When text87 arrives at your mailbox, it is not quite ready to meet your specific needs. It must be reconfigured to your standards.
RECONfigure First off, execute the recon file in order to reconfigure your working copy. Important defaults are then written into your working text87: millimeters vs. inches, various default drive names, Baud settings, etc.
You can change many text87 defaults from the Parameter command later, but you must set your page length correctly to 66 lines per page, since text87’s default is 70 for A4 paper. This is the time to select default drives, the printer port (par, ser1 or ser2) and the Baud rate.
If you forget, all is not lost. Many defaults can be reset within the program and will auto-load if you save them in the configure_C87 file.
When first executing text87, the program attempts to load three associated files that provide what you want in the way of features. These are the driver_P87, founts_A87, and configure_C87 files.
Part II discussed driver and founts files, but first a quick review.
The driver_P87 file holds all information about your printer. (Quill reads the printer_dat file each time a document is printed; the printer driver for text87 is loaded into memory.) It also keeps information about Attached screen font representations (printypes) – for example, you may have let Roman16 screen font represent a double-high printer font or you may prefer green ink to white to represent normal fonts.
Also saved in the driver_P87 file is your choice of hotkeys to select favorite printer fonts with Shift-F3 and Shift-F4.
You must create the founts_A87 file, easily done, to automatically load your desired screen fonts. If it’s not there, each screen font (other than Default11) must be individually loaded by name.
Finally, there is the configure_C87 file which stores everything else.
A CONFIGURE FILE holds a range of working standards that you want each time you write a document. If you call it configure, it will load automatically each time you execute text87, but it can have any name you like. Indeed, I have a suite of files all called update that I load to write this column, so that text is ready for publication in UPDATE magazine.
A CONFIGURE FILE holds the details set by Layout, Mode, a chunk of the Context options, and all the details of Ruler 0.
LAYOUT Start with the simple stuff: press F3 and Layout. Modify the page layout to your liking. The large block on the screen represents the page of paper. There are four choices: Text area, Footer, Header, and number of Columns. The maximum text area is 8″ wide and 1″ (25mm) less than the page length.
Set text area with cursor controls and the space bar. It is independent of the number of columns of text to a page. But if you want a footer or header, the text area must be shortened to make room for them. A footer or header requires at least 2/10’s of an inch or a line won’t fit.
MODE Next, change the Mode (F3 M). You can have the body of the text Frozen or automatically Re-formatted, and choose whether or not the margin Indent is automatically activated or manually set to the first tab on the Ruler.
CONTEXT Then, begin work on features reached from the Context command (F3 C).
The first choice is Window, which lets you change the size and position of the working window (perhaps to make room for a concurrent clock or a CAPS indicator) or simply to meet your monitor’s requirements.
The next choice in C is Video. You can have the screen Compressed or not, i.e. whether or not the screen presentation shows the scale of line feed you have set in a Ruler.
You can also choose whether or not the screen display is normal (colored ink on a black screen) or Inverse (a white background to all text with white ink shown in black).
Finally, you can set the Scale at which pixels correspond to widths on the page. The default is 60 pixels per inch, but can be set from 50 to 180. At 180 it spreads out the words and lines so that a vision impaired person could Attach a huge screen font to normal printer text output and have no problem seeing the screen. At 50, it lets you see most of a condensed printype line on the screen.
At this point the next choice in C is Save. Pressing S prompts for a file named configure. If you accept the default, that file will be auto-loaded when you next use text87, but you can give it any name and thus have a range of settings available for use as required. Whatever name you give it will have the extension _C87.
After Saving the changes to date, (in case of a power failure, the only way that text87 can crash), adjust the Parameters. You can choose any character as the Decimal tab (remember that the comma is used on the continent.) You can re-select Length unit, some default devices for file and document storage, and printer port and baud rate. (But you cannot change the range of alternate drives as well as in the recon session.) Finally, you can re-select the amount of memory text87 grabs for itself the next time it is run. Save the configure file again,
The next Context option is Load. It prompts for the configure file to be loaded. Enter the name used to save the configuration, in this instance configure, to reload the default settings.
The other three Context choices, Attach, Driver and Founts relate to driver and founts files.
RULER The last stage to complete a configure file is to check out Ruler (F3 R). Probably there will be only Ruler 0, which will have a thin vertical cursor next to the word Ruler. This Ruler (Ruler 0) is saved in the configure file. Press either T for Tabs or M for Margins to reset both. The Horizontal Coordinate changes as you move the cursor left or right giving its absolute position in tenths of an inch (or millimeters).
Press M for Margin to set a left or right Margin. The left Margin cannot be set to the right of the Indent (open right triangle) nor the right Margin to the left of a tab. If the Indent is at the same position as the left Margin, the left Margin sign disappears. The Indent can be placed to the right of the left Margin to create hanging paragraphs, that is, paragraphs with the first line to the left of the other lines in a paragraph.
For paragraphs with indented first lines, place a left tab where indent commences, and set the Mode to auto-Indent. (Are you confused yet? Indent doesn’t mean indent unless you mean indent.)
Unlike Quill, which lets you put a tab in every column if you choose, text87 limits you to twenty tabs between the Indent and the right Margin. You also cannot have tabs closer than 4/10’s of an inch. (text87 locates characters in absolute units and some screen fonts are more than two-tenths of an inch wide. The closest you might want tabs to be is two characters, anyway.)
Also unlike Quill, you can adjust line feed. Normal line feed is 1/6″ (or an equivalent fraction). In text87 you can micro-adjust line feed. This is handy for squeezing a line or two on a page to avoid the need for a second page.
Now go back to Context and save this ruler to your configure file so that it will always be there each time text87 is run.
the end
So? Is everthing clear? Probably not, but this is the end of this series. For questions (or to submit tips) on using text87 or any of the Psion software, write the author. If sufficient volume is received, we’ll have a regular column.
If you require an immediate response please phone (617) 889-0830 or write and enclose an S.A.S.E.
text87 is £60 from Software87, 33 Savernake Rd., London, NW3 2[illegible] United Kingdom. It includes Qtyp, an integrated spell checker with English, French and German dictionaries – a £30 value alone. It is available in the USA for $119.95 from EMSoft, P.O. Box 8763, Boston, MA 02114-8763 (617) 889-0830.