How to get eWriter ready: When I sit down at my eWriter, it’s as if I settled into two comfortable chairs, one with my physical being and one, I guess, with my cyber-being. This is the result of dense familiarity and a fat ewriter.ini file. The nature of the content of that .ini file counters any idea of “quick fattening” (let alone any pre-fattening). But here’s a few bits of guidance in getting things in place and ready to go.

The Top Tool:
     The multiple reading (pun?) on “top” is very much intended. It’s the first tool on the Tools menu and it’s the boss tool. Most of the other tools on the menu and many scattered tools or toolettes on other menus want a path\filename or url from you. The Pathfinder tool is an open dialog re-built to be a browse tool that will let you find the path to a file and, then, by clicking Open, put that path and file onto the Clipboard for dropping into any input box or text.

EWriter, remember, is a “duplex” etextwriter or ewriter with multiple wysiwygs. Tools/Browsers furnish the wysiwyg views. Use Pathfinder to track down your browserS and drop them into Browsers. Many other input boxes will ask for files with paths and, then, also use browser selections. So this is a good box to fill first. In any case, though, Pathfinder should get a workout in making your fat ewriter.ini. It’s truly a “top” tool.

Building a Help system:
     Prior to 0.Ca, I hardwired in ewriter.hlp, a WinHelp file, and eManual, an htm frameset file with a number of .htm files to go in the main viewer frame. The hard-wire worked for eManual, because all the htm files were simply dumped into the directory a user created for eWriter. Nothing needed doing beyond unzipping ewriter.zip, using eWriter and fattening up the ewriter.ini file.

With 0.Ca, there were two collections of .htm files with frameset ebooks to organize them. One is eManual with it's “concept papers.” The second is eWriter’s eHelp. This was an online draft of what I intended to put into an MS HTMLHelp chm file to be shown in a MS HTMLHelp reader. However, for users with Windows 95, I might have had to distribute (and help setup) some libraries from Internet Explorer and the wrapper, hh.exe, that uses those libraries. So, my ehelp.htm will remain a perpetual “draft.” The name HTMLHelp (or HTML Help) is a pointer to yesteryear’s paradigm, anyway. One more e- word. But, it's not HTML Help, but help with all the text and etext writing tools. It's “e-help” because it’s in htm files.

With 0.Cd, eManual (a collaction of concept papers) is dropped. As it stands, the top of the Help menu will look like this:

How to get eWriter ready
eWriter’s eHelp reference
An early WinHelp reference
Special Operations
Known Problems

Ewriter.zip will contain fewer files than in 0.C, but one of these will be a zip file, ehelp.zip. Preparing the help system begins with creating a sub-directory in eWriter’s directory named ehelp. Unzip ehelp.zip in its directory.

You can put it anywhere you want, or you can use the eHelp that is online, even if it changes its url. I am not using hard-wiring. I use an input box into which you can put a pathname or url to be handed to the browser.

I usually put in a default to show up before you put in what you want and save settings on close. In this instance, I will not supply a default. If you put in one of the entries below, or another, and save settings on close, this will become your default.

c:\ewriter\ehelp\ehelp.htm
http://home.earthlink.net/~acorioso/ehelp.htm

eReference Shelf:
     This is located on the Help menu. Its file is ew_ref.htm in the eWriter directory. Click on it so you will have it in a browser to look at. Then, bring the file into eWriter. Even if you are tip-toeing in html writing, you can begin to experiment with putting references you will use on your reference shelf. Categories, buttons (internal links), listings. They are all modeled. This won’t fatten your ini file, but it’ll add to the “comfortable chair” feeling.

Direct Open files:
     On the File menu, you can put in five files that you’d like to have immediately at hand. When you bring in one of these files it does not go on the Recently Opened list to drive other files off the bottom. These are files you frequently want but apart from the project of the moment.

Boilerplates:
     All that “batch” typing on the menus and one place in which you can begin putting your personal stamp on it. You must have a few lines you know you will type many times to use to start a set of (eight) one line (of any length) boilerplates. Even if only the parts of a signature block (though blocks are better in super-boilerplates), you can put these into boilerplates and start a set. When you have a set of even random ones, you can export it, get a bplates.set file going, and, then, over time, work up a collection of good tight sets. The current set is kept in ewriter.ini, so this helps with the fattening.

And beyond boilerplates...

Helpful sites and files:
     Back to the Help menu and three lists kept in ewriter.ini:

Helpful Websites Links
Helpful WinHelp Files
Helpful HTMLHelp files

To be continued...