Tex-Edit is a multi-window, styled text editor that includes a built-in text reader. I keep a copy in my Apple menu and an alias on the desktop (for drag-and-drop operations). Tex-Edit is fast, easy-to-use and requires very little memory. It is particularly adept at formatting text which is transmitted to and from a BBS. Tex-Edit 2.0 is FreeWare. (1/10/94)
••• Apple Menu •••
• About Tex-Edit…
This gives a few helpful hints for using Tex-Edit. It also includes instructions on how to contact me for suggestions or bug reports.
••• File Menu •••
• New
This will open a new blank document window. Up to nine windows can be open simultaneously, depending on Tex-Edit’s memory allocation. (To increase Tex-Edit’s memory allocation, enter a new “preferred size” in the Finder’s “Get Info…” dialog box. You will need to add about 50K per extra window.) The new window default font and size are set in the Preferences… dialog.
• Open…/Open Any…
This will bring up the standard file selection dialog. Pick the TEXT document you wish to open. If you hold down the shift key while choosing this command, you will be allowed to open the data fork of any file, including non-TEXT files. If you open a TEXT document containing a ‘styl’ resource (such as documents created by JoliWrite 3.0, Stylus, America Online 2.0 and, of course, Tex-Edit), the text will display style attributes (boldface, italics, color, size, etc.). I would discourage you from trying to open active files (such as Tex-Edit or the System).
• Open Selection…
If the current text selection corresponds to the name of a TEXT file (or alias to a TEXT file) in the same folder as the active document, that file will be opened by Tex-Edit into a new document window. If the selected file cannot be found, Tex-Edit will beep and display a standard “Open…” dialog. If the selected file exists and is not a TEXT file, Tex-Edit will open the document by launching its creator application. (Tex-Edit sends an OpenSelection Apple Event to the Finder. Of course, this requires System 7.)
As you might imagine, this allows you to create simple hypertext documents. Place the “root” Tex-Edit document in a folder along with all of the documents (and aliases of documents) that you want to be able to open from within the root document. You should mark all the embedded filenames in a distinctive way (like this).
• Insert…/Insert Any…
This will bring up the standard file selection dialog. Pick the TEXT document you wish to insert into the active document. The text is inserted at the cursor position, replacing any text which may be selected. The donor document is not affected. If you hold down the shift key while choosing this command, you will be allowed to insert the data fork of any file, including non-TEXT files. (This command will not execute if the resultant combined document will exceed 32K.)
• Close/Close All
This will close the active window. (It is equivalent to clicking in the window’s close box.) You will be prompted to save any changes you may have made. If you hold down the shift key, the menu item changes to “Close All” and all open document windows will be closed rapidly. Likewise, holding down the shift key while clicking in the close box will close all open windows rapidly.
• Save
This will save any changes you have made to the file in the active window. A standard file dialog will be displayed if your document is not yet associated with a disk file.
• Save As…
This will bring up the standard file dialog for creation of a new text file on your disk. For System 7 users, there is a pop-up menu which allows you to choose the desired file format. “Normal” is the default styled Tex-Edit format. “Plain Text” will create a Tex-Edit document without any style information, thus saving a small amount of disk space (about 20%). “Stationery Pad” format creates a styled Tex-Edit boiler-plate. This version of Tex-Edit can also directly create Word, Word Perfect, MacWrite, WriteNow, TeachText, TeachText Read-Only, America Online and JoliWrite documents (as well as a few others). To create another type of document, select the “Other…” option. This displays a dialog box which allows you to enter any 4-character creator code. Documents created using this last option lack all style information.
“Normal” and “Stationery Pad” Tex-Edit documents remember their size and screen position during each Save. They will appear in the same place when re-opened, if you have the “Remember window size and position” selected in the Preferences dialog.
• Revert
This will revert to the last saved version of the file in the active window. All changes made since the last time the file was saved will be lost.
• Page Setup
This will display the standard Page Setup dialog allowing you to set certain characteristics for your printer.
• Print Options…
This will display a Print Options dialog, which allows you to set the page margins (in inches). Two checkboxes let you choose whether or not you want double-spaced printouts or numbered pages. None of these choices affect the actual file or its window. The page margins settings are saved in the Preferences file.
• Print…
This will display the standard Print dialog for whichever printer you have selected in the Chooser.
• Preferences…
This dialog box allows you to customize several of Tex-Edit’s features. All preferences are stored in a “Prefs” file which is created the first time Tex-Edit is run. The prefs file is usually stored in the System folder or Preferences folder (System 7).
1) Show “Open…” dialog at startup. If this is selected, when you first launch the Tex-Edit application, you will be greeted with the standard file selection dialog instead of a new blank window.
2) Open new windows to full screen size. If this is selected, new windows will open up to fill the entire desktop, leaving a thin strip of desktop on the right side of the screen (for the disks and trashcan). Otherwise, new windows will be slightly smaller than a 9 inch screen.
3) Smart (“”) quotes. If this is selected, typographer quotes will automatically be used whenever you hit the single or double quote key. You may wish to disable this feature if you are creating files to be sent to non-Mac systems.
4) Change file “creator” to:___ If this is selected, the 4 character creator code in the editable box will be used instead of Tex-Edit’s usual TBB5. This allows Tex-Edit to create files that would be recognized as belonging to another application. (For example, Microsoft Word’s creator is MSWD.) Documents created for other word processors in this manner do not contain a ‘styl’ resource, thus decreasing the file size by about 20%. System 7 users can override this setting in the “Save As…” dialog box.
5) Tab creates ___ spaces. If this is selected, a tab key entered at the keyboard will result in the insertion of the chosen number of spaces into the text. This may be helpful to indent the first line of a paragraph (or create columns if you are using a mono-spaced font like Monaco).
6) Wrap text inside window. If this is selected, the horizontal scrollbar is disabled and all text automatically wraps inside the right side of the window. If this is deselected, the right margin is set at approximately 1500 pixels and the horizontal scrollbar becomes active. This should be useful if you are writing source code and wish long lines of text to stay on one line.
7) Smart cut and paste. If this is selected, Tex-Edit will include the trailing space (if any) when cutting a word to the clipboard. If the selected word is followed by punctuation instead of a space (as is the case for the last word in a sentence) the leading space will be cut. Cutting a word from the middle of a sentence will thus leave only a single space, which is usually what you want. Subsequent paste operations will insert the word along with its trailing space. In most cases this will save two steps in the cut-and-paste cycle.
8) Remember window size and position. If this is selected, Tex-Edit will use information stored in the document’s file to restore the document’s previous size and screen position when it is re-opened. This only works with “Normal” or “Stationery Pad” Tex-Edit documents. If this option is off, document windows will be evenly “staggered” as they are opened.
9) Default Font:___ This pop-up menu allows you to change Tex-Edit’s default font. The default font is used when a new window is created or when a generic text file is opened.
10) Default Size:___ This pop-up menu allows you to change Tex-Edit’s default font size. This size is used when a new window is created or when a generic text file is opened.
• Quit
This will close the Tex-Edit application. You will be prompted to save any altered or unsaved open documents before Tex-Edit quits.
••• Edit Menu •••
• Undo
Undo can reverse your most recent editing action or style change. After you undo something, it can be redone if desired.
• Cut
Cut will remove the current selection to the clipboard, making it available for pasting to Tex-Edit or other programs. The clipboard holds the text as well as its ‘styl’ information, making styled selections available to other programs that support standard Mac conventions.
• Copy
Copy will make a copy of the current text selection and place it in the clipboard.
• Paste
Paste will move a copy of the clipboard contents to the current insertion point, deleting any text which may be selected in the active window.
• Clear
Clear will erase the current text selection.
• Select All
All the text in the file will become hilited (selected).
• Paste Time
The current system time will be pasted at the insertion point. The clipboard is not affected. Use the “Date and Time” control panel (7.1) to alter the format of the date and time to be pasted.
• Paste Date
The current system date will be pasted at the insertion point.
••• Special Menu •••
• Find/Replace…
This dialog lets you enter a text string for which to search. You may also enter a text string to use as a replacement when the search string is found. Selecting the “Find” button will hilite the first occurrence of the search string. (You may then use the “Find Next” or “Replace & Find Again” menu commands.) If you push the “Replace All” button, Tex-Edit will replace all occurrences of the search string with the replacement string, then report how many replacements were made. The three small buttons labelled “CR”, “Tab” and “LF” allow you to easily enter a carriage return, tab or linefeed character into the find string or replace string.
All searches start at the top of the document, unless you select the “Start search at cursor position” option. The “Cases must match” option forces Tex-Edit to look for exact matches. Turn this switch off if you wish case to be ignored. The “Whole words only” option will limit matches to distinct whole words (i.e. looking for ‘the’ will find ‘the’ but not ‘them’).
• Find Again
This option becomes available once a match has been found. It allows you to keep searching down through the document looking for the next match.
• Replace & Find Again
This will replace the hilited word with the replacement string (from the “Find/Replace…” dialog box) and continue searching for the next match.
• Enter Selection
This will copy the current text selection (up to 255 characters) into the “Find/Replace…” dialog box. This text will thus be used for the next “Find Again” command.
• Change Case
If some text is hilited (selected), this submenu gives you a choice of various case-changing commands. You may change all the selected text to uppercase, lowercase, title case or sentence case. (Title case capitalizes the first letter of each word and sentence case capitalizes the first letter of each sentence.) Only the hilited text is affected.
• Block Quote
This command will convert the selected text into a 60 character-per-line block format. Each line is preceded by the “> ” characters (greater than-space-space) and ended by a carriage return. Words are not split. Use Tex-Edit to “quote” a passage of text in your received E-mail and copy it into your reply. Quoting a brief passage allows the sender to remember their original message and thus the context of your reply. (Unfortunately, some people go overboard and end up quoting the entire message, thus wasting space and the reader’s time!)
• Strip LF’s
This option removes all linefeeds from the text. Linefeeds show up as useless little boxes at the start of each line. They are inserted by MS-DOS text editors to handle line wrap, but they are not needed on the Mac.
• CR’s -> LF’s
This option converts all carriage returns in the active document into linefeeds. This is useful for some UNIX systems which use the linefeed character to terminate paragraphs.
• Modify…
This dialog box allows you to globally change special characters in the text. If some text is selected, only that hilited text is affected by these changes.
1) Strip foreign control characters. If this is selected, Tex-Edit will delete all non-Mac control characters. Specifically, it will delete all characters with an ASCII value less than 32 (except for tabs, carriage returns and linefeeds). Control characters usually show up as useless little boxes scattered through the text.
2) Replace each tab with ___ spaces. If this is selected, each tab character will be replaced with however many space characters you specify. This is useful for aligning columns, since Tex-Edit is unable to directly handle tab characters.
3) Quotes. The two available choices allow you to replace all ordinary quote marks with typographer quote marks or visa versa. Note that most BBS’s and MS-DOS systems don’t recognize these “smart” quotes.
4) Ligatures. The two available choices allow you to replace all occurrences of “fi” and “fl” with the single-character typographer ligatures or visa versa. Note that some fonts do not have these ligatures installed, thus producing ugly little boxes. As with the smart quotes, ligatures are usually not recognized by less intelligent computer systems.
5) Line Endings. These various choices allow you to change your file’s line formatting. In a Mac editor (like Tex-Edit), line endings are determined by “word-wrap” and carriage returns are only used to end paragraphs. Non-Mac systems usually end each line with a carriage return (or more likely a carriage return/linefeed combination). You can use “Strip CR/LF” to convert the text to Mac-formatted word wrapping text.
Alternately, you can force carriage returns (or carriage return/linefeeds) at the end of each line. In this case, you need to specify the number of characters per line. This will allow those with non-Mac systems to easily read your uploaded text files.
• Go To Line #…
This command displays a dialog that lets you jump to any line in the active document. The desired line is hilited and scrolled into view. This option is most helpful if you de-select “Wrap text inside window” (Preferences dialog).
• Word Count…
This command shows the word count, line count and character count for the active document.
••• Font Menu •••
The font menu lists all the fonts available to Tex-Edit. The current selection’s font is checked.
••• Size Menu •••
The size menu lists a selection of common font sizes. The current selection’s font size is checked.
• Smaller
This decrements the current selection’s font size by one point (2 points minimum), redrawing the selected text if necessary. The command keys are an easy shortcut for quickly changing font size.
• Larger
This increments the current selection’s font size by one point (127 points maximum), redrawing the selected text if necessary.
• Other(_)…
This command brings up a dialog which allows you to select any point size between 2 and 127 by simply entering that value in the edit box (or using the arrow buttons). A sample of the currently selected text’s font and size is displayed interactively.
••• Style Menu •••
This is a standard style menu with the addition of color and justification submenus. You may change the selection’s color in the same manner as you change its other style attributes. Of course, the color only shows up on your printout if you have a color printer. The justification setting (left, center or right justified) affects how the entire document is displayed and printed, but does not alter the file’s contents.
••• Speech Menu •••
• Read Entire Document
This command will cause the active window to be read aloud by the Mac, if you have the Speech Manager installed in your Extensions folder (or System folder). The reading session starts at the top of the file and reads one sentence at a time, hiliting each sentence as it is read (scrolling as needed). Editing is not permitted while the text is being read. The reading can be canceled or paused at any time. This command is remarkably useful for helping to proofread a document, catching grammatical errors which eluded both my spelling checker and my tired eyes.
• Read Starting At Cursor
This command will cause the active window to be read aloud starting at the current cursor position (or the end of the current selection, if some text is selected). Speech then continues until the end of the document is reached or “Stop Reading” is chosen.
• Read Selection
If some text is selected, this command will read it aloud. It can be stopped or paused as desired. Once speech commences, all editing functions are restored, allowing background reading of documents.
• Stop Reading
If Speech Manager is reading a document or selection aloud, this will immediately stop the reading session.
• Pause/Resume
If you are reading a document aloud, this will allow you to temporarily pause or restart the reading session.
• Turn Speech On/Off
This command activates the Speech Manager. It must be selected before any other speech-related commands are usable. If you have problems loading certain voices (especially the PlainTalk voices), you may need to increase Tex-Edit’s memory allocation in the Finder’s “Get Info” dialog. Turning speech off will immediately stop all speech and release any memory allocated for the Speech Manager.
• Speech Settings…
This command brings up a dialog which allows you to modify some of the Speech Manager’s speech characteristics. The “Voice:” pop-up menu lists all the voice resources currently available to your system. Selecting a voice will adjust the pitch and rate to that voice’s default setting. Try experimenting with different rates and pitches to get the most pleasing results. The “Sample” button will cause a sample sentence to be read aloud.
••• Windows Menu •••
• Switch
This command will bring the lowest Tex-Edit document to the front and make it the active document. Selecting this command repeatedly will “cycle” through all open documents. This allows easy switching between multiple windows.
All open documents are listed in the Windows menu. Choose the window you wish to activate. This duplicates the action of clicking on a window in the background to bring it to the front. The currently active window is checked. Command key shortcuts are displayed.
••• Miscellaneous •••
• Requirements
Tex-Edit requires a Mac or Mac-compatible running System 6.0.7 or better. To use the speech facility, you need to copy Apple’s Speech Manager extension (along with any desired voices) into the Extensions folder and re-boot. Tex-Edit runs fine without the Speech Manager.
• Extended Keyboards
Tex-Edit makes full use of Apple’s extended keyboard including the forward delete, home, end, page up, page down and cursor keys. The escape key can be used to cancel any dialog box (just like command-period).
• Other Features
Tex-Edit is 32 bit clean, stationery aware, Apple event aware, System 7 compatible, MultiFinder compatible, color compatible, big screen compatible, 68040 cache compatible and adheres to all of Apple’s interface guidelines (as best I can tell). Undo is implemented for most functions and balloon help is available (under System 7). If you triple click on a sentence, the entire sentence will be selected. Shift click on a close box to close all windows. Hold down the shift key during cursor key movements to extend a selection.
• File Formats
Tex-Edit saves its documents in a format which can be read by any text editor or word processor (type ‘TEXT’). It saves the style information (font, size, color, boldface, etc.) in the file’s resource fork. Since this style information is ignored by other text editors, they are unable to display anything other than plain text when editing Tex-Edit’s files. When Tex-Edit re-opens a file which has been altered by another editor, all the style information will be gone, unless the other text editor also stores the document’s style information in the resource fork. For example, America Online 2.0, JoliWrite 3.0 and Stylus create styled text files which can be easily opened by Tex-Edit with all style information intact! (Tex-Edit scans the document file for a resource of type ‘styl’. The first one it finds is used to style the text. If the document is using ‘styl’ resources for some other purpose, the text will look funny.)
Tex-Edit can create styled America Online 2.0 and JoliWrite 3.0 documents (if you are using System 7). In order to move a styled Tex-Edit document into another word processor without losing style information, you can use the clipboard to copy and paste the entire document. (A few expensive word processors apparently do not support Apple’s standard clipboard formats and may lose the ‘styl’ information. Go figure…)
Tex-Edit can open any ‘TEXT’ document (up to 32K) and can also display the data fork of any other file. Tex-Edit can correctly open stationery pad documents.
• Limitations
Tex-Edit is limited to 32K text files. This is due mainly to the author’s decision to keep the code as small and fast as possible. It also allows open documents to be stored in RAM, thus benefiting PowerBook owners. Tex-Edit does not deal directly with tab characters or graphics. Tex-Edit only allows nine documents to be open at once (regardless of memory allocation), because any more confuses the Windows menu (and would be silly).
• Source Code
Tex-Edit if FreeWare. If you would like a copy of the THINK Pascal source code, please send $5, a disk and a self-addressed stamped disk mailer envelope. My address is:
Tom Bender
5313 Beverly Drive
San Angelo, Texas 76904
• On-Line Support
If you have questions, suggestions or bug reports, you can also reach me via modem:
America Online: TomBB
• Other Products
Please also try Eliza, Re-Pete and Azile, hopefully available on a BBS near you!
• Credits
I am grateful to the many users who have contributed to the evolution of Tex-Edit, however two people have devoted a large amount of time and effort. I would like to thank E.J. Chichilnisky (for suggestions, feature development and extensive beta testing) and Keith Corwin (for helping to design Tex-Edit’s beautiful new icon suite)!
