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Text File | 1993-04-10 | 19.0 KB | 349 lines

***************************************************************************** FormEd2 3.04 - by Acorn Computers/RISC squad/Paul Hobbs ***************************************************************************** Paul Hobbs commentary --------------------- This is RISC Squad's FormEd version 2.84b enhanced to include Interface 3D icons and some extra options to make it easier to use. The template 'Filer' and the 'Handles' code were extracted from version 2.87 of Risc Squad's effort. If I knew who 'Risc Squad' were I'd ask permission before hacking their program, but they are so modest they don't even give an address. I intend eventually to create !FormEd+ (hows that for originality) using my EvntShell library and even more features when I can get around to it. New Features Include: - Resizing of icons without dragging for more accuracy - The addition of Left/Right/Top/Bottom alignment options for selected icons - The 'Arrange' option for selected icons - Interface style icons may be created directly from the menus, including new borders introduced with v2.00 of the Interface module - DragASprite solid dragging for RISC-OS 3.1 (wow!) - Support for RISC-OS 3 boot message - Template 'Filer' window (no more windows opening all over your desktop!) RISC Squad commentary --------------------- Completed 21st September 1990 to version 2.80. Here's a list of all the things I did, as far as I can remember - I didn't make a list as I went along. i) Icons can now be selected/deselected by clicking the menu button on them whilst holding the SHIFT key down. ii) The icon dragging procedure - with the left button - now moves all of the selected icons in the window. Dragging with the right button (re-sizing) is unchanged. iii) The main menu structure has been split into an Icon menu and a Window menu - for convenience and for speed. Previous releases of FormEd were notoriously slow at creating their menus. Each of the two menus includes an option for calling up the other, which will then be opened as default on each subsequent occasion. iv) The Window menu is largely unaltered, but does include a 'save' option for saving only one template at a time. Be warned, font freaks - the save routine will check for anti-aliased fonts in all other windows too, so I don't know what will happen in that situation. Whatever it is, it shouldn't be fatal. v) The Icons menu is now far more versatile than before. Many choices are now available for all selected icons (in that window only) including specific choices from the EDIT ICONS submenu structure - notably BUTTON TYPE !! vi) The RENUMBER option is virtually as before, but the renumbering process can be optimised by the use of the MENU button whilst depressing the CONTROL key. This is identical to choosing the 'Renumber #nn' option directly. vii) The DESELECT ALL option deselects all the icons in the current window. viii) The COPY and MOVE choices may now be performed on either single icons or on all the selected icons. ix) The WIPE option may now be on selected icons, on a single icon or on any icon number specified. I find this useful in two instances - (i) When I import templates which have 'missing' icons that aren't used - see Paint's 'save' box, icon #1 is to the right and is '<CRAP>' (ii) If I can't find one of my own icons !! x) Note that any options which are either on 'selected' icons or on a specific icon can be controlled by clicking MENU over a specific icon for the latter, or on no icons (the window's work area) for the former. In such a case, if no icons are selected, you will be informed, eg. 'Wipe No Icons' - which will also be 'shaded out'. All in all, the lesson to be learned from this is - if you want any icons to be selected (in the finished template) - leave them to the end, so they don't screw up your work ! PS I also put in an 'Info' box and attached it to the icon bar menu as expected. Plus, while checking up on the 'Save one template' job I re-enabled the facility to save off the entire file merely by choosing the 'Save templates' option on the icon bar menu. - this had been REMd out ! ***************************************************************************** Updates, Version 2.81 - 24/11/90 The main problem bugging those people I knew of who were using this was that of the un-named windows not being saved. I have therefore included a new error in the 'save' routine such that the error 'Only the named windows were saved' occurs if any of the templates were un-named. I also fixed the 'Move Selected' option from the 'Icons' menu, which did absolutely nothing in version 2.80. ***************************************************************************** Updates, Version 2.82 - 02/12/90 Oops, version 2.81 was chronically buggered ! The aforementioned error occurred on every occasion, without exception. This is now completely fixed ! The extra features are as follows : i) It is now impossible to create un-named templates. ii) The identifiers of windows must be different on a non case-sensitive basis, i.e. It is not now possible to call one template 'Save' and a different template 'save' even though the names, strictly speaking, are distinct. iii) Clicking on the icon bar icon opens a dialogue box, prompting the user to enter the identifier of the new template. Press ENTER or click on OK to confirm; press ESCAPE or close the box to cancel. iv) Alternatively, a new template may still be created by the use of the icon bar menu structure. The normal rules for identifiers still apply. v) Any new template has its title bar icon set to text as before, but the text defaults to the identifier at the time of creation. This allows easy reference on a set of newly created templates. vi) As a result of all this, the errors such as 'Only named windows can be saved' and 'Only the named windows were saved' are now a thing of the past ! vii) On a completely different point : newly created icons now appear directly underneath the pointer rather than a small distance above it. ***************************************************************************** Updates, Version 2.83 - 23/12/90 Aha, welcome back to all template designers. It's been exactly three weeks since v2.82 and in such a short time I found a lot to do to the program, it wan't hard. Have you noticed how all of these have been issued at weekends, i.e. Friday, Saturday, then Sunday twice ? I suppose I should tell you what I've done to it again - well, in order of appearance . . . i) The icon bar menu is restructured so that the templates and the sprites are handled independently. This also makes the main menu less tall, which looked very silly. ii) You will of course have noticed an unfamiliar option on this menu as soon as you tried it out after you'd read through part (i) i.e. the new 'Clear' option. Fairly self-explanatory, all it does is asks for confirmation, then clears all templates from memory. This is mainly useful for loading a new file etc. For example, if you want to pinch the save box from Edit, then you would load the templates from Edit, save off just the one template you wanted, clear the templates then re-load the old file, eg from RAM:. This saves either (a) deleting all of the templates in the file 'by hand' or (b) quitting FormEd and waiting for another copy to load and initialise (very slow)! iii) The next idea I had was to add a facility for certain 'default' icons, rather than the <Untitled> icon as before. This became a thorough restructure of the icons menu, to become a more filer-type menu tree. Here's how the new 'icons' menu looks. iv) Create icon - On its own, this creates the old <Untitled> icon, almost. The submenu has a variety of goodies on offer ; Text - Colour 12 bordered text icon (Click/Drag) Sprite - 'Free-standing' sprite icon (Click/Drag) Arrow - Colour 12 bordered arrow icon (Click/Drag) Option - Normal 'Optoff,Opton' icon (Radio) Radio - Normal 'Radiooff,Radioon' icon (Radio) Writeable - Normal text entry icon (Write/Click/Drag) Menu - Normal menu icon, eg 'OK' box (Menu) Comment - 'Free-standing' text icon (Click/Drag) e.g. the 'Name:' icon in a ProgInfo window. v) This is where the similarities to the Filer start. The third choice is either 'No Icons' or 'Selected Icons' or 'Icon #0' for example. The submenu yields to present the choices : Edit, Copy, Move, Wipe, and Renumber - all as in v2.82 vi) By the way, the 'Button type' menu has been rigged to disallow types 12 & 13 (reserved) and type 11 is once again referred to as 'Radio' vii) Back to the filer, the next two choices are 'Select All' and 'Deselect All' viii) Lastly, 'Tidy Icons' removes any spurious icons that lie wholly outside the window's Work Area. Note that this is NOT the same as outside the opened window space. For example, in Paint's notorious SaveBox [see v2.80, (ix),(i)] the CRAP icon is within the Work Area, but the lack of scroll bars on these windows sometimes makes it seem to lie beyond these bounds. NB when using the default icons on the 'Create' submenu, make sure that you remember to set the button types of the icons, particularly the arrow icons (usually Auto-Repeat). The icons default to Click/Drag because they rarely appear in exactly the right place, so need moving. Happy templating ! ! ***************************************************************************** Updates, Version 2.84 - 07/02/91 Thought for the day : When I use this - and I do, despite the bugs - I nearly always use the icons menu rather than the windows menu, but this poses an annoying problem. How does a lazy programmer (contradiction ?) like me delete a window without using the other menu ? Answer - put the 'Delete window' choice on BOTH. Completely against the idea of separating the two menus, but I don't care. I was quite stunned when I happened to notice how Acorn handled their icon indirection workspace - it goes like this. (i) DIM a large block of memory. (ii) Set a pointer to the start of this area. (iii) Whenever workspace is needed, use the memory at the pointer, and move the pointer on. (iv) When the pointer reaches the end of the buffer, annoy the user by generating errors. Actually, (iv) might have been 'by crashing without explanation' - but if it was, I've already 'corrected' this. To counteract this problem, the pointer is moved back to the beginning when the last template is deleted, or if 'Clear' is chosen from the icon bar menu. Crude, but still better than Acorn. I've been hassled a lot recently by my friend Anonymous 'Rabbit' Unknown 'cos he was getting worked up about the indirection buggy bits - apparently, when large, multi-indirected templates are used (waffle) the indirection buggers up so the icons start to contain bits of the !RunImage, i.e. it points to the WRONG BIT of application workspace. As a result, when you wipe it, bits of your (still running) program go missing, and crashes ensue. Alternatively, all the icons are inter-connected, so when you delete the unwanted bit of one, the other one does spurious things too. I think I've sussed it though; I looked at the code, changed a few things and now it seems to work, so to quote the ISV docs, 'Everyone is happy'. Rabbit was also whining about the way that the files were saved 'backwards' so that the window stacking is reversed. Big template files have to be kept tidy in this respect, it was annoying ! I've just done another detail - when a single template was saved before, the 'Original' filename, as appears off the icon bar 'save' box, was changed to become that of the single template just saved. It was wrong, it's not now. The other (trivial) bug was that the colours menus did odd things; sometimes the icon colours menu was in monochrome, and always there were problems with mobile tick on the currently selected colour - particularly if a menu choice was made with ADJUST. This is fixed too. Acorn were previously reading the palette each time the tick moved, to decide which colours contrasted with which others - this is now, of course, done on the WIMP message which has something to do with palette changes, and it's faster too. Typical. ***************************************************************************** Updates, Version 2.84b - 01/03/91 Nothing fascinating, as usual - a minor bug fix to do with the 'Icon #nn.Edit.Text' bit of a submenu, from where the text sometimes goes walkies. The usual un-recreatable bug sort of idea, the icon would contain text, but the menu would suggest that it had a null text string. Also I added a new choice to the icon bar menu, 'Finish', which is exactly equivalent to 'Save Templates' then 'Clear Templates'. Some choices, i.e. 'Finish', 'Clear' and 'Save' are now shaded whenever there are no templates loaded into FormEd. I thought it would be a nice idea to be able to load an application's 'Templates' file by merely dragging the application to FormEd, so it now attempts to load the file '!ApplName.Templates', failing if it is not found, or if it does not have the file type &FEC (Templates). I was right about the nice idea, it's very convenient ! The slight fib is that the normal error 'This application has no Templates file' occurs even if it exists, but with the wrong file type. So who cares anyway ? Not my problem. Lastly, the general icons menu now opens such that the pointer is usually over the 'Selected icons' jobbie, making editing slightly easier, ta very much Mister WIMP, see you on the next version of FormEd. ***************************************************************************** For those interested, here's Acorn's crap on the subject, as found in my application directory. Anything subsequently in this text file is unedited, excepting the last few lines (blanks and asterisks). ***************************************************************************** Notes on using FormEd, 16-May-89 FormEd is an editor of Template files. To understand this you need to understand the program interface of the Window System, as described in the Programmer's Reference Manual. The description here assumes an understanding of template files. FormEd is started by double-clicking on a template file after the FormEd icon has been "seen". This will cause FormEd to be loaded, and to display all of the windows in the template file. Alternatively, double-click on FormEd itself and it will be loaded with no current windows. If a template file does not appear to load properly, give more memory to FormEd before it starts using the Task Manager window. A template file is often constructed with reference to a specific set of sprites. A sprite file can be dragged onto the FormEd icon on the icon bar to set the available sprites. These are displayed in a window. Some previous versions of FormEd used to provide facilities for editing sprites, these are now provided only in the Paint application. Clicking on the FormEd icon creates a new window in the current template file, and displays it on the screen. The menu provided from the icon on the icon bar provides the following functions: Create window - similar to clicking on the FormEd icon, except that a name may be specified for the template. Load templates - allows you to type in the filename of a template file to be loaded, instead of dragging an icon from the Filer. Save templates - a save box for the templates being edited. Quit - quit FormEd. Beware that this has no "confirm" option, so any edits will be discarded instantly if you choose this menu entry. The template windows displayed by FormEd mirror precisely the size, position and properties of the windows in the Template file. The following actions directly affect the stored values: Close the window - deletes it from the template file. Move/scroll/resize the window - moves the default setup of the window in the template file. Clicking MENU on a template window produces a menu tree that allows a wide variety of alterations to the menu structure, based on the various control fields of a window structure as described in the Wimp documentation. It also allows you to create icons in the window. An icon, once created, can be moved and resized using drag-SELECT and drag-ADJUST. It can also have its properties adjusted by pointing at it and then clicking MENU, and following the "amend icon" submenu. The best way to experiment is to examine and update the template files belonging to the Applications Suite (saving the original first!). It's also possible to update the template files used by ROM utilities. These reside in the deskfs: filing system in the ROM. They are accessed via the environment variable Wimp$Path, so by updating this to search a directory of your own first where your updated template files reside, you can replace the window templates used by the utilities in the ROM. Your ability to drag and resize icons may be affected by a button type affixed to an icon: only those button types which generate the appropriate Wimp events can be dragged and resized directly. It's interesting to note that FormEd keeps no data structures describing each template window, relying on the Wimp to keep and manipulate each structure. FormEd keeps a file of sprites in memory which can be used in icons in the template being edited. The default sprite file used is the file Default inside !FormEd, which is in fact a copy of the sprites found in the RISC OS ROM. To load in a separate sprite file to use with your template file, drag the sprite file onto the FormEd icon. *****************************************************************************