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Text File | 1995-07-25 | 24KB | 480 lines

Smart Quotes version 1.51 © Sam Kington 25th July 1995 This program is shareware, *not* public domain or freeware. You are allowed to evaluate this program free of charge for a period of two weeks; after that, you should destroy it if you do not intend to use it, or pay the registration fee to carry on using it. The registered version has more features than the free version, so there’s a carrot *and* a stick ;-). See the ﬁle “Versions” for more details. It only runs under RISC OS 3 or later, but nowadays this means most people. Bear in mind that this ﬁle uses all the typographically-correct characters provided by Smart Quotes, and as such will look strange on other platforms or if you’re viewing it in the System font. Contents ******** This ﬁle contains the following sections (those marked * are essential to using Smart Quotes, the others less so): *• Quotation marks – how quotes work *• Expands – how expands work *• Typing mistakes – which ones Smart Quotes can correct *• Menu structure, windows – brief explanation *• Expand menu – what it does *• Settings window – where you choose types of substitution • Choices dialogue box – various preferences or choices • Other choices – more choices • Characters dialogue box – change the characters used for quotes *• Expands window – viewing and editing expands • Using expands – hints and tips for expands *• Known problems – please read • How to use hotkeys with Smart Quotes *• Thanks, credits and acknowledgements • Boring legal message – terms of distribution • How to contact me – says it all really. Address, email, etc. Quotation marks *************** Operation of the program is (hopefully) self-explanatory; the principles behind it may not be. What the program basically does is sit in the background, and intercept all the key presses, substituting quotes according to the current settings, correcting miscapitalisation and doing all sorts of clever things involving expands (see below for a full explanation). It does this by remembering which keypresses have come before, and guessing what the text you’re editing looks like. If you’re just typing away, or have moved about using the left or right cursor only, this will usually be almost 100% accurate; if you start moving up or down, moving left or right by words or sentences, or move the cursor with the mouse, it will give up and start from scratch. If Smart Quotes gives up, its icon will brieﬂy change to a question mark “?”. Note that Smart Quotes assumes that Tab inserts a tab character, and that Copy deletes to the right. If this is not the case in the editor you are using, Smart Quotes may get confused. Smart Quotes will often not substitute quotes in a writable icon – keys are usually handled directly by the WIMP in writable icons, so Smart Quotes doesn’t get to hear about them. You have to insert them manually – Shift-Adjust-clicking on any of Smart Quotes’ windows’ close icon will run !Chars (or whatever character viewer you have chosen – see “Other choices”). Expands ******* Expands are similar in operation to Impressions’ abbreviations: you type in something which is automatically replaced by something else. They are used for ligatures (ﬁ), accents (é), various other symbols (×) and can also be used to apply rules of punctuation (only one space after a full stop, commas must be before quotes and note afterwards, etc.). There are two parts to an expand, the “found” part and the “substituted” part – so for instance, to get a ligature such as ﬁ, you would create an expand with “fi” in the found part, and “ﬁ” in the substituted part. When you type fi, Smart Quotes will automatically replace it by ﬁ. See the “Expands” directory for more details. Related to expands, but not quite the same thing, is Smart Quotes’ ability to delete ligatures properly. As long as Smart Quotes knows that you’re deleting a ligature (i.e. you typed it recently), if you delete it Smart Quotes will pretend it was two characters – so if the cursor is after “ﬁ,” and you press Delete, it will delete the ﬁ and replace it with a f (the same thing works with Copy from the other end). See “Expands window” for more details about how to add expands yourself, and “Using expands” for some hints and tips. Typing mistakes *************** Typing mistakes, known as “typos” for short: most of them are either wrong capitalisation or transposition of two letters. Short of having a massive dictionary Smart Quotes can’t help you with transposition – and anyway if you’re using this in a word processor you will have a spell checker –, but it can make an intelligent guess at correcting capitalisation. What usually happens is this: you have Caps Lock turned off, and you want to type a word beginning with a capital letter, so you press Shift to make the ﬁrst letter a capital – and then you leave it on too long so the second letter ends up capitalised as well. You’ve usually let it go by the time you type the third letter, so you end up WIth WOrds THat LOok SOmething LIke THis. If you have typing mistake checking turned on, and you type two capital letters at the beginning of a word and then a lower-case letter, Smart Quotes will replace the second capital letter by a lower-case letter, so you end up With Words That Look Something Like This. This is the option that is least likely to cause you problems, as it doesn’t involve any fancy characters that some programs don’t like. Only turn it off it you will be typing words like NExT a lot of the time, or if case matters (variable names, SWI names etc.). Menu structure, windows *********************** Smart Quotes supports interactive help, so I will only explain things in this ﬁle that wouldn’t ﬁt in the interactive help messages. Interactive help should by default be turned on; if it isn’t, select “Interactive help” in the Choices window, available from the menu option “Choices...” in the icon bar menu. One thing worth mentioning here is that you can move the icon around by dragging with Shift and Ctrl held down. If you drag to the icon bar it inserts the icon where you dragged it; if you drag outside the icon bar, it will create a ﬂoating window which contains the icon. The state and position of the icon (if in a window) are stored in the choices. Expand menu ************** Save saves a ﬁle called “Expands” in the directory pointed to by the variable SmartQuotes$ChoicesDir, which is by default SmartQuotes$Dir but can be changed to point elsewhere if the Smart Quotes directory is read-only or restricted access (i.e. on a network) in the “Other choices” window (see below). The Expands ﬁle is a simple Obey ﬁle, so double-clicking on it will load the expands. Refresh: basically, choose this option if you want to make sure the front end really knows what characters are going to be substituted. Usually it does, but if you have modiﬁed the expands in the command line, or by double-clicking on another Expands ﬁle, you have to tell it the expands have changed. It’s also useful if the window seems to be the wrong size. Settings window *************** The settings dialogue box determines how characters will be substituted. Choices take effect immediately, so playing around with the different options and typing to see what happens is usually the best way to work out what they all mean. Choices dialogue box ******************** This dialogue box affects the working of the front-end, and so doesn’t affect substitution of quotes: it’s mainly cosmetics. Changes take effect immediately. See also the “Other choices” window. “Show quotes’ state in icon”: If this option is selected, Smart Quotes’ icon will show the state of quote substitution – an open double quote “ if quotes are on, and a neutral quote " if they are not. If quotes and/or expands are on, it will brieﬂy change to a question mark “?”. “Interactive help”: If selected, you will get interactive help on all of Smart Quotes’ windows and icons; if not, you won’t. As mentioned above, this is supplied with the module More Help, which means it doesn’t eat up any of Smart Quotes’ memory – it does use some in the Module Area, though. “‘Quit’ kills module”: If selected, when you quit the front-end, the ‘SmartQuotes’ module will be killed, thus stopping all substitution. If you want substitution to carry on after you quit the front-end (if you are short of memory, for instance), turn this option off. Bear in mind, however, that without the front-end you will need to use the command line (F12 or Ctrl-F12) to modify the settings; also, when you quit the front-end, you may have forgotten the module is still running and substituting quotes. Programmers beware! Other choices ************* The “Other choices” window is different from the other windows, in that changes you make in this window do not take effect immediately. This is due to the special nature of the Other choices window, which is in fact “owned” by another application, as it wouldn’t ﬁt in the main Smart Quotes application – which explains the disc access when you click on the “Other...” button in the Choices window. Also, when you quit Smart Quotes the “Other choices” window stays open. In this window you can change the font styles Smart Quotes uses for the “Expands” window, the “Edit expands” window and the “Characters” window; you can change the application to be run when you Shift-Adjust click on a close icon (the “character viewer”); and you can change where Smart Quotes stores its Choices ﬁles, if you are running Smart Quotes from a read-only ﬁling system like a network, a CD or a protected hard disc. Full interactive help is provided, so there shouldn’t be too many difficulties. The following comments may be useful: • You don’t have to drag an application to the window to change the character viewer; you can drag a ﬁle as well. (Unfortunately you cannot use a directory - you can’t have everything). The ﬁle will be run using *WimpTask, which will run the ﬁle without telling applications – so if you run a Drawﬁle and Draw (or a similar application) is running, a second copy of Draw will be loaded. Therefore, the best ﬁles to use are Obey, Command, the TaskWindow equivalents, Desktop or similar ﬁles. • You can change the location of the Choices directory (usually called “SQ Choices” but you can modify the actual ﬁlename by editing the writable ﬁeld); when you click “Save and use”, if the ﬁlename is different the ﬁles will be copied from their old location to their new one. Smart Quotes will then try and update the “Choices” ﬁle in the (NB) *Smart Quotes* directory – which may be write-protected. In this case, Smart Quotes will try and save it in the Scrap directory. This also happens if the new choices directory is write protected. If you don’t have a Scrap directory set up (i.e. you haven’t “seen” Scrap if you have RISC OS 3.1) the save will fail. • When you modify one of the options, the title bar will change to “Other choices *” to show that the choices have been modiﬁed. Characters dialogue box *********************** Clicking Default will revert to default settings. An individual character will also revert to default if the ﬁeld is left blank. Clicking Save will save the preferred characters to a ﬁle called “<SmartQuotes$ChoicesDir>.Chars” (see above). This is a standard Obey ﬁle, and so is human-readable and editable (unlike the rather obscure Choices ﬁle ;) ). Again, like the Expands ﬁle, running it from a Filer window will load the characters (provided Smart Quotes is running, of course). Clicking Refresh will re-scan the characters, in case you have changed the deﬁnitions via the command line or by double-clicking on another Chars ﬁle. Expands window ************** Choosing ”Expands...“ from the main menu will open the Expands window, containing a list of all the current expands. The list is divided into two columns, somewhat like this: Found Subst -- – –- — —- • fi ﬁ fl ﬂ The window uses an outline font (Trinity.Medium for the text, Homerton.Bold for the heading, by default) so you can see exactly what is going on. The Found column contains the string typed in, the Subst column the text that replaces it. Using expands ************* Most expands in the list are fairly straightforward: f and i make ﬁ, - twice produces an en-dash (–). There is however more than that to expands: you can combine several expands. For instance, to get a longer em-dash, type - three times: it will be substituted by an en-dash, and then by an em-dash, as another expand was deﬁned as – + - = —. For when a expand is substituted, it simulates a key-press, and can therefore be the ﬁrst part of another expand. (Typing - yet again will turn the em-dash into a bullet •, as yet another expand was deﬁned as — + - = •). Accents can also be provided: e and / results in é, e and \ in è, etc. Circumﬂexes are more difficult (you need a ^, which uses Shift), and umlauts are downright difficult: " is already used, and using a colon is dangerous as colons are commonly used after vowels. You could always use £ or |. Cautionary tale: at one point I was going through the list of ligatures in the character set, and found “œ”. Having just done æ, I added o + e = œ. Then I typed “does”. Oops. So beware: don’t add expands just because there’s a character that *could* be substituted - you might not want to use it. Known problems ************** First of all, you can’t save the settings from the “Other choices” window if you’re running Smart Quotes from a read-only ﬁle system like a CD. Copy it somewhere else if you want to change the settings. If you are programming, typing commands at the CLI (F12 or taskwindow), doing anything at all involving comms, or in general using an application that doesn’t look too kindly upon top-bit-set characters, turn Smart Quotes’ substitution off (Adjust-click on the icon will do the trick temporarily). Otherwise, the CLI will fail to recognise your command (“file 'ﬁlters' not found”), any quotes or expands will be tokenised if you’re programming in BASIC (it’s particularly spectacular in Zap ;) ), and any e-mail or usenet postings will look particularly gruesome on some people’s machines. This isn’t a bug, or even a feature, so there’s nothing you can do about it. As mentioned previously, Smart Quotes will often not substitute characters when the cursor is in a writable icon – in a dialogue box or off a menu item, for instance Name disc in the ADFS icon bar menu. This is because the WIMP handles those key presses itself (unless the “Notify” option is set in the validation string, e.g. “KARTN”), and Smart Quotes doesn’t get a look in. This shouldn’t be too much of a problem – usually you don’t want substitution in those cases anyway. However, any applications that require you to enter text in a dialogue box (a ﬁeld name in a database, for instance), will not allow substitution. Those using Zap may ﬁnd certain expands don’t work – namely, those using a shift-key to produce the second character, like A E Æ (if Caps Lock is off), < < « etc. This is because, when Smart Quotes sends Zap a delete character, Shift is still held down, so Zap looks at Shift-Delete and sees the command “DELETENEXT” rather than “DELETE”, and so fails to delete the character, so you’re left with something like AÆ, <« etc. To get round this, you have to change the key mappings: Edit the key mappings (iconbar menu, Options=>Edit keys) Find sDELETE in the ﬁle Replace whatever command is opposite it by DELETE Save the ﬁle Re-load the key mappings as the new one (Options=>Reload keys) On a similar level, if you hold down the hyphen key, you may ﬁnd that dashes in various shapes and sizes start lining up, looking something like this -----—•–•-—•-–. (This was actually done in Edit as Zap is fast enough not to have this problem ;) ). This is because Edit (or whoever the culprit was) wasn’t managing to delete characters fast enough before another one comes along, so Smart Quotes’ fancy substitution method falls over. The solution is simple: don’t type as fast! If you reload the module when Smart Quotes is running, the expands window may get seriously confused. Use “Refresh” to solve this. I have been told of problems with certain terminal emulators (think it was Hearsay), where Smart Quotes causes spurious interrupts or something. I don’t know any more about this, and knowing comms programs it’s probably not me ;). But you have been warned. As mentioned elsewhere, KeyMouse uses Alt-Select to move a window. Clicking Alt-Select on the iconbar makes it want to move the window – obviously it can’t, but tries all the same, and someone complains (ADFS Filer on my machine). This isn’t Smart Quotes’ fault! If windows appear in strange positions, or fail to appear at all when you try and open them, you very probably have a corrupt Choices ﬁle. Delete it and re-run the program; the program will complain that it can’t ﬁnd a Choices ﬁle, and will then create a new one with the default settings: • All substitutions on • Show quotes state in icon • Use interactive help • Kill module when quit • Windows positioned to suit a mode 35 screen or similar (768x288) Impression’s spell checker doesn’t take kindly to ﬁ and ﬂ (certainly not on my version, Publisher 4.01, ImpressionSpell 1.27). When spell checking, it ignores ﬁ and ﬂ, so if you spell check the word “ﬁnding” it will complain that it doesn’t know the word “nding” (rather than complain about not knowing the word “ﬁnding” ;)). This is because, if you look at the character set (double-click on Smart Quotes’ icon or run !Chars), ﬁ and ﬂ are buried among the odds and ends, like bullets, fractions, dashes, etc., not among the accents at all (Impression knows about accents - checking the word “étrange” will come up with “étrange” and not “trange”). I suspect (I haven’t tried it) Impression will ignore all characters from € to ¿, and cope happily with À to þ (not ÿ for some reason), so there will be the same problem for Œ and œ (but not for Æ and æ). I don’t know what you can do about this, apart from complaining to Computer Concepts and using the “Ignore” button a lot ;) – the nice man from Computer Concepts said they had no plans to add support for ligatures to ImpressionSpell in the near future. (This is from the company whose own literature, namely the DemoDoc ﬁle supplied with Publisher, recommends you use ligatures all the time ;) ). If it bothers you, remove ﬁ and ﬂ from the list. Thanks, acknowledgements, comments ********************************** I would like to thank Acorn for this nice machine, and especially the bit in RISC OS 3.1 and later (the Filter Manager) that allows you to intercept other tasks’ events and muck about with them as you please. It is exceedingly useful - I have currently nine programs that use ﬁlters on my machine (it used to be seven, but I've been adding them since)... I got the idea for this utility after reading a small news item in MacWorld about a similar program for the Mac, that sat in the background and substituted quotes for you. It also did em dashes, and Smart Quotes didn’t use to do those, but now it does, and much more... I am grateful to Michael Rozdoba, author of Desktop+, for making his source code freely-available so I could see how he coded his code variables - although I must point out that the vast majority of the code is mine (I pinched that sentence from him as well ;) ). I don’t think anyone out there consciously rips off other people’s code (as in copies large chunks of it verbatim and calls it his own); however, I’m sure every programmer out there has at one stage or another taken a peek at someone else’s code. And as I’m not doing this for money or anything, I’ve included the complete source code to the applications, module and even vector claim routine ;). Also, thanks to the people who e-mailed me to tell me how wonderful previous versions were (or not, as the case may be), and to give me ideas for this version. The HENSA archive also deserves a thank-you for providing such a good service to Acorn users over the years (even if it looks likely to die a slow death in the more or less near future); a big ‘hi’ also goes out to Tom and Don Clarke. But I’ll stop here before this starts looking like a demo ;). The disclaimer was “lifted” from Ting Kuei’s DeskPatch help ﬁle - this doesn’t mean anything, I was just looking for a disclaimer and DeskPatch was the ﬁrst thing I looked at that had one I liked. The freeware bit I also stole from someone, but I can’t remember who - sorry! Other people I should thank for writing very useful bits of software, used to write this or just making my desktop look prettier: Dick Alstein, for his wonderful TemplEd. Dominic Symes for his even more wonderful Zap. Cy Booker for his BASIC cruncher - worth every penny of the registration fee. Michael Rozdoba for Desktop+ Mark Greenwood, for Black Hole. Matthew Godbolt, for FinalLook (quite simply essential on a RO3.1 machine) Olly Betts for ReducedDrag and SpecialCase - the latter in particular is a godsend now I have a CD-ROM. Ian Jeffray for Memory Pie (even if I hate the gratuitous pic ;) ). Simon Burrows for FontsPlus (font directory thingy). Computer Concepts for Impression Publisher. Sorry for anyone I’ve forgotten. Boring legal message ******************** This registered version of Smart Quotes must not be distributed. You can, however, use and distribute the module “MoreHelp” separately. This software is supplied “as is”: I make no warranty, expressed or implied, of the merchantability of this software or its ﬁtness for any particular purpose. In no circumstances shall I be liable for any damage, loss of proﬁts, or any indirect or consequential loss arising out of the use of this software or inability to use this software, even if I have been advised of the possibility of such loss. In other words, if your computer crashes, blows up, you lose all your work etc. all because of Smart Quotes, don’t blame me. If you use this at all, please write to me or e-mail me (see below) telling me how wonderful or how atrocious it is. How to contact me ***************** All bug-reports, suggestions, comments or indeed any feedback at all will be welcomed. Here’s how to get to me: E-mail : 926286ki@udcf.gla.ac.uk. This should be OK until June 1996. I probably won’t be in Glasgow outside term-time, but mail will be forwarded to wombat@altern.com, which is my French email address. Snail-mail : My term-time address, at least until June 1996, is: Sam Kington 12/1 Southpark Terrace Glasgow G12 8LG SCOTLAND Again, a backup is the home address – anything that goes here will get to me eventually. Sam Kington Merlhiot 24420 Savignac les Eglises FRANCE Term-time is October to June, with bits off at Christmas (3 weeks) and Easter (4 weeks). I can guarantee support and updates by email; anything else is trickier. If you send me a disc and the appropriate stamp (or two discs) I'll send you the latest version of Smart Quotes - registered or unregistered, depending on which version you have at the moment. (Unless you’ve borrowed this ﬁle from a friend, you should have the registered version).