LSD Docs/LSD Docs.iso/FILEZ/lsd21.dms/lsd21.adf/Transcript.help.pp/Transcript.help

Text File | 1990-09-07 | 10KB | 206 lines

                             TRANSCRIPT HELP

Put together by PARASITE of LSD.


1. Introduction

Welcome to Transcript. Before diving into the program itself, it might
help if you understand a bit of the philosophy behind Transcript.
Transcript is designed as a high-performance alternative to other word
processors on the Amiga that are too slow for serious writing and editing
work. While it is completely suitable for quick letters, Transcript will
be greatly appreciated by professional writers, editors, and anyone else
whose work involves large documents. Text entry and editing operations
have been carefully chosen and implemented for efficiency and simplicity.
Document size is limited only by available memory, and there is no speed
penalty for large documents. Multiple windows can be used concurrently,
working as separate tasks in the Amiga's operating system. And above all,
Transcript is easy to use, so that you don't have to do a lot of
relearning if you come back to the program after a long absence.

The applications for Transcript are the same as those of a regular word
processor, but Transcript lends itself especially well to big jobs and
professional work where other programs would bog you down: writing a
novel, magazine publishing (several magazines use Transcript as their
in-house text editor), and as a preprocessor for desktop publishing and
other text-oriented programs. Finally, for the ultimate Amiga desktop
publishing system, Transcript and Professional Page are designed to work
together, giving you the benefits of efficient document creation and
editing, combined with professional quality typeset output.

NEW FEATURES

Transcript has some recently-added features that were not in the manual -
they are documented here. Please read the Transcript manual first, in
order to get the background that will help clarify these instructions.

MACROS

Macros let you define common operations or pieces of text and recall them
with a single key sequence. This is useful for an operation like
"italicize word" (delete word, paste word, italic text, clear highlight),
a piece of text like a Professional Page formatting code, or any sequence
of text and operations that you perform often. Up to ten different macros
can be defined at one time, and sets of macros can be saved to disk and
loaded at any time.
To define a macro, hold down SHIFT and CTRL and press a function key. All
the keystrokes and/or menu operations you enter from now on will be
stored into the macro for that function key. End the macro definition by
pressing the SHIFT-CTRL combination again (see the prompt displayed in
the title bar during macro definition).
To "replay" a macro, press CTRL and the function key. You can define up
to ten macros (one for each function key), each with up to 99 keystrokes
or operations. You can save or load macro definitions from the Project
menu. Other macros can be used within a macro definition.
Macros can "record" only those events taking place within a Transcript
editing window; operations done on requesters or control panels will be
ignored.

MOUSE-DRIVEN MACROS

You can automatically insert text or perform any operation allowed by a
macro at any place in your document by holding down the CTRL key when you
click the left mouse button. This will first position the cursor as
usual, then invoke the F9 Macro as if you had pressed CTRL-F9. If you
continue holding the CTRL key and click the mouse button again within two
seconds (moving the mouse to a new position first), the F10 macro will be
invoked at this new position. (If you wait more than two seconds, the F9
macro will be invoked again the next time you click.)
This feature is extremely useful for adding Professional Page formatting
codes to selected phrases or sections of text. For example, suppose your
document is in the `Times' typeface, but you wish to put selected words
or phrases in Helvetica. You could define macro F9 as the formatting
codes required to switch to Helvetica ( \ff<Helvetica> ), and macro F10
to switch back to Times ( \ff<Times> ). Now, to change a word in your
document to Helvetica, you just hold the CTRL key down and click the
mouse button at the beginning of the word, then at the end of the word.

TRUE TAB CHARACTER

Some word processor and other text programs put a special TAB character
in a document when you press the TAB key. Although Transcript doesn't use
actual TAB characters, if you absolutely need to get true tab characters
into a document, you can do so with CTRL-t (which shows up on the screen
as a reverse-field `t'). This character doesn't do anything special in
Transcript, but will be saved as a true tab (ascii 9). However, when it
is loaded back in, it will be expanded into spaces (Transcript's normal
way of handling tabs). The only way to preserve true tabs across a
save/load sequence is to select "Show P-Page Codes" (Special menu) before
saving, and "Hide P-Page Codes" after you load.

NEW FORMATTING CODES

(See the section on formatting codes in the manual.) Relative text margin
settings are now supported - use `+' or `-' before the margin value to
specify a relative adjustment to the current setting, e.g. lm+4 to indent
subsequent text by four spaces.
Paragraph indent: `pi+<n>' or `pi-<n>' indents or outdents the first line
of all paragraphs by the specified amount.
The `ep' (eject page) code has been extended to take an optional numeric
argument. If present, this specifies a minimum number of lines that must
be available for text on the current page. If less than this minimum are
available, the page is ejected and printing continues on the next page.
This allows you to `protect' sections of text in your document from being
split across a page boundary. Using `ep' without the numeric argument
causes a form-feed regardless of the current page position.
There is also new code, `nl'. This works similarly to `ep<n>', except
that `<n>' refers to a number of end-of-paragraphs, rather than just line
breaks. Typically, the code `nl1' might be used before a paragraph to
ensure that the whole paragraph will fit on the page. As another example,
You might have a paragraph with a heading above it that you want to keep
on the same page: assuming there is a blank line between the heading and
the paragraph, by specifying `nl3', you would make sure that the three
paragraphs - the heading, blank line, and following paragraph of text -
were not split up between pages.

CHANGES TO THE SPELLING CHECKER, TRANSSPELL

You can specify default user dictionaries and rejection dictionaries in
the command line or with TOOLTYPES in the icon. These dictionaries will
be automatically loaded when TransSpell is run. The tooltypes are as
follows (See the manual for more details on tooltypes):
   USERDICT=name1+name2...
   REJECT=name1+name2...

For example, putting the command `USERDICT=MyWords' in the icon's
tooltypes would cause TransSpell to load in the user dictionary called
`MyWords' from the same directory as the TransSpell program. You can
specify the entire `path name' for the dictionary if you wish. To load
more than one file, put a `+' between the file names. For CLI users, the
command line options are -u and -r, e.g. `run TransSpell -
uMywords+british.dict'.

An option now exists to keep the dictionary on disk instead of
automatically copying it to RAM on start-up; this saves about 170k, but
makes spelling checking slower. To specify this option, use
DICTIONARY=DISK in the TOOLTYPES of the icon, or `-d' in the command line
(`run TransSpell -d' from the CLI).

NOTE: Users with 512K Amigas must use this option in order to run
Transcript on a custom screen and TransSpell at the same time.

The manual gives the word "Amiga" as a good candidate for a user
dictionary entry. The word is now in TransSpell's internal dictionary, so
it will be recognized automatically. For an example of a word not in the
dictionary, try "Atari" instead.

THE FILE REQUESTER

".info" files do not show up in the file requester. This avoids confusion
when looking through a directory containing a large number of documents
with icons.

You can type the complete `path name' of a document, including the file
name, into the "Drawer" string gadget; the file name will be
automatically removed from the end of the path and put into the "file
name" string gadget.

SEARCH AND REPLACE

A search/replace operation can be aborted with the ESC key.

JOIN/SEPARATE LINES

The `Join single lines' and `Separate lines' features in the Special menu
can be restricted to a range of text: if the cursor is within the marked
range when you select one of these commands, only the marked text will be
converted. This is consistent with the way text styles and the convert to
upper/lower case commands work.

RUNNING FROM THE CLI

You don't need to use the RUN command to make Transcript `detach' from
the CLI: Just type `Transcript' (or `df1:Transcript' if the disk is in
drive 1) from the CLI and the program will run, leaving your CLI window
free to type new commands into.

INSTALLING ON A HARD DRIVE

To install Transcript on your hard drive, you need only copy the program
using the Workbench or CLI, as the manual instructs. If you wish to run
the spelling checker from the hard drive and have it load the dictionary
from the hard drive, you need to copy both the `TransSpell' program and
the dictionary file `pfsf6b90k'. You must then remove the Transcript
floppy disk from the drive and give the CLI command `Assign Transcript:
dh0:' (substitute the appropriate volume or directory name for `dh0:').

PERFORMANCE

On page 10 of the manual, the `TIP' box advises splitting up large
paragraphs in order to speed up Transcript's text operations.
Transcript's performance has since been increased to the point that this
is not necessary; text updating will always keep up with any typing
speed, even in very long paragraphs.

BOOTING FROM THE TRANSCRIPT DISK

The manual advises booting from your regular Workbench disk, then
inserting the Transcript disk and clicking the icon to run the program.
This is still the recommended method, but you may boot with the
Transcript disk if you wish (insert the disk when the Workbench prompt
appears on the screen). This may be more convenient for users with
single-drive systems.

End.