BBS in a Box 1/BBS in a box - Trilogy I.iso/Files/Publish/U-Z/WordLess ƒ/WordLess Plus - Read Me

Text File | 1992-09-29 | 14.2 KB | 316 lines | [TEXT/Rich]

RELEASE NOTES FOR WORDLESS PLUS


Dedicated to Shane Stanley (CIS 100033,317), who needs it worse than
any of us...



This is a utility that does a reasonably smart job of doing 'one dumb
job'.

WordLess Plus is SYSTEM 7 ONLY. Its only interface is Drag and Drop,
so you cannot use it with earlier Systems. If you double-click on it
from a System 6 machine, you will get an error message and the
software will quit gracefully.

To use WordLess Plus _with_ System 7, simply select the files you
want to filter and drag them on the program's icon or an alias of it.
New files will be created, and your original source files will remain
unaltered.



What is it...?

WordLess Plus is a further development on the gross concept of the
original WordLess (WordLess Classic?), stored on CompuServe (GO
DTPFORUM, Library 5, DOW WDLESS.CPT). WordLess Plus not only extracts
the text from MicroSoft Word 4.0/5.0 files, it also converts a
significant amount of the paragraph and character styling to their
Quark XPress Tags equivalents. Most significantly, XPress Tags typed
into the Word file are retained. In this way, you can code for
effects that Word cannot achieve _while_ drafting your copy.

IMPORTANT: WordLess Plus will refuse entirely to read Fast Saved
files. The functions of both WordLess and WordLess Plus will be
implemented in Mark My Words, which _will_ process Fast Saved files.
But, until the release of that product, you should retain your copy
of WordLess. There may be occasions when you want _only_ the text, or
when WordLess Plus will not read the file (because it is Fast Saved
or corrupted). In those events, you will need to use WordLess.

WordLess Plus refuses to read Fast Saved files for these reasons: 1.
Presumably, WordLess Plus is being used on live work, where
concordance to the text is not optional. 2. The deltas in a Fast
Saved file can contain styling exceptions that will disrupt the
toggling sequence in the non-Fast Saved parts of the file.
Consequently, WordLess Plus will fail gracefully to parse a Fast
Saved file, and it will thoughtfully remove all evidences of its
failed attempt. If you need to process a Fast Saved file, you can:

1. Use WordLess (Classic), understanding that the deltas will be
omitted.

2. Open the file from Word and do a Save As with the Fast Save option
unchecked, then run WordLess Plus.

3. Import the file into Quark and Save Text as XPress Tags.

There are a certain few other occasions where WordLess Plus will fail
(ever gracefully) to process a file. For example, files produced by
versions of Word earlier than 4.0 are politely refused. And: files
that are excessively complicated are deflected. In the former event,
open the file from Word and Save As in a version less historic. In
the latter case, chop the file up into smaller chunks and feed them
to WordLess Plus in a batch. For reference: a file will be refused on
the grounds of complexity if it entails more than 1024 character
styling or 1024 paragraph styling changes. This is not a problem with
actual Word files, but it _has_ proved to be achievable by saving
large links as Word files from Quark (incidentally, and semi-cool,
Quark saves the PICT previews of inline pictures in Word files).

ALSO IMPORTANT: What WordLess Plus really produces is Torquemada/XP8
food. It yields _approximately_ the same results as doing the
procedure for Word recommended in the XP8 manual (Get Text into a
dummy Quark document, Select All, change to Normal, change to one
font family, change size and lead to one value, set all fields in the
Formats dialog box to one value, delete all tabs, Save Text as XPress
Tags). But: there are some differences. For a major thing, we are
retaining some information that would be omitted by this procedure,
about which more below. And: we are not doing exactly the same things
that Quark would do. For example, where Quark shows "<U>" for all
types of Word underlines, we are showing "<U>" only for the true
underline, while the other types are shown as "<W>". This is done for
reasons of uniqueness. Neither Quark nor I can help you fake a dotted
underline, but maybe Torquemada can. The unique code makes it
possible for him to try, in any case.



Paragraph styling...

This is easy: the only paragraph styling we are doing is retaining
the true name of the style used in the Word document. Mark My Words
will (optionally) retain the full style definition and any local
variations. WordLess Plus does none of this. A WordLess Plus file
will retain the name of the style, but it will be up to you to write
the ultimate style definition in your Quark document. For the most
part, this is an unmitigated feature, but there is one area of
caution: Shane tells me that he sometimes removes a paragraph's first
line indent from the ruler, rather than with an explicit, named
style. In that event, the variation will not be recorded in the
WordLess file. Unless you are using Word as a full-blown front-end to
Quark, as against using it as a text editor or as an affliction
inflicted upon you by customers, this should not be a problem.



Character styling...

This is where WordLess Plus shines. We are retaining virtually every
Word character style that can be reproduced in XPress Tags, and we
are striving, as above, to do something intelligent about many that
cannot. Specifically, a WordLess Plus file will properly handle these
common XPress Tags:

<B>, <I>, </>, <O>, <S>, <H>, <K>, <U>, <W>

In addition, it will reflect midline font, size and alignment
changes. In the case of fonts, a word needs to be said. We are not
parsing the table of font names stored in Word 5.0 files. Instead,
we're doing pretty much what Word 4.0 does, assigning the name that
belongs to the font I.D. on the _local_ system (which may be a
different name than that used for that I.D. on the system of origin).
If we can't find a name (no font with that I.D. is currently loaded),
we are showing the number itself. In this way, you are assured of
getting a _unique_ font name, even if it is not the _correct_ font
name. You can either Torque for bad names or just use Font Usage from
within Quark.

WordLess Plus will convert Word's colors into their appropriate
XPress Tags form, and text styled in Word as "Hidden" will be
shown as Shade 0 ("<s0>").

Included with this archive is a file called "TheDemoThing" that, by
means of incorporating bits and pieces of files Shane and I used for
testing, gives a fair demonstration of the WordLess Plus feature set.



Character conversion...

And: WordLess Plus does a thorough job of converting Word's special
characters. In unambiguous cases, the appropriate XPress Tags coding
is produced. In situations less clear, WordLess Plus plugs an
imperative little note into the text (e.g., "[PICTURE!!]" represents
an embedded picture).

In the neighborhood: WordLess Plus sequentially numbers footnote
calls and footnotes flagged by Word's numbered footnote character.
The text of the footnotes appears at the end of the file and is
tagged with Word's hard-coded "Footnote" style.

Finally, WordLess Plus converts any control character it can't puzzle
out the meaning of in the format used by Torquemada (e.g., ASCII 14
becomes "<\#014>). This is done to make the characters conveniently
searchable.



Some tips...

I'm not prepared fully to commit to this position, but it seems
likely that Word plus WordLess Plus will make a better front end to
Quark than anything we now have available. In the long run, I intend
to make something better, but this will do for now. The advantages
are these: You can draft as Styled Text, using the familiar Keyboard
Equivalents, as opposed to typing verbose and obscure XPress Tags.
Moreover, the people who type for you can give you what you need
without your having to teach them very much. The resultant files can
be run through WordLess Plus, Torquemada, and XP8 And then, if you
want, you can open them _again_ from Word, do the edits as Style
Text, run through WordLess Plus again, etc. You can work with Tags
without having to type (and _check!_) each and every one.

If you are lucky enough to have people typing for you who do what you
say, you can introduce their files to Torquemada and have a great
deal of the up-front labor of your jobs done for free. For example,
if some words of a paragraph need to swap out to a PMS color, you can
have the keyboarder style that text as "Blue", then search in
Torquemada, replacing "Blue" with the true name of the color. Or you
can use XP8's mnemonics or a code of your own devising to flag
special situations and dingbat characters, then use XP8 or Torquemada
to plug in the true XPress Tags coding.

Every WordLess Plus file begins with the XPress Tags version tag
("<v1.50><e0>"). This is included because WordLess Plus makes use of
the Baseline Shift tag ("<bXX>"), and Quark varies its interpretation
of that tag based on the presence or absence of the version tag.
Without it, the file is interpreted as being a Quark 3.0 file, and
the effect of the Baseline Shift is inverted (viz., positive values
shift down instead of up, replicating a bug in the XPress Tags filter
that shipped with Quark 3.0). If you are still running XPress 3.0
(why?), you will need to do two things: lose the version tag and
invert the signs of all baseline shifts. These Torquemada strings
should serve to do both:

<v^?^p        {nothing}        Omit the version tag
-b^#        |b^#            Mark the negative values
b^#            -b^#            Invert the positive values
|-            {nothing}        Remove the marks

In the same neighborhood: the second half of the version tag
("<e0>") is a language identifier. If you are working with a
non-English version of Quark, you may need to change this to the code
shown when you Save Text as XPress Tags from within Quark.

And one more: as a default, we are showing Word's numbered footnotes
in Quark's Superior style. Alas, there is no clear-cut way of dealing
with footnotes flagged manually with user-supplied text. These are
being shown the way that Word is storing them. In "TheDemoThing",
they're coming across as "<z9.0b3.0>". If you have footnotes of both
types in the same file, you'll need to search to bring them into
concordance.

Eminently useful: Word 5.0 does an excellent job of filtering a
number of alien file formats. It sees all its own historical
versions, of course, plus all of the many version of DOS Word. But it
also does a great job with, e.g., WordPerfect for Mac and DOS. The
best thing to do with an alien file is to get it into Word in some
way, preferably from Word 5.0, from MacLink or Software Bridge
otherwise. Then Save As a Word 5.0 file and run the resultant file
through WordLess Plus. This is the most efficient means you have of
retaining the maximum amount of supplied paragraph and character
formatting.



The usual legal mumbo-jumbo...

WordLess Plus, its source and executable code, and this poor excuse
for a manual are Copyright (C) 1992 by Greg Swann. All rights are
most emphatically reserved. Greg Swann is a Macintosh software
developer specializing in Desktop Publishing applications. He can be
reached via CompuServe at 70640,1574 or by USPS at:

        P.O. Box 1724
        Andover, MA 01810

WordLess Plus is freeware and may be distributed freely so long as
the complete, original archive is transmitted.

WordLess Plus is delivered "as is", without any warranties, expressed
or implied. It is not warranted to be useful _to_ anyone, _for_
anything, and in no wise am I to be held responsible for any
unfortunate consequences resulting from its use or misuse. And I
_hate_ having to say things like that. I do my best to write useful,
simple, elegant, bug-free solutions to difficult problems. In this
case, I am giving of my labor at no charge at all. If you take it
into your head that I represent your big chance to 'strike it rich,'
you will pay a lot in legal fees to discover that you have
miscalculated. It's sad and sick and stupid that we live in a world
of bloodsuckers, but I _promise_ I will not be leech lunch. So there!

And: to those to whom the above disclaimer does not apply: forgive me
for having to make it. It's _you_ whom I'm working for, for pay or
for free. I appreciate your custom and your support, and I wish we
all could just comb the others out of our hair...



Final thoughts...

As I've said many times, in many sets of release notes, without Shane
Stanley my stuff wouldn't be half as cool. Together, we run a global
software-testing relay, passing Sol as our torch. He spells me when I'm
weary, sees what I miss, and keeps me honest and on track. I'm proud
to dedicate this to him, not alone because he's been more than
usually instrumental in pushing it along. This does about 80% of what
he needs and about 80% of what I need. Our needs are not coincident,
but Mark My Words will satisfy both of our aims (and then some!). In
the meantime, this will do a serviceable job, and perhaps it will
flag a few of the landmines that lay in wait for Mark My Words.

About WordLess Plus, Shane says:

"If this doesn’t knock people’s sox off, they must be wearing bloody
sandals."

I quote this for two reasons: because I agree with it, and to prove
that I don't put that bloody bad language in his mouth (grin). I hope
you will find WordLess Plus as useful as we assuredly will.


Very Best,

Greg Swann
9/24/92



ADDENDUM REGARDING VERSION 1.0.3

To my surprise, we found a bug. In situations not very common,
WordLess Plus can show a number as a style name, rather than the true
name of the style. This is not _awfully_ consequential, since the
number will be, nevertheless, a unique style name. But it _is_ a bug.
It is fixed in this release.

Also, Shane wanted me to point out that the styling heirarchy of
Word's tables (hereinafter known as Word's Goofy Tables) is retained.
Word's Goofy Tables work rather like this: a number of paragraphs are
_subsumed_ by a mother paragraph, which is the one that controls
vertical justification with respect to all the other, non-Goofy-Table
paragraphs. The situation is almost perfectly analagous to
side-by-side in-line text boxes in Quark: the stuff inside the boxes
can consist of paragraphs, but the "paragraph on the page" is the one
into which the in-line boxes are pasted. From that altogether too
confusing explanation, it should be obvious to the Xtags(tm) gamma
testers why I left the stylenames _within_ Word's Goofy Tables in:
the best way I can think of to convert these babes is with an
"<&tb(blah)>" from Xtags(tm). For now, you'll have to Torque, but
Mark My Words will do this for free.

9/29/92