by
George MacDonald
The thirty-third in the "Golden Gale" series of electronic texts.
Contents
scrolling
2.4 Bookmarks:
Modifying them:
MS-DOS Shell
Other MS Windows Problems
Grey-scale Displays
a) If you press the F ("find") key, a wide panel will appear. Key
in a word which you wish to find. Then if you want to search
for the word starting from the beginning of the book, press
Enter or Return. If you want to search for the word starting
after your currently displayed position in the book, press the
Down Arrow key.
One of two things will then happen:
EITHER the first occurrence of the word will be found, and the
passage will be displayed
OR a message will appear, saying that the word cannot be found.
b) If you subsequently press the A ("again") key, the next
occurrence of the word in the book will be found, and that
a
a
e
i
i
"
e
"
"
`
132
145
137
139
141
e) When the Find panel first appears, anything which you typed
in last time will usually be displayed. If, at this point,
the first thing you type is a letter of some kind, the old
entry will disappear and the new letter will appear at the
left of the field. If the first thing you type is a Left or
Right arrow key, or End, or Home, the old entry will not
disappear. Note that this version of the program does not
handle "wild cards" or more than one word; future versions
may do so.
2.4 Using Bookmarks
You may display the text at any bookmark as follows: First press
the key with the | character marked on it. You may also press the
B ("bookmark") key, and then G ("go to"), but the first way is
faster. A list of all the currently defined bookmarks will appear
(or the first twenty, if there are more than twenty). Use the Up
or Down arrow keys to move to a bookmark you want. Then press
Enter or Return. The text at the point where the bookmark was set
will appear on the screen. (Press the Escape key instead of
Enter if you decide that after all you do not want to go to
any bookmark.)
Another method of displaying the text at a bookmark is to start
from the "Go To" menu as described in section 2.1 above. This menu
is displayed when you press the left or right arrow keys. Move the
highlight to the item "A Bookmark" and press Enter or Return. A
list of all the currently defined bookmarks will appear, and you
may choose from them as described above.
2.4.4 Quick Toggling to and from a Bookmark
A third panel will appear, asking you to choose your printer port.
You can use the left and right arrow keys to rotate between PRN,
LPT1, LPT2, LPT3, and LPT4. When you have chosen the printer port,
press Enter or Return. (If you are uncertain about which port to
choose, try LPT1 first, PRN second, and then LPT2.)
If your printer is switched on and "on line", printing will now
begin. You will not be able to enter any more keyboard commands
until printing has finished.
If printing cannot take place, either because your printer is
off line, or because it is not switched on, or because it is
connected to a port other than the one you have selected, or
because it has run out of paper, a message will appear to that
effect. Here you may elect to press Enter or Return to try
again (after having adjusted the printer), or you may press
Escape to give up trying to print.
Most printers will give you some choice of fonts, point sizes,
line spacing, letter quality, and the like; it should also be
a simple matter to set the page length and inter-page gap. If
you want to do your own text formatting, you will have to copy
the text to a disk file (as described below) and then use a
formatting program such as PageMaker, Wordperfect, and so on.
Note that double quotation marks, and dashes, will be printed
in a form more simple than that in which they are displayed on
the screen. Italics will not be present. Greek letters will not
be printed.
In the freely distributed version of this program, the maximum
number of pages which you may print or copy is three. A version
without that restriction is available from the publishers; with
that you may, if you are so minded, print or copy the entire book
in one go.
2.6 Copying Sections of Text to a Disk File
In addition to the keys described in section 2.3, you may use the
Dot (Full Stop or Period) key to take you to the next field.
After you have keyed in the file name, and pressed the Enter or
Return key, the program will check whether the file you chose
already exists. If so, you will be given a choice between
1) overwriting the existing file, 2) appending the text to the
end of the existing file, or 3) writing to a new file with a
different name (which you should type in over the name you just
tried). In the second case, where you elect to append the text
to an existing file, a short horizontal line, towards the left,
will be written to the file, so as to divide the earlier
section of text from the newly-written section.
2.7 Changing the Display Margins
Many other programs use a simpler character set, designed for more
primitive computers.
Therefore, if you are about to copy a section of the displayed
text to a "clipboard", you should press the " key first. This
changes all double quotation marks to the character " , and it
causes all dashes to become slightly longer.
Next, do the copy of the text to the "clipboard". After that, you
may press the " key a second time, causing the normal characters
to reappear.
The adjustments described here are also automatically made when
printing text or copying it to a disk file. They are useful
too when running the program in a "windowed DOS" OS/2 or
Windows session.
2.11 Displaying the Author's Photograph
c) If you really like the text colour you have used, you may
retain that colour in DOS by choosing the third option from
the panel which appears when you press the Q or E keys.
This will save your configuration and return you to the
operating system, just as if you had pressed the E ("exit")
key, except that the DOS text colour and background will
remain those you chose while viewing the book.
d) The Escape key is normally used to remove a panel if you decide
that you do not want to perform the panel function. If you
press the Escape key when you are in smooth scrolling mode,
the program will revert to non-scrolled (manual) mode. If you
press the Escape key when you are in manual mode and no panel
is displayed, it will have the same effect as the Q ("quit")
key.
2.14 Using the F1 key to display a "help" screen
The text will reappear when you press one of the cursor keys,
but the best solution, for the time being, is to be in
non-scrolling mode before switching sessions.
b) When running on some portable computers, the fonts are the
wrong size, or smooth scrolling is jerky. This can usually
be corrected by a changing a configuration option on the
portable computer. For example, with Compaq portables, you
can obtain a setup menu by pressing F10 while the computer
is booting. Select "Video", then set "Internal Display
Features" to "Disabled". This will improve the smooth
scrolling, but it will still not be as clear as a normal
VGA, because of the inherently slow screen update speed
of most portables.
c) When running under Microsoft Windows, in a "full-screen DOS
session", the top three smooth scrolling rates may be far
too rapid. This is caused by one of your PIF file settings.
Use the PIF editor to open your PIF file. On the "Advanced
Settings" screen, under Display Options - Monitor Ports,
find the "Text" box. Make sure the box is unchecked, and
that should cure the scrolling problem.
d) The same problem with the top three scrolling rates will
occur when running in a full-screen DOS session under OS/2.