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WRITER'S DREAM - BUILD Version 4.31-P Special version for inclusion in the PIECES Suite of Programs Copyright 1991, 1993 Jeff Napier & Another Company INTRODUCTION What Writer's Dream Can Do For You Judging by the correspondence that comes to Another Company, we have found out that most of our customers are good writers. Most of you also know something very useful and possibly unique. Perhaps you are a retired glass blower, or know everything about training seeing-eye dogs, or could teach people how to cook nutritious foods. Perhaps you could write a course in industrial grinder safety, or volleyball, or advanced electronics, or elementary geology. Maybe you would be good at writing science fiction or children's stories. But why bother? Becoming a published writer is nearly as difficult as becoming a rock 'n' roll star. Self-publishing costs money and requires marketing skill. GUESS WHAT? There is another way to be published that works for absolutely everybody! Yet, almost no one knows about it. Using this technique costs almost nothing, but literally millions of people may read your writing! You can make unlimited money! What am I talking about? The Writer's Dream. The Writer's Dream is a way to put your information on IBM-compatible disks. If you can operate any word processing program, you can do this: Let's say you have written a disk about house cats. You release it as a shareware product. This means you send copies to some shareware distributors. There are 72 million IBM-compatible computer users in America. Many of them are frequent shareware buyers. Some of them will get your disk, and they will make copies, which will in turn be read and copied by others. Eventually, one person out of every ten is likely to read your disk-based cat book. You, with your own little computer, could be an author with 7.2 million readers! And that's not all. You can put a commercial in your disk which inspires some of the readers to send you money. For instance, your commercial could introduce another disk-based book you have also written, called Dogs. Dogs is not shareware. The only way the readers can get your excellent dog disk is to send you $19.95! No doubt you see the potential! In fact, since you can put text on a disk and therefore create information of interest to others, shareware is only one means of distribution. You might like to use it for in-house training or disk-based conferencing within your company, or you might like to create and sell a retail disk-based book product. About the User Interface There are a few other text presentation programs on the market, but so far as I know, none are as easy-to-use for both the author and the end user as this one. Writer's Dream is colorful, even allowing the reader to change the colors to suit individual taste. Writer's Dream has some special features such as automatic electronic indexing, on-line help, and "Autoscroll." Automatic indexing simply means that the reader can press the [S] key at any time, type any word or phrase, and instantly find it anywhere within a chapter. Autoscroll is really neat. Simply type a number from 1 to 9 while reading, and the program will scroll the text past your eyes at whatever speed is comfortable. Changing the autoscroll speed is as simple as pressing another number key. Writer's Dream requires absolutely no learning on the part of the reader. They will be able to read your book instantly. Not only is it super-simple, it is becoming common. Many readers are already familiar and comfortable with Writer's Dream. The Writer's Dream main menu is mouse-driven for those who prefer a mouse interface. You can put programs on the main menu as well as text files. When the user selects a program, it will run normally, then return to the menu. This means you can mix programs to display graphics or allow user input within your text presentations! You can also put PCX files on the main menu, and Writer's will display your pictures automatically in up to 256 colors. If you have sensitive information which must not be changed and passed along by end users, file encryption is also provided by the Writer's Dream software. The next chapter will instruct you in how to create your own book with Writer's Dream. Note: This is a shareware program. If you create and make copies of a disk-based book, you are required to purchase a license ($29.95). See the TO PLACE AN ORDER (ORDER.DOC) chapter for details. ANOTHER NOTE: Writer's Dream is presented on an as-is basis. I make no claims or warranties as to suitability to your purposes, and will absolutely not be responsible for any situations which arise due to your use of this program. How to use Writer's Dream The very information you are reading now is being presented with Writer's Dream. You are reading an electronic book. This one has only a few chapters, but your book can have up to 100 chapters. We are using Writer's Dream to teach you about Writer's Dream! As you read this chapter, you may find some items temporarily confusing. Don't worry, with some experimenting it will all make sense. In fact, unless you are already a very experienced computer user, some experimenting will probably be necessary. Be patient. Enjoy. The General Principal Of Operation Using an ordinary word processor, you create files of text on disk. These files will be like chapters in a book. Using BUILD.EXE you will create a file called BOOK.CFG which will tell DREAM.EXE the names of your chapters. You create a master disk containing your chapters and DREAM.EXE and BOOK.CFG. Make and distribute copies of this master for others to read. INSTRUCTIONS 1. Make your chapters. Use any word processor. If your word processor is one that normally makes non-ASCII text, use the ASCII mode (or 'non-document' or 'print to disk', depending on your word processor). All standard word processors can make ASCII files, but you may have to read the instructions that came with your word processor for details. You can have up to 100 chapters and they can each be as long as you like. THERE SHOULD BE NO LINES LONGER THAN 80 CHARACTERS. Obviously, the total size of all your chapters cannot be more than one disk will hold. If they are, make a two-disk ('two-volume') book, using Writer's Dream for each disk. 2. Copy DREAM.EXE and BUILD.EXE onto a blank, formatted disk. Then copy all your chapters (files) onto the same disk. There must be at least 5000 bytes (5k) free space left on the disk. Safely store your original Writer's Dream disk in case your working copy become damaged. (And because the BOOK.CFG file will be changed) 3. Type BUILD and press [Enter]. This is the setup program for Writer's Dream. It will allow you to enter the title, your name, and your chapters as they will appear in the 'menu'. The menu is a 'live table of contents' - the first screen the user will see when they start to read your book. It will look just like what you see if you press the [Esc] key now, except it will have your chapters instead of mine. Your electronic book can have from one to 100 chapters. 4. After a welcome screen, the BUILD program starts with a menu providing two main choices, "Simplified Build," and "Menu-Driven Build." For now, start with "Simplified Build" because it automates the full sequence of building a book, thereby avoiding possible confusion. The next item which appears is a title box. This resides at the top of the user menu. You can enter up to 3 lines of text here. Our example looks like this: WRITER'S DREAM by Another Company To edit any line, just move the highlight bar with the arrow keys to the line you want to edit, then press the backspace key or hold [Ctrl] and press [Y] to delete what's there. Then type your own line. Your lines must be less than 56 characters long. Do not center your lines, the program will do this automatically later. When done editing the lines to contain your title and name and possibly subtitle, just press the [Esc] key. The program will remember your changes. 5. Now you will be shown a bigger box. This is the Table of Contents. In the left of this box you will enter your chapter names as you want them to appear on the menu. Just delete my example chapters, and type in your own. You can delete a line by using the [BKSP] key or by holding [Ctrl] while you press [Y]. On the right side of this same box are the files that contain your chapters. In other words, if you have written a chapter called INTRODUCTION and it is in a file called INTRO.DOC, you would type INTRODUCTION on the top left line, and INTRO.DOC on the right side. This is how the program knows to display the text in INTRO.DOC when the user selects INTRODUCTION. If you have more chapters than can be shown in this box at one time, simply use the up and down arrow keys to scroll through. Do not precede filenames with a drive or path. If you were to put C:\MYBOOK\INTRO.DOC, the program will not work properly on other people's computers, unless they also happen to have a sub-directory called MYBOOK on their C: drive. Do not type A:INTRO.DOC either, for the same reason. Someone might purchase your electronic book and put it in their B: drive, and it wouldn't work. Do not leave blank lines between your chapters. Each chapter must have a corresponding file where the text is to be found. You have a limit of 34 characters for each chapter name. Your filenames must be ordinary DOS-legal filenames. You can have as many as 100 chapters or as few as 1. You can insert or delete chapters by pressing the [Insert] or [Delete] keys. When done with this section of the program, just press the [Esc] key. 6. The program will ask you some questions. The first is about sound effects. If you like the sounds, answer [Y] and the same sounds will occur for your readers. (The readers can optionally switch off the sound effects from within the DREAM program by pressing the [T] key.) If you answer the question about sound effects with [N] then there will be no sound effects in your book unless the reader presses the [T] key. Then you have a choice of centered or left-justified table of contents. The normal choice is [C], but if you want all your chapter names to be shifted to the left, press [L]. You are asked whether you want to create a custom line at the top of the Writer's Dream help screen. Normally, this line contains the Another Company copyright notice, but you might rather have it show your book name, or related information. You are asked whether you want to use the bookmark function. If you say yes, (by typing [y]) then the end user can read your book, quit the program, and when the user resumes at another time, the program can take the user to the exact place in the text from where the program was exited. Bookmark expects to be able to write to disk and therefore should not be used with write-protected disks since a DOS error message will occur. NOTE: If you use the bookmark feature, the very last thing you should do after testing the master disk of your finished product is start DREAM, go to the beginning of the first chapter, then quit. This puts the bookmark at the very beginning. When it is at the beginning, the user is not asked about 'resuming,' which would be confusing to a new user. Then you are asked whether you want to modify the colors. You can change the background color, the text color, and the menu colors which Writer's Dream gives the end user. If you do choose to use different colors, keep in mind that the default colors are designed to work well with color, Hercules and monochrome text monitors. If you change them, you might end up with a program that you can use, but one which is blank or unreadable to users with other monitor types. Finally, the program will ask you if you want to create a new book. This is your last chance to cancel by pressing [N]. If you press [Y], then whatever previous book setup existed on disk will be lost and a new one written. The BUILD program creates a file called BOOK.CFG. This is where the table of contents information is stored on your disks. So, before you create a new book, if you'll ever want to read this example book again, make a backup copy. 7. You will probably have to experiment with the BUILD program several times before you fully understand it and can create the perfect product of your dreams with your own text files. That's ok, in fact, just fine. Each time you restart the BUILD program, it will show your previous configuration so that you can edit only the parts you want to change. When done with BUILD, you are given an opportunity to test your whole book. If you have accidentally misspelled a filename, or put the a filename next to the wrong chapter name, you'll see the problem. MIXING OTHER PROGRAMS INTO YOUR TEXT PRESENTATIONS You are not limited to text-only presentations! You can mix in pictures, questions and answer sessions, databases, almost anything else you want. It's done like this: You can list programs and batch files on the menu as if they were chapters (text files), but when the end user selects one of these programs, it runs! Then, when the program ends, the user is returned to the DREAM menu! A simple use of this might be to include a picture. Let's say you have created a tutorial about playing the flute, but you really want to show your readers a picture of the fingerings. You can use The Multimedia Workshop (available as shareware) or just about any paint program to create the picture, then list it's runtime display program on the DREAM menu. When the user selects that "chapter," instead of the usual text, your fingerings picture is displayed. And, of course, you can get fancy, including several pictures, a self-running catalog database, and ORDER.EXE (provided with WRITER'S DREAM). Here's The Details: To enter a program on the main menu, use the BUILD program as usual. On the left side of the BUILD menu, type a description of the program as if it were a chapter. Then on the right, type the exact name of the program with it's extension, but without drive or sub-directory information: PACMAN.EXE - this is ok STARGATE - this is NOT ok (needs the .COM part) C:\GAMES\STARGATE.COM - this is not ok (plus it won't fit) Some programs require a parameter, such as the name of the picture file to display. You'll notice there is no room on the right side of the BUILD menu for the parameters. So how do you work with these programs? You make a batch file and list it on the BUILD menu. For instance, MSHOW.EXE is a program which can display a picture. We'll pretend you have a picture called CATTLE.1 which you want to show. At the DOS prompt, you'd type: MSHOW CATTLE.1 But this won't work in BUILD. So make a batch file. We'll call it PICTURE.BAT, but any name would do. PICTURE.BAT only needs to contain one line: MSHOW CATTLE.1 Batch files are simply text files, so you can use any text editor (as long as it makes ordinary ASCII files) to make PICTURE.BAT. Then on the BUILD menu, you list PICTURE.BAT on the right side where the filename belongs. Batch files can run an unlimited number of programs. Your PICTURE.BAT file could look like this: MSHOW CATTLE.1 MSHOW CATTLE.2 MSHOW CATTLE.3 MSHOW HORSES.1 MSHOW HORSES.2 ORDER.EXE Well, you get the idea. Or if not, a little experimentation will answer your questions. Most programs that run from the DOS prompt will run from the DREAM menu. Dream reserves about 60k of RAM space, so very large programs may not run, especially in computers with less than the full 640k of RAM. If in doubt about a program which requires a lot of RAM, test it, and if you are going to distribute copies to owners of assorted computers, you really ought to try it again on a machine with limited RAM space, or else mention in your advertising that 640k RAM is required. An ideosyncracy exists within DOS, in that COMMAND.COM must sometimes be available via the PATH statement in the AUTOEXEC.BAT file, or on disk for batch (.BAT) to run. This is almost never a problem on hard-disk equipped computers, but may sometimes cause problems on floppy-only systems. Of course, this only applies if you list .BAT files within the Writer's Dream menu. Here's a fun tip. You can use WRITER'S DREAM as a super-simple and nice-looking menu maker. Put it in your root directory, and with BUILD, list all the programs you like to run. (Remember, that you'll need a path statement in your AUTOEXEC.BAT file or you'll need to make batch files to reach programs in unusual sub-directories.) You can put anything you like in the title box. Mine says JEFF'S MENU. NOTES: If your book contains .EXE, or .COM programs which use lots of RAM, it may be preferable to test your finished book by typing DREAM at the DOS prompt, since both BUILD.EXE and DREAM.EXE also require some RAM. If you list .BAT files on the Writer's Dream menu, COMMAND.COM must be available via the PATH (in the AUTOEXEC.BAT file) or on the same disk. This is an ideosyncracy with DOS - it will not run batch files without reloading COMMAND.COM in many cases. BUILD contains some other options which do not appear if you use "Simplified Build." You can use .CFG filenames other than BOOK.CFG. If you do use a different .CFG file, it must end with .CFG, and when you start DREAM.EXE from a batch file or from the DOS prompt, you must type DREAM followed by a space, then the name of the .CFG file you have chosen. BUILD also provides file encryption if run from the "Menu-Driven Build" option. File encryption makes your files encoded so that they cannot be changed by end users. 8. HINT: To make your disk easier to use for beginners (and everyone) you can copy BEGIN.BAT from the Writer's Dream disk onto your disk-based book. Then, on the disk label you can type this line: "Type BEGIN and press [Enter]." 9. HINT #2: If you want your text to look better on-screen - just like this text - in your word processing program, set your left margin to 10 and your right margin to 70. Note to Word Perfect 5.X and MS-Word users: Your word processing programs are capable of ASCII (.ASC) files, but may not preserve the left margin when converted. To fix this problem, use SPACE.EXE, provided with the registered version. 10. DELETE BUILD.EXE from your final disk. This program is just the setup utility of Writer's Dream. The only program required for your distribution version is DREAM.EXE, and of course the configuration file called (default) BOOK.CFG. 11. Test your new electronic book carefully. Make sure you have not misspelled a filename, or left anything out. Make sure you don't have any chapter names without a corresponding file name on the right side of the box. There are some things you can do to make sure you get more readers and that they are more likely to send you money. * Consider your title carefully. It must attract attention. * Make sure your first 100 words are very powerful. * Make sure your advertising is well written. If you simply ask for a donation, you won't get much. One of the best things you can do is use your disk to sell something else. A same-subject, volume 2, or another disk-based book covering a different but related subject will be easy to sell. * If you are already in a business, consider using a disk-based book to sell your product. For instance, if you sell seeds, you could write a book about gardening and tell your readers to call or write for a free catalog, or even provide a catalog chapter. * The more copies you send out, the more readers you will reach. A good idea is to send to as many shareware distributors as you can. Most distributors will gladly list your disk in their catalogs. Shareware has a lot of inertia. It can take over a year between the time you introduce a shareware product and the time you start getting money. This is because it takes that long for distributors to get it into their catalogs, and for friends to make copies for friends, etc. Shareware also has a long burnout period. If you put your phone number in your disk, you may be answering requests for orders or free catalogs for years into the future! Now is the time to write that book you've been dreaming about! Thanks, Enjoy and prosper from this program, Jeff Napier d.b.a Another Company August 21, 1993 P.S. For your convenience I have written a disk-based book called SUCCESS WITH SHAREWARE. It is about the shareware business for programmers and text-writers alike. Learn all the professional tips for successful shareware authorship, learn all the pitfalls to avoid. Can you succeed without Success With Shareware? Yes! But why learn everything the hard way? I've packed tons of experience into Success With Shareware to save you years of fooling around. Not only is it based on my own experience but also contains the fruits of knowledge gained from conversation, correspondence and study with other shareware authors. Success With Shareware contains sales frequency charts, ideas for subjects to write about, techniques in advertising, and techniques for ensuring maximum exposure of your shareware to the public. Send $29.95 for your copy of SUCCESS WITH SHAREWARE. I'll send it to you immediately. (Please specify 5.25" or 3.5" disk size.) P.S. #2: How would you like a list of over 200 shareware distributors who would like to review your shareware products for inclusion in their catalogs? Send $29.95 for this very up-to-date list and bump your new career into high gear. (Please specify 5.25" or 3.5" disk size.) This software is copyrighted by Jeff Napier of Another Company, and distributed by Gary Smith of OEC Systems. Neither Another Company nor Gary Smith/OEC Systems assume any responsibility for your use of this product or any Another Company product. The shareware or registered versions of PIECES may be purchased from Gary Smith at OEC Systems: Gary Smith c/o OEC Systems 4646 North Shallowford Road Atlanta, GA 30338-6304 phone: 404-394-1000 orders only: 800-444-2424 fax: 404-394-1006 BBS: 404-804-7889 MasterCard and VISA accepted _____________________________________________________________ end of file.