Add your own special operations. Pull speclops.htm into an editor, put in a line (Ctrl+NumPad#4), and type in how you do a complex task involving interior and exterior setup. Put in another line at the end. If you get a number of these, you might want to put in headings. you might even put in anchors and a jump table at the top. Be sure to copy in the form frame with the Return to Top button that you see just below this note.
In 0.Ci, eWriter brings back Notepad's word-wrap at the right edge of the sized window. This is needed to comfortably read and work on files made for "pouring" into forms, mail composers and other programs which may respond to mid-paragraph #13#10-line-breaks.
Six months or more earlier, I put on the Text menu an item for pulling n lines up into 1 line to produce such one line paragraphs after working comfortably with column-wrap. But to read a file, you'd have to set Word-wrap, turn it on, and then chop up those one line paragraphs by deleting and re-inserting a space in the long trailing line.
In 0.Ci, all you have to do to read the file is go to the Text menu (where you set all Word-wrap conditions) and click on "Window Edge" Wrap. The menu item is then checked and you click it again to turn off WE-wrap. You can read those one line paragraphs. You can work on them, remembering only that some of your batch-typing using menu items will insert #13#10-line-breaks you will want to backspace over.
One big extra rule in 0.Ci: In 0.Cj, this will be taken care of for you. When you switch windows, turn off "Window Edge" Wrap before switching. You can leave it on when closing eWriter and Saving Settings because it won't be saved as a setting, but I did not cover closing, or switching from, the window. In each window in which you want to use it, turn it on and then off on exit.
EWriter's Word-wrap is in its own code; "Window Edge" Wrap is in Windows' innards. Leaving that setting in the innards causes some strange things to happen. In 0.Cj, WE-wrap is turned off when you leave the writing window, though you still might want to turn it off to build discipline into your natural rhythms -- as a writer.
When you turn on WE-wrap, regular Word-wrap is turned off throughout the system. If you go to a window in which you were using it, turn it back on and it will be on throughout the system. Word-wrap is saved as a setting when you Save Settings. WE-wrap is not. Trying to integrate WE-wrap, mainly a reading devise, safely with the system Word-wrap would be a great deal of trouble, and resulting confusion, for no apparent gain. Its use is best confined to one window while you work in that window.
The Next and Prev commands in the system menus of child windows in the Windows Multiple Document Interface applications are pretty useless. Next skims through the z-order stack by sending the front window to the back. Prev brings the bottom window to the top. Once the load order has been shuffled, these bring up random windows. In eWriter, starting with 0.9x, Next, ^F6, brings up the window immediately under the top one. If you have a number of windows open but want to jump back and forth between two, bring them to the top and then use ^F6 to move back and forth. When you use ^F6 (or Next on an editors system menu) the two files involved are remembered for the rest of the session. If you go to another window or open a window, but would like to return to alternating between those two, use Shift+^F6. It will bring those two to the top and you can use ^F6 to switch back and forth between them. If you close one of those windows and reopen it with a new window number, it will still come up in its proper position. Shift+^F6, which was Prev, becomes useful if you have opened another file or moved to a window other than the two you were switching between but would like to continue the switching you were doing.
eWriter began as my 21st century etypewriter. My horizon stretched out just past the neighborhood pizza palace. It's plain text for writing email content. Plain text means 7-bit characters (the 0 to 127 byte values). That's why tagging methods like RTF and HTML exist. Attachments go through a MIME coding-decoding pair of processes to get the text into plain text form. And I guess modern mailers run their own text through the process to catch 8-bit chars.
If you just open an editor in eWriter and start typing, you will find that the chars 128 through 254 do not seem to work. Actually, you can make them work either of two ways. Look on the Edit menu. There are two items:
Enable high one-byte chars as text
Enable high one-byte chars as HTML/XML codes
You can check only one of these, and while it is checked the 8-bit ANSI characters will go into your text as the characters you expect to see or as HTML/XML "escape" codes for showing the characters in a browser viewed text.
From my early days of protecting the American English writer from his or her special case typing in a plain text setting, I did not keep those two settings across sessions in ewriter.ini. This means that to type Spanish or German you must pull down the Edit menu and click the pertinent item each time you open eWriter. Of course, you may be moving back and forth during the session, anyway.
A friend who uses a Spanish keyboard alerted me to a problem that is probably common to all European keyboards. Shift+TopNumKey 1..8 will get different symbols than my keyboard will. In fact, the UK English keyboard might, since currency symbols at least should be different.
Carlos told me that the right-hand Alt key is labeled AltGr and in eWriter he got some unexpected results when using AltGr+3 to get a #. What he got, instead, was the SuperBoilerplates dialog, with the 3rd scratch pad in the viewer.
Ive no idea what the Gr stands for. But I do know that pressing that key gets Ctrl+Alt+ and, with a number 1..8, gets the appropriate superBoilerplate in a viewer with a button for typing it into the active editor at the cursor.
How do you, then, get those symbols? Im afraid you will have to use the Alt+0+NumPadNumber. And to do that, you will have to have checked the item on the Edit menu (in the session) for Enabling one byte chars as text. This overcomes eWriters imposition of plain text (7-bit numbers). Of course, if you are typing html'd text, you can enable those 8-bit chars as escapes rather than text. That will happen as you type those chars, too. Given an English keyboard, you must do one of these checks to enable the Alt+0+NumPadNumber.
To look up numbers, use Esc Keys/Escape Codes Pick List/Overview.
Im not sure what I mean by special operations, but I know what my first topic will be. It has to do with the emailing of what Ive referred to as an eletter. My first thought about eWriter, and the 16 bit Pocketpad I did earlier, was as everyones etypewriter. The paper would roll into a text editor and roll out of a web browser. Both were free and ubiquitous. The two were connected by the cyberspace wormhole of email with its seven-bit plain text.
The single drawback, was the HTML tag as the writers punctuation marks. The simplest is three characters. And in the simplest cases two are required. Obviously, the etypewriter for the 21st century would have to have some souped up keys. The result is eWriter as you see it.
The special operation I have in mind has to do with the new mailers which are also using HTML as a way of exporting text when sending it. If you do not have one of those mailers to export and received HTML tagged messages, you see the text message and then below it the HTML tagged version of the message. One of these mailers will not read my tags in an eletter and will, as I intend, present the eletter as plain text. The recipient selects everything between <HTML> and </HTML>, moves it to a text editor, and saves it into an .htm or .html file. The recipient reads the manuscript in the mailer or text editor and the typeset or word processor copy in a browser, from which a paper copy may be printed.
The problem comes when these new mailers are used both to send and receive an eletter. The solution lies with the sender. The problem is that the HTML tagged version of the sent message puts its tags around all those tags in the text. I understand, from a new friend who has tried sending eletters to his friends, that what is read by his friends mailers is ...confused.
To send eletters, or anything you dont want to arrive in a (usually pointless) HTML wrapper, you have to turn off your mailer's HTML export. Ive installed Outlook Express in order to see how this is done. I assume other mailers will have pretty much the same Options setup.
On the Menu: Tools/Options... Send (Tab). Check Plain Text. OK the dialog. To make your mailers Compose editor look and feel like a text editor, not a word processor, click on the read tab and make your Proportional Font, like the non-Proportional font, Courier or Courier New. You may already have seen my suggestions for eletters.
To make them easy to read as text in the mailer, I usually tab in eight spaces to write text. I use Shift+Enter to hold that indent in subsequent lines as I type paragraphs. This way, I can put <P> and other non-inline tags in a gutter and, by using white space, make the text paragraphs very easy to read as plain text.
Then, a first book on xhtml appeared. Two things stood out. Tags should be lower case, but Id already done that not too long after introducing the well-formed tags. I even have an item on the Text menu to convert non-quoted text inside tags to lower case. (Dont do that if Javascript functions are called and keep a backup.)
The other thing was a work-around for that <br/> tag. I could get rid of my </br> appendage by putting a space in front of that slash, <br />.
Keep in mind that if you use Ctrl+NumPad-#1 to put in links the way to make a normal html link is, when asked for the element name, give the lower case-a (a) as the name. Then, just do what you always do. The image link on Ctrl+NumPad-#2 isn't changed, though it prints out differently.
Look over the Tagset menu. Even if you are doing just plain old, but not too old, html, you will want to build, export, and import tag sets. What I have on the menus is pretty basic. On the Javascript menu, I have a (borrowed from Richard Wagners Javascript Unleashed routine for creating arrays that JS 1.0 can handled. And I do not have all the tags you will want to use regularly. You can build up tagsets of fifteen tags each and swap them in and out. You can have three or four that differ in olny an included attribute allowing different values with a pair of clicks or keystrokes.