From: K6X (Cluke)
Subject: Program Documentation WITZ
The program to which I referred in my
General Message should be on this disc
under the filename WITZ, if Chris has
managed to find room for it. It was a
very large program which was written
originally for use on NASA's equally
large computers, where space was not a
problem!! It took Mona nearly as long
to prune and convert it for use on my
128 as it did to write it in the first
place. Most of the facilities have had
to be removed, like the 18,000-word
technical-term dictionary, the pseudo-
thesaurus, the multi-language text
translation function, and more. Even
so, the main facilities of word- and
spell-checking constitute a very large
program which only just fits into my
128, and even then only after a bit of
OS tweaking prior to loading. Simply,
it works by reading several pages at a
time from the source file, using these
as the 'template' for the next few
pages loaded, and loads the corrected
text into a destination file. The next
few pages are loaded and then checked
against this 'template' to catch any
words which might be correctly spelt,
but which do not make correct sense in
the sentence or in the general context
of the pages being checked. As each
large block of pages is being checked
and then downloaded to the destination
file, the 'template' is constantly
being updated, even to the extent that
earlier corrections could be reloaded
and amended in the light of later up-
dates of the 'template'. You will see
from this that twin-drives really are
preferable when dealing with large or
multiple files, as I do when checking
the issue discs, although it does work
OK ( with a lot of disc-swapping! ) on
a single drive. Text is not displayed
during the process, as it scrolls both
backwards and forwards far too quickly
to be read. All that is displayed is;
a HEX number at the top of the screen
relating to the page-block currently
being processed, and some messages as
the program works it's way through the
text under scrutiny. It runs directly
from the Utilities Menu, after loading
a short header which does the necessary
OS tweaks for you prior to loading in
the main program. I have also written
a short file ( appropriately entitled
TestFil ) which is liberally sprinkled
with (INTENTIONAL!) errors. If you read
it before running the program, you will
more fully appreciate just how good it
really is. Just follow the prompts, and
I think that you will be impressed.
N.B. The program has been modified so
it will run on all Beeb machines
From: L1M (Janny Looyenga)
Subject: FontSaver
There are two versions of Fontsaver on
the disc, one for the BBC and one for
the Master.
BBC users should explode the fonts
first by typing *FX20,6 and *BASIC
before running this program. The fonts
on the Master are already exploded so
no need for this.
A program will be saved onto disc
named FSAVE. When you have loaded a
font into memory you can save this by
entering *FSAVE <fsp> where <fsp> is
the name of your font.
You can load it back with a * command:
*<fsp> where <fsp> is the name of
the saved font.
To: 999 (all members)
ReplyTo: D5B (Jon Ripley)
From: K8G (Jonathan Harston)
Subject: Scroll
The latest update to Scroll is on the
disk. The changes are:
The filename is displayed correctly if
longer than a certain length.
Scroll will now display text files
where the lines are terminated by LF
instead of CR.
To: 999 (all members)
From: K8G (Jonathan Harston)
Subject: Prime Numbers
The text file accompanying my Prime
number program in issue 52 lost all
the TABs, so the table of times lost
all sense. I've resubmitted it here
with the TABs replaced by the correct
number of spaces to align up the
tables.
To: 999 (all members)
From: D6G (SPROW)
Subject: Programs this time
Usefuls
=======
The file "Usefuls" on this disk
contains 3 handy FNs that seem to crop
up all over the place when I'm writing
programs that require large amounts of
text handling.
They perform the following functions -
1)Raise a string to upper case
Eg.In a word processor
2)Get a string of fixed length using
OSWord 0
Eg.When a 7 letter filename is reqd
3)Test for occurences of valid
characters
Eg.Filenames aren't allowed spaces
OSWdetect
=========
If your machine isn't a Master,but you
do have a clock board added, and don't
have the instructions to check whether
the driver ROM supports OSWORD and
OSBYTE as per the Master,then run this
little BASIC program to see if it
does.
If the resulting screen output says
that ANY of the calls are unavailable
then the 'Doomsday' ROM (to fix the
year 2000 problem AND add some new
star commands) will not function as
specified.
The Doomsday ROM is detailed elsewhere
Enjoy!
Robert Sprowson
To: 999 (all members)
From: 3WU (Fred Price)
Subject: Jim Downies Pools
After reading Jim's poem 'Mother' in
the last issue, I thought I would give
you his second of three this time so
you can decide for yourselves 'have
they or not won the pools?', and as you
can see he has brought his parents in
this time.
Have your printer ready and centred if
it can handle it; the program contains
a centreing command. If your printer
cannot handle centreing, LOAD in the
program and put REM at the beginning of
line 30 ( or delete it ) before RUNning
it.
Ok here we go and let's have take a
look and dive into Jim Downie's
POOLS
Fred
To: 999 (all members)
From: K6N (Brian Raw)
Subject: Teletext in all MODEs
**********************
The poor Electron owner often gets
forgotten nowadays, these machines
not having MODE 7 although I believe
you can stick another lump of plastic
onto the back of these machines to
get MODE 7.
Anyways, from the Notepad Suite of
programs you may have seen or indeed
used the Epson printer option, well
this works by intercepting the
teletext codes and sending a suitable
graphic to the printer instead. Well
it occurred to me that by using a
similar method, teletext graphics may
be sent to the screen allowing MODE 7
screens to be viewed in any MODE.
On the Master a simple way to do this
might be to redefine the character
set, however on the BeeB this would
need to explode the character set
using up valuable ram (Jonathan!) .
A better way would be to intercept
the teletext codes as they are passed
to OSWRCH and redefine CHR$(128) each
time. This way you wouldn't notice
the program's presence until you try
to print characters above 128
The accompanying demo program goes a
little way to achieve this but wants
a bit more work yet, however notice
that in the multi colour MODEs it is
possible to change colour. I have
included the resistor program from
some time ago as this only uses basic
teletext codes for changing colours.
However once you have got this demo
loaded which initially works in MODE1
try escaping out of the program
nicely (not hard break).
Type MODE 0 and RUN.
Try MODEs 0,1,3,4,6,7.
While in MODE 0
LOAD"DemoTxt" and LIST
and finally hit BREAK and LIST again.