And I walk
Through confusion
With a smile on my face
(Ride, "Natural Grace")

How To Reach The Author

The main reason why this topic is one of the first, if you are reading this documentation sequentially, is not because I want to receive as much email as possible. Actually this chapter is designed to keep my email traffic as low as possible.

Before You Contact Me

I know I can't expect you to read the whole manual, but make sure you have at least read the sections about Questions And Answers, Related Stuff (and tools), Future improvements and Known Bugs, Problems And Limitations before you contact me.

There are also chapters about compiling and installing, and you should at least give a glimpse at them. For non-Amiga users, there is a chapter about all those existing ports to other systems describing differences.

Maybe there is already a bugfix available at the hsc-support-w3-page, so check this, too.

On What To Contact Me

If you..

..find any new bugs
..think that hsc accepts severe errors in your sources without warning about it (Note the word severe)
..have any questions about hsc and it's usage which are not covered sufficiently in this documentation or located at a completely unexpected place (which should be quite unlikely because I meanwhile consider this documentation to be rather useful). Please note that I do not want to be bothered by problems concerning tools not included in this package, like make.
..want to port hsc to another system not yet mentioned on Existing ports.
..have any (reasonable) suggestions how to improve hsc; but note that I'm currently not thinking about any conceptional changes.

you should contact me.

On What NOT To Contact Me

You should not contact me on the following topics:

You just want to say ``hi!'' and tell me that hsc is a great tool. <ARROGANCE>I already know that.</ARROGANCE>. Furthermore, I don't think that it is that great as some people try to make me believe.
You want to compile hsc for your system but don't have enough experience on such things. Bad luck for you, try to increase your circle of acquaintances and find some of these unwashed nerds who spend most of their time compiling and installing packages like this.
You think hsc is a great program, and you want to use it with some MS-DOS-based system like Windows NT, Windows 95 or OS/2.
Your compiler has problems compiling a simple ANSI-C program. (You won't believe it, but there are still such compilers around.)
General discussion about html-tags and how to use them. I don't know the correct usage of several tags defined in hsc.prefs myself.

If you fail to exclude the above topics from your email, you might get a reply consisting of a single term: ``Read the fucking manual!''.

About Bug Reports

If you think you've found a bug that is not already mentioned or discussed in the chapter about ``Known Bugs, Problems And Limitations'', you should include some information in your bug-report:

Which version of hsc did you use? You can find this out if you invoke hsc without any arguments or simply type ``hsc HELP'' in your shell. Always include version number and exact date, do not use terms like ``the latest version''. The CLI option HELP also exists for all other tools coming with this package.
Under which operating system did you use hsc? (e.g. AmigaOS or RiscOS)
Include a single command call or batch-script and hsc source (or at least part of) that reproduces the bug.
Do not send me all your sources for your whole site, try to trace the bug back to a single input-file and macro, if possible.

Exceptions of these are internal error messages, as they usually leave you without a glue. Try to include the information described above as long as it does not require any effort, read: program version and name of system.

You don't have to provide information about the exact hardware or version of the operating system or compiler used, as hsc is supposed to be rather system independent, but I might asked you for that in a reply, so keep this at hand.

The more specific and smaller your bug-report is, the more likely I might fix it; although I can't promise that I will fix all bugs reported to me in reasonable time.

If your bug-report fails to include the above informations, I might completely ignore it.

...And Finally

You can reach me via email using agi@giga.or.at or agi@sbox.tu-graz.ac.at. Note that I might reply from another address, but add only one of these two to your address book, they should be valid for a longer time.

If you include binary data, MIME-attachments are accepted. Preferred archives are .lha, .lzx and .tar.gz. If it is necessary, I can cope with uuencode, but please try avoid it if possible, as I'm awfully lazy - I always have to look at the manpage for it.

You can use English or German for communication, with the first one being preferred.

There is no mail address as this changes too frequently.

As an act of protest, there also is no homepage.