MacEuclid is an easy-to-use (aren't they all?) program for creating, editing and analyzing reasoned arguments. When most individuals think of an “argument”, they expect several participants communicating with each other. In the case of Euclid, however, an argument is any type of reasoned discourse. It may be a single person presenting a case, it could be several people collaborating to create a single case, or it could be a group of people arguing against each other.
Euclid supports arguments created over long distances and stretches of time. Any research article or editorial can make great use of this program for formulating sound, logical arguments and clarifying them to the reader and the writer.
I am always looking for comments about the program and constructive criticism is welcome. The best way to figure out how this program can help you would be to just try it out. Use it for some actual papers you need to write or other arguments that you would like to interpret. This tool can be used to help read arguments so that you can better understand them.
• Page numbers now appear at the top of the printed pages.
• AutoScrolling: when an object is selected off the screen, it is scrolled in. If more than one object are in the selection, and any of the objects are visible, then no scroll is done.
• When doing Show List Members, if option key is down, no new objects are made visible, but members of the list that are already in the display are hilited. (Hilite List Members).
• Using the Control key (Hand Drag) to move the page around, if the window is larger than the page, it was right-justified in the window. Now it is left-justified which seems more appropriate.
• After a Save, all the text became "clickable", even in objects that were inactive. Fixed.
• Opening displays should be slightly faster. I was adjusting the boundaries for every object as they were loaded. Now it happens once after loading all objects.
• Opening scroll position. It was scrolling to the page of the last object added, but now it starts scrolled to the top-left page.
• After the first time using a database, the default settings are saved. e.g. Next launch, the default text type, relation type, list type, source and user are automatically set. At login, the default user is selected.
• The little arrow icons on objects whose relatives are not visible now are gray when the object is not active.
• When selecting a rectangle to hilite objects, if the shift-key is down, the objects are now added to the selection instead of replacing it.
• Fixed a class of bugs introduced in b7. When a display was the active window, the user couldn't change default types or use apple menu. Now it works as expected.
• Fixed bug: do Page Setup and change something and then Print, it crashed. Now the window is repaginated after Page Setup, fixing the bug.
• Can open display or database or both directly from finder.
• Objects now print on all pages.
• Object info window now reflects changes in the popup menus immediately.
• When objects are resized, the borders get refreshed properly.
• Changed some keyboard equivalents and moved menu items around.
• Objects can now be moved to negative coordinates like above and to the left of the starting page.
• Copy Types From… command now copies users and sources as well as the normal types.
• When an object is selected, all lines connected to it are thickened to clarify where its connections go in large displays.
• Fit To Text… command makes text objects a tiny bit taller to fit the text better.
• Fit To Text… now shrinks horizontally to fit text objects that have only one line.
• Text (font/size/style) can be changed for multiple objects in a selection. Previously, the user needed to select a range in a single text object. When the font is changed for a selection, only the first font is substituted for the new font. For example, if I use a symbol font in the middle of the text, it will not be changed. To override this, hold the option key when making the font change.
• Autoscrolling works. If the user is dragging a box around objects, connecting objects with a line or dragging objects, when the mouse leaves the window, the contents will scroll toward the cursor while still in the context of the operation.
In order to allow the new Merge Database command, I needed to add some information (modification date) to the types and source information. The format of all database files have changed.
The conversion takes place automatically when you open your files with this version or later (for now), so you should open all your database files and then save them immediately. Don't try to copy types or merge databases from files made with version 1.1b5 or earlier!
•• Fixed Bugs
• When the logged in user is not the create of a text object, the user may change the contents, but then the database fails to give access, but object in display still changes.
:-) FIXED: Now the wrong user can't even try to change the contents of someone elses objects. The user may still select and copy the text.
••• Added features
• Added menu "Merge Database…" under File menu. If a database has been modified by several different users, the changes can be merged together. Open one of the databases and select the command "Merge Database…" to get a combination of the two files. More about this in the updated manual.
• Changed the terms "Assertion" and "Asserter" to "Source" and "Primitive Source". I hope this makes the concepts easier to understand.
• Added menu "Send To Back" in case a big object is covering something else.
• Copy now can copy TEXT of the selected object. If a list object is selected, the contents of all members are copied. A user can make a list with object in order and copy the list and paste it into a word processor. A return is put between each content. A list object is surrounded by "start" and "end" markers.
• If you run out of memory while a save is happening, you lose everything.
:-) I added two new features wrt file save:
1. During save, the file is first copied to a temporary file, then the save is done and then the temp file is deleted if the save was successful.
2. Preferences now has an option for creating a backup of the file. The new file name has " backup" appended to it, and the same file is overwritten after each save.
Also, save doesn't use so much memory anymore.
• Lots of memory leaks found in database.
:-) FIXED (all that I've found so far)
• I keep getting more and more replications of assertions.
:-) FIXED
• When I create a text object, and deselect it before typing into it, and then type something into it, the saved version of the object has wierd style information.
:-) FIXED. It seems that the StyleTE manager sometimes makes the Style handle larger than is accounted for in nRuns. I only save the number of style runs (+ 1) given in nRuns and ignore the rest when saving.
• When I Save As…, I lose the default types and I am no longer logged in.
