Welcome to Tex-Edit, my multi-window, styled text editor that fills the gap between Apple’s bare-bones TeachText and a full-featured word processor! Tex-Edit is small, fast, easy-to-use and requires little memory. Tex-Edit is ShareWare ($5).
With Tex-Edit you can:
• Quickly create, edit and print short (32000 character) styled text documents.
• View and print TeachText or SimpleText read-only (“ReadMe”) documents, including
pictures.
• View and print color PICT files, such as those produced by draw programs or
Apple’s built-in screen snapshot utility.
• Copy a selection from a PICT file, cropping the image for use in a word processor, etc.
• View, edit and print text documents created by virtually any word processor or computer.
• Reformat downloaded e-mail or text, correcting word-wrap problems and removing
extraneous, non-Mac characters.
• Prepare text for upload to a BBS, so that people with MS-DOS systems can view the
document as it was intended to be viewed.
• Instantly quote a brief passage from received e-mail, allowing the sender to remember
their original message.
• Add color to your America Online or eWorld e-mail.
• Read any text document aloud, if you have Apple’s Speech Manager extension. (Listen
to a TeachText read-only file, for example, as the text and pictures scroll by!)
• Quickly optimize a document for printing, substituting professional-looking typographical
characters for generic, typewriter-era characters.
• Create simple hypertext documents.
• Attach attention-getting sound annotations to spice up ordinary inter-office mail.
• And more…
Drag & Drop spoken here…
Do you appreciate the ease with which the Finder allows you to shuffle application, document and folder icons? Have you mastered the System 7 trick of dropping a document onto an application icon, forcing that application to open the document? Do you like being able to drag text selections around in Microsoft Word? How would you like to be able to select any data in any program window and move it to any other program window as easily as you drag old versions of Word to the trash? No cutting, no copying, no pasting, no program switching, no messing with data translations…
Apple’s wonderful new Drag Manager technology takes the popular Drag & Drop functionality of the Finder and extends it to its logical conclusion. Drag & Drop is more intuitive, easier to learn and much faster than the clipboard. The Drag Manager allows data streaming, delayed delivery of data, and simultaneous transfer of multiple items (each of which can have a different data type). The Drag Manager also integrates with Macintosh Easy Open, providing automatic data type translation. The new Finder can even keep track of separate “clipping” files, providing the functionality of a multi-layer clipboard.
Drag & Drop is easily demonstrated using Tex-Edit. First open or create a few short Tex-Edit documents and arrange the windows so they don’t totally hide one another. (See Figure 1.) Select (hilite) a word, then move the cursor over the selection. Notice how the I-beam turns into an arrow when over a selected block of text. This signifies that the selection is “draggable.” Now click and drag the selection. A gray outline of the selection will follow your cursor as it moves over the window. A blinking vertical “insertion marker” is visible at the tip of the arrow, indicating the target location. Release the button while still in the same window. Instantly, the original selection disappears and then reappears at its new location. Notice how inter-word spacing is preserved at the origin and destination sites (similar to “smart” cut and paste).
Figure 1. A “gray” selection outline follows the cursor. Note the flashing insertion point.
Since the dragged text is still selected, try dragging it to another Tex-Edit window. When the cursor enters the new window, notice how the text area of the window “lights up.” (See Figure 2.) This signifies that the window is capable of receiving all of the items being dragged. Release the mouse button. An exact copy of the text now appears in the new window at the point it was dropped. Although the recipient window does not become active (come to the front), you can still tell where the text went, because background text selections are outlined.
Figure 2. The destination window “lights up” if it can accept the dragged items.
As a matter of fact, you can now click on the outlined text in the inactive window and drag it to one of the other windows, copying the selection without having to activate either window! (Try it.) Now go back to the front-most (active) window and drag the text selection within the same window while holding down the option key. Notice that this results in a copy operation instead of a move (just like in the Finder). Drag the text selection to the top or bottom of the active window and notice that it will “auto-scroll” to reveal the rest of the document.
The real fun starts for System 7.5 (and System 7 Pro) users when the text selection is dragged to the desktop. A text “clipping” will appear at the drop point. (See Figure 3.) Double click the clipping file to see its contents. Drag it back into any drag-savvy application window when you wish to use it. You can even drag multiple clippings simultaneously. (They are inserted into the text in the order in which they were selected in the Finder.) I keep a “return address” clipping on the desktop and drag it to the top of all my correspondence. It’s much faster than the scrapbook!
Figure 3. Drag a selection to the desktop to create a “clipping” file for later use.
Now sit back and experiment to your heart’s content. Try to figure out how and why windows become active during all this moving and copying. (It really is quite logical.) Try dragging a selection onto the menubar. If you happen to drop data on an area that cannot accept that particular data, notice how it “zooms” back to its starting point. Try clicking in the middle of a selection. Guess what happens when you drag a selection onto the Trash.
Drag & Drop is a wonderful new technology that Apple has seamlessly integrated into System 7.5. It is also available to the users of 7.0, 7.1, 7.1.1 (Pro) and 7.1.2 through the magic of the Macintosh Drag and Drop extension file. System 7.1.1 and 7.1.2 users can use the Clipping extension to allow the Finder to create clipping files. Inter-application dragging on System 7.1 requires an additional extension (the Dragging Enabler file).
Unfortunately, implementing Drag & Drop is not as easy as it might seem. So far there are not many programs which can use the Drag Manager. (Finder and SimpleText are two.) Undoubtedly, more and more applications will become Drag Manager-aware as Mac users discover the power of this new technology and demand its addition to their favorite programs. Developers who insist on ignoring advanced features of the Mac operating system in an effort to maintain “cross-platform uniformity” are not deserving of our support…
MS-DOS versus the Mac…
You may have noticed that your e-mail sometimes has funny little boxes at the beginning of each line. This problem arises because MS-DOS and the Mac have different opinions about line endings.
MS-DOS editors commonly use a character-based line width. When the cursor gets to the last (usually 80th) character position, the editor obligingly backs up to the beginning of the word being typed, inserts a CR (carriage return) and LF (linefeed character) and then carries the unfinished word down to the next line. This prevents lines from extending past the right margin and also prevents words from being split between lines. In a similar manner, most generic BBSs terminate each line with a single CR.
In the Mac world, text editors dynamically “word-wrap” at the right margin and do not insert any special characters until the end of the paragraph, at which point they insert a single carriage return. (See Figure 4.) When viewing a non-Mac file, therefore, the Mac user may note that each line is preceded by an empty box (signifying the terminating LF character from the preceding line). In a large window, the text may not extend to the right margin, and in a small window, there is usually an odd mixture of alternating short and long lines. The Mac thinks each line is a separate paragraph!
Figure 4. This looks like a job for the “Strip CR/LF” command (in the Modify dialog)!
You may have also noticed strange squiggles and misspelled words scattered throughout your downloaded text. (See Figure 5.) This is because the Mac and MS-DOS have different ideas about the use of the “upper” ASCII range. (ASCII is a standard convention used to define how all computers store alphanumeric characters.)
Unfortunately, the ASCII convention only specifies values for the first 128 (out of 256) characters. The Mac uses the remaining upper range of characters to hold diacritical markings, foreign characters, typographical (curly) quotes and a host of other goodies not found on a standard typewriter. As you might guess, MS-DOS uses this upper 128 characters for a completely different set of characters.
Figure 5. Notice what happens to curly quotes, em dashes, ligatures, ellipses, etc.
Luckily for you, Tex-Edit can easily handle all of these problems using the Modify dialog (see the Tex-Edit Reference document).
Tex-Edit versus other Editors…
You will discover that Tex-Edit documents lose all their style attributes when opened by other word processors (and visa versa). This is because most word processors use their own private method for storing character styles (font, size, color, etc.)
Tex-Edit can swap styled documents with America Online, eWorld, Joliwrite, SimpleText and Stylus, since they all store style information in the same way. You have to rely on the clipboard (or Drag & Drop) to swap styled text with most other word processors. Curiously, at least one expensive word processor does not support Apple’s standard clipboard format for styled text. Go figure…
Miscellaneous helpful hints…
• To edit the text in a TeachText read-only (ttro) document, open a new blank window
and use the Insert command—or simply select and copy the entire document. (This
tip also applies to SimpleText and Tex-Edit read-only documents.)
• Open any file by dragging it onto Tex-Edit or its alias (System 7).
• To move a styled Tex-Edit document into another word processor without losing
style information, use the clipboard to copy and paste the entire document.
• Triple click to select a sentence.
• Quadruple click to select a paragraph.
• Option-click on a close box to close all windows.
• To delete all occurrences of a string, use the Find/Replace dialog. Just leave
the replace field blank and choose Replace All.
• Count the number of occurrences of any given string using the Find/Replace
dialog. Choose Replace All, note the number of replacements, then choose Undo.
• To see non-printing characters (tabs, CRs, etc.), use an ASCII font (available on
most BBSs).
• Tex-Edit’s PICT handling abilities are handy when it comes to cropping screen
shots (Command-shift-3) for use in other programs (e.g. Word). Just
click-and-drag a selection marquee and choose Copy.
• If you run out of memory during a PICT copy operation, try keeping the entire
selection marquee visible.
• If you run out of text space, break your document into “chapters” and use
Tex-Edit’s convenient Windows menu along with its ability to hyperlink between
documents (Open Selection).
• When you wish to read a large (>32K) file, consider using the Etext option in the
“too big to fit” dialog box. When you are finished, simply option-close the top window
and all the windows will close without the “Save Changes?” dialogs.
• A TeachText read-only document can be read aloud (if speech is turned on) by
choosing one of the Read… commands in the Sound menu.
• A document can be read in the background if Auto-Highlighting is off. You may
use all of Tex-Edit’s normal editing functions during the reading session.
• If you wish to create longer sounds, simply increase Tex-Edit’s memory
allocation (in the Finder’s Get Info dialog).
• To create an emphasized, indented, centered block of text (such as used to quote
brief poetic passages in a larger document), use the Block Format command with
the Block header (Preferences dialog) set to all spaces.
Etc…
If you have questions, suggestions or bug reports, please contact me. You can reach me via modem:
America Online: TomBB
eWorld: TomBB
Internet: tombb@aol.com
Or, if you prefer, you can contact me via regular mail:
