Suggestive remarks


Mike Kerslake finds a rival...

I recently received an email from Eric Hays of the Yolo Atari Club (YAC) in the USA. My column had caught his eye because of its similarity to the list his club used in a contest to encourage programmers in their efforts.
The YAC are currently running the 1997 Shareware Programming Contest so here's the details in case anyone would like to enter:

"Shareware Programmers: Would $50 help inspire you to finish that program you started over the summer but never finished? What if we could help you distribute your software to local BBS's, the major on-line services, and the Internet? We could also help you by writing and printing documentation to go with your program (we can translate from German to English if necessary). We'll even throw in a year's membership to our local user-group with its bi-monthly newsletter mailed directly to you, and the honorary title of YAC Official Programmer for a year..."

All entries for the 1997 contest must be received by 2nd December 1997, which, unless you have something suitable ready to go, doesn't leave you with long! The judging criteria are as follows:

  1. Reliability
  2. Originality
  3. Compatibility
  4. Efficiency
To enter mail your entry to:
The Yolo Atari Club
1129 Fordham Drive
Davis
CA 95616
USA

Alternatively e-mail them an FTP location where your program resides (remember to include your program's name and the full path to it) to:

elhays@writeme.com
e.kaljumagi1@genie.com




My suggestion this issue is a utility for use with paragraph based document processors. The web is a fantastic source of information on any number of subjects, but getting the information into a suitable format for further processing or printing is time consuming. CAB offers printing functions capable of outputting entire pages but I'd really like the ability to print out individual paragraphs. Ideally I would like a program capable of interpreting chunks of HTML source code and intelligently converting the tags. For example the following code displays "The Publishing House" as a centred headline in CAB:

<H1 ALIGN=CENTER>The Publishing House</H1>
I'd like it converted to a word processor or DTP package using preset font sizes and styles so it looks similar to the CAB display:


The Publishing House


Timeworks DTP enables defined paragraphs using the < limiters to mark up text before import and my suggestion could be based around this concept.
I guess we're talking about a stand-alone search/replace utility with added options to enable the input and output files to be specified, with the ability to substitute unmatched HTML commands from a library of pre-defined options.
Programs which don't hold their library of tagged paragraphs within an editable ASCII file (Papyrus springs to mind) would be more difficult to work with, but maybe someone knows a way around this?
I'll personally reward anyone that comes up with a suitable solution - so get programming!


If you have got any suggestive remarks to make about this column or ideas for potential programs, please send them to:

Atari Computing
"Rois Bheinn"
Overton Crescent
JOHNSTONE
PA5 8JB
Scotland

Or send them via email to:
letters@ataricomputing.com



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