTOP.INF" just fits (all
accessories put 2 blanks at the beginning), but a long file name such as "
STeno: FILENAME.EXT" is too big, so STeno just shows: " STeno:
FILENAME".
Those of you who are using STeno from within MultiDesk will just see
"STeno", since MultiDesk makes its own copy of the original name used and
STeno's changes go unnoticed.
STENOCFG.TTP Is Now Obsole