CONText II is a very powerful text editor. It was designed to be used in conjunction with communication software and for small amounts text editing work. CONText II was *not* designed to take the place of your word processor. Its best for working on small text files.
CONText II is System 6 and 7 compatible and is 32 bit clean. It will work on all Macs with system 6.0 and later. It is compatible with programs like ATM and Thunder 7.
Since most of the features of CONText II are similar to all text editors and word processors, I’ll only describe the features unique to CONText II here.
Shareware
^^^^^^^^^
CONText II is distributed using the Shareware system. If you like CONText II and would like to get rid of that annoying dialog box every time you launch CONText II, send a check or money order for $15 (U.S.) to the address below. For international orders, send an extra $2 for the added shipping costs.
Michael Conrad
ATTN: CONText II
955 Escalon Ave. #505
Sunnyvale, CA 94086
For your bucks, you’ll receive the latest version of CONText II plus an application called “CONText II Converter” which will convert all copies of CONText II into the non-demo version. You’ll also receive the source code for the standard macros that came with CONText II so you can use them as building blocks to build your own.
Opening Existing Files
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
CONText can read in any file of type ‘TEXT’. When you select “Open” from the file menu, you will be presented with the standard open file dialog box. Only text files will appear in the selection window. You can double click on CONText II documents in the finder to open them as well.
CONText cannot display a file larger than 32K. If you attempt to open an file larger than 32K, CONText will ask if you wish to open the file in separate segments of 30K each. If you click “OK” CONText will open as many windows necessary to display the entire contents of the file.
Setting Preferences
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
You set CONText’s preferences by selecting “Preferences...” from the file menu. Here is where you tell CONText whether you want smart quotes on and set the documents creator.
The Finder uses the documents creator to determine which application to launch when it is double clicked, and to associate an icon with it. You can, for example, save documents with the creator ‘MSWD’ (without the quotes) so when files are saved, they will appear like Microsoft™ Word documents. Double clicking on them will launch Microsoft™ Word.
By pressing “Creator Search” in the preferences dialog, you can find the creator of a word processor or editor without having to use programs such as ResEdit. Just select the file or application who’s signature you want and its creator will be placed in the Document Creator edit field of the preferences dialog.
CONText’s preferences are saved in the system folder inside a folder called “Preferences.” If this folder is not present, CONText II will create it.
Document Statistics
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
When this item is selected, a dialog will appear presenting you with the statistics concerning the current document. Displayed will be the number of lines, characters, words and pages in the document.
Stripping Characters
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Select “Strip Character...” from the edit menu to strip any ASCII character from your document. This was designed for stripping control characters from text files.
Adjusting Carriage Returns
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
With this option, you can place a carriage return every ‘n’ characters in the document. This is useful when sending a text file to non-Mac computers or BBS’s.
Saving Default Text Characteristics
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Selecting “Save As Default” from the Text menu will save the current settings in the Text menu to the preferences file. New documents will then start out using these settings. Saved are font, size and line spacing.
Macros
^^^^^^
CONText II loads in the macros located in the file “CONText Macros.” This file must reside in the same folder as CONText II for them to be loaded. The macros perform certain operations on the text of a document. The macros should be self explanatory by their name in the Macros menu.
PROGRAMMERS:
You can build your own macros by using any compiler which can build code resources. The main function in the code resource should read:
In Pascal:
FUNCTION main (theText:TEHandle):OSErr;
In C:
Pascal OSErr main (TEHandle theText)
CONText II passes a text edit handle to the document’s text in ‘theText’. Your code resource should pass back any OS errors encountered during the macro operation. Pass noErr if there are no errors. CONText II will handle the reporting of errors for you.
Build the code resource to type ‘MCRO’. Any unique ID will be ok since CONText II reads in the macros by their resource name.
IMPORTANT: Its YOUR responsibility to ensure that any memory you allocate gets allocated and disposed of properly. If you cannot get memory as needed, pass memErr back to CONText.
For Example:
function main (theText:TEHandle):OSErr;
var
h:Handle;
begin
h := NewHandle(120);
if h = nil then begin
main := memErr;
Exit(main);
end;
...
DisposHandle(h);
end;
Once the macro is built, copy the code resource into the resource fork of the file “CONText Macros.” The next time you launch CONText II, the macro name will appear in the Macro menu.
CONText II takes care of redrawing the text and also calls TECalText() upon the return of the macro.
Registered owners of CONText receive the source code to the standard macros that CONText II comes with.
